On 05/09/11 14:45, Lloyd Parkes wrote: 
But the ISPs don't have to be paid for handling an infringement notice.
They only need to be paid if they are to pass it on to the customer.
Replying and saying "give me money" still costs money, so we may get to
the worse situation where more notices are sent to ISPs (because there
is a legal process for this now), but fewer notices are sent to
customers (because the process isn't followed) and the ISPs have to pay
for it.

I can't speak for other ISPs, but the process here used to be:
  1. Receive a robotic infringement notice to our NOC or abuse address.
  2. Identify the customer.
  3. Forward the notification to the customer, along with a pointer to our Ts & Cs.
  4. Stop.
Usually, we get a grovelly "won't do it again" email back from the customer.

Now, the process is as follows:
  1. Receive a robotic infringement notice to our NOC or abuse address.
  2. Reply with a form letter explaining how to arrange paid-for processing of notifications under the Act.
  3. Stop.
If we receive a compliant notice to our copyright infringements address from a rights holder who has set up paid-for processing, then, and only then, do we go through the steps to identify the customer, forward a notice and invoice the rights holder. All other notices get the form letter.

The new process involves a lot less thinking than the old, as customer records don't need to be accessed, nor does the infringement notice need to be interpreted beyond getting the reply address and incident number to respond to. Usually both are provided in a mailto: link in the body of the notification.

From where I sit, this is win-win -- the work required to handle robotic notices is reduced, and there's a potential revenue stream if any rights holder wants to take that option. There is absolutely no incentive to forward a notice to a customer for free, when rights holders are legally obliged to pay for that service.

I don't believe that the number of notices will increase due to this legislation; the robotic notices that are currently being issued are targeted to the much larger US market, where ISPs process them automatically, and without charge; what we see in NZ is largely collateral damage. I'll be very surprised if there are very many compliant, paid-for notices issued under the Act.

There will be some, of course. The way I see it, the modus operandi of copyright compliance operations has always been to keep up a steady pressure, hitting a small proportion of infringers as hard as possible (which under the NZ legislation, isn't really that hard at all), to instil a climate of fear among file sharers. The focus has been on deterrence rather than actual enforcement.

Give that, jumping up and down and saying how badly the law might treat some individuals is exactly what the MPAA & friends wants. Fear and loathing ...

-- don