Speaker: How's that three strikes thing working out, anyway?
107 Responses
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Alan P, in reply to
Totally - wish people would stop with the "why do you need more than xGB data unless you are a pirate" line. Seems to me Telecom have always liked to push the impression that you should be grateful for 3GB per month at whatever exorbitant price they feel like charging. We are a household of 2 adults and one teenager (plus one 4 yr old, but he's not using the net just yet), and we comfortably use 50-80GB per month without any movie/software/game piracy. Common data suckers in our household are email, work, general browsing, YouTube, and probably the real biggies for us - Facebook, and Facebook games.
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Pete Sime, in reply to
Very timely. I've been curious about this - when the law was still being discussed, the admin fee was framed in terms that *explicitly* included preventing fishing expeditions
That could be overcome by requiring a statutory oath or declaration accompanying each application in respect of the ownership of copyright. A false oath or declaration could result in 5 years imprisonment.
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And for those that don't watch television, can I just ask why? Because as far as I can tell we're living in a golden age of television drama.
Breaking Bad, Doctor Who, Boardwalk Empire... there are plenty of shows that you wouldn't have seen only five or six years ago, plenty of use of television as a medium (as opposed to screening stage shows or chopping down movies to fit) and I'm loving it.
What I don't love is the nonsense that goes with it, but television as a medium is actually really rather good at the moment.
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I suspect the $25 was the price of getting the law in at all....and then once in, they lobby the government to lower it - just as they do elsewhere....pushing all the cost onto everyone who ISN'T actually losing a penny due to piracy.
Will this government cave to lobbyists with deep pockets and influential friends? One could be forgiven for thinking: "...by lunchtime..."
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Don Christie, in reply to
Sure - but in the absence of a legitimate way for their consumers to obtain Game of Thrones, they're the people profiting off the illegitimate means.
Relief, you were in satire mode.
For those that may not get it, its like those fucking window fitters and glass makers who benefit every time someone's house gets robbed. At least we make them pay, right?
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nzlemming, in reply to
But until they do, are there many other reasons to pay for a 20G data plan?
I blow through 20-30GB a month easily, and I don't download or torrent TV or movies unless they are copyright free. I actually blew through my 40GB cap last month downloading completely legal movies from the Internet Archive. I also d/l a lot of software (mostly open source) like Linux distros, and large datasets for analysis. And I watch stuff on YouTube. In a multimedia world 20GB is the bare minimum.
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nzlemming, in reply to
My fear is that this kind of activity so devalues copyright in the public view that we raise a generation of kids who see stealing copyright material as normal and "right"
That's an immediate part of the problem. A longer term part is the dearth of material entering the public domain. Some of the "usual suspects" are arguing for perpetual copyright, which would lead to the death of culture - everything is built on what went before.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Sure - but in the absence of a legitimate way for their consumers to obtain Game of Thrones, they're the people profiting off the illegitimate means.
That's an RIANZ/MPAA/NZFACT argument, Danyl. The ISPs make no more money from the downloading of illegal content than they do from legitimate content. In fact, legitimate content can cost them because they have to do something about it if approached. It's clear you've never worked for an ISP or even talked to one.
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Gareth Ward, in reply to
The sentence ends " ... and reasonable amounts of money but no multichannel TV."
Ah yes, missed the last bit of that. Follow now - so it negates the benefits of going it alone but doesn't address the potential of replacing the multichannel TV service if the right scale of channels can avoid it. Makes for an interesting point on the need for a scaled move by multiple content partners and is probably why an Apple-type go-between and aggregator is probably the right catalyst...
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Those nice people at Telecom just sent me an email telling me they were doubling my data package from 40Gb to 80Gb at no extra cost. Hmm, what to do with it?
I've heard about some product called TunnelBear, which can enable you to watch stuff using the BBC iPlayer site. (I think it's an idiot-proof VPN tool.) I'd be willing to pay the UK license fee to have unlimited access to BBC programming though.
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The ISPs make no more money from the downloading of illegal content than they do from legitimate content. It’s clear you’ve never worked for an ISP or even talked to one..
I work at a university. I know how much traffic was used up by file-sharing before proper safeguards got put in place, roughly 1% of which were legitimate linux distros, ect, and the rest of which was Avatar torrents. It’s true that ISPs make the same amount of money transferring the linux distros as they do from pirated material, but the amount of people who want the former compared to the latter is tiny.
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
Sorry, but none of that does anything for me (didn't we have Dr Who in 405 lines when I was a three-year-old?)
I'd almost always rather read a book - for one thing, my input bandwidth for reading is many factors faster than watching. Now, book DRM is something I fully object to.
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Stephen Judd, in reply to
You userbase isn’t exactly typical at a university though, is it? Irresponsible, hedonistic, impressionable.... and then there's the students.
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nzlemming, in reply to
I work at a university
Ah, right, so how much did the University make from that? Must have been a lot, by your argument.
What's that? You say a university is not an ISP? Ah, but it is, under the Copyright Act, as is any entity that provides internet access to multiple users, like libraries, schools, TradeMe (free WiFi on Welly's waterfront) to name a few.
Oh, you say it's not a commercial ISP? Then the experience you say you have in this matter is hardly relevant, is it? If individuals are presented the opportunity of getting something for free, that there is going to be very little chance of comeback, that's going to skew the data a bit.
Back in the real world, while ISPs may get the same revenue from pirated vs non-pirated content, as I said before (actually I said "the same money" by which I meant revenue and you took it that way, so all good), in no way do they make the same profit.
ISP profit is from those who pay for 40GB "just in case they go over" but only use 15GB for their email, work and general browsing ( and, Alan P, you really need to look at what's running on your system if you're ripping through 50GB a month at that and YouTube, unless you're running YouTube about 18 hours a day on 3 machines ). The ones who are pirating are generally using up their full cap each month but not going over, because that would cost more (significantly more, if you're on TelstraClear - $2.95 per GB!), so the residual profit is 4/5ths of bugger all.
The ISP has to pay its upstream provider for the data that is downloaded and only makes money when the amount being paid for exceeds the amount being used.
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Paul Brislen, in reply to
I use TunnelBear myself and it's very handy for those "I'm sorry you can't watch that video in your territory" moments. Stupid morons. TB offers an easy to use console and from memory if you tweet about how cool they are you get 1GB of data free each month.
It is quite slow though so I use it just for those short-run movie trailers/BBC news clips etc that won't play because I'm a dirty foreigner.
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SteveH, in reply to
But until they do, are there many other reasons to pay for a 20G data plan?
Video chat/conferencing uses pretty substantial bandwidth. Skype’s recommendation for group video (http://support.skype.com/en-gb/faq/FA1417/How-much-bandwidth-does-Skype-need ) is 8.5Mbps for 7+ people, and that works out to nearly 4GB per hour. Even one on one video conferencing can be 0.5-1 GB per hour.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
And for those that don’t watch television, can I just ask why? Because as far as I can tell we’re living in a golden age of television drama.
If you’ve read Orwell’s 1984, you’ll know that it’s to immunise oneself from all the prolefeed. Not because we're Patricia Bartlett types.
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Peter Graham, in reply to
Given that I can watch Game of Thrones in America for $25/month
For the latest episodes? And is that full cost of basic pay tv + whatever premium channels you need to buy?
If you've seen that Oatmeal cartoon of trying to buy G of T in the US online you'll see we're not the only ones who struggle with this model. You can buy the cable TV service online, but the content will be delivered by cable TV to your TV. Not quite what we're after.
That Oatmeal comic is really silly. Game of Thrones was available to him, he just didn't wan't to pay the price. That's a pretty weak justification for piracy. HBO use an aggressive pricing model where you have to pay for an HBO subscription if you want to watch HBO shows as they come out. If you don't want to pay that much you can wait and buy a DVD later. This is pretty much the same pricing model that the novels use, and I've never heard anyone justify pirating novels because they didn't like the pricing model.
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Don Christie, in reply to
I presume you never taped music "illegally" when you were young? Or even a student. You sure are paying now through your "Best of" collection.
For a real life experiment, try viewing some BBC iPlayer material (which you may have to parallel import through a proxy) and see how quickly you blow through a data cap or 10.
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Kyhwana, in reply to
The ISP has to pay its upstream provider for the data that is downloaded and only makes money when the amount being paid for exceeds the amount being used.
ISP's don't pay their upstreams per GB downloaded, they just buy <x> mbit/s pipes to various places plus transit/peering costs.
Your statement about how they make money is incorrect as well. They can't "exceed the amount they paid for" because they've only bought <x> mbit/s and that's all they get. (Unless they want to fork out for fatter "pipes")
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nzlemming, in reply to
ISP's don't pay their upstreams per GB downloaded, they just buy <x> mbit/s pipes to various places plus transit/peering costs.
Really? Not what they tell me. Yes, they pay for the pipes, but I understood they also pay for what goes across those pipes. The point about where they make their profit still stands, as it's about costs vs. revenue - bandwidth hogs cost more to supply than ordinary users. They made this particular point in submissions to the Select Committee on this bill.
Your statement about how they make money is incorrect as well. They can't "exceed the amount they paid for" because they've only bought <x> mbit/s and that's all they get. (Unless they want to fork out for fatter "pipes")
The "exceed" comment was about end users, not the ISPs.
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
Yes, they pay for the pipes, but I understood they also pay for what goes across those pipes
Kinda. Wholesale capacity direct to an international carrier is, generally, un-metered, and purchased by the Mb of pipe size.. It’s just not worth the hassle for big international carriers to worry about metering their wholesale customers’ usage.
Where it gets murky is for domestic links to other ISPs (looking at you, TelstraClear) that don’t make connections to peering points such as Auckland Peering Exchange or Wellington Internet eXchange. To connect to the likes of APE or WIX an ISP pays for a pipe of a given size and then exchanges traffic with anyone else at the exchange for no cost. To exchange traffic directly (instead of via an intermediary such as an international carrier via Australia) with ISPs who don’t peer, however, an ISP will have to pay for a pipe to that ISP and then the ISPs will settle a bill each month for the bytes transferred.
ETA: I realise that a "PE 101" is a bit teaching you to suck eggs, but the backgrounder is useful for others.
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Juha Saarinen, in reply to
Not "downloaded". The Internet is a two-way street, people. ISPs pay other providers for capacity and utilisation of circuits, real or virtual, over a period of time. Plus, SLAs, delivery options, and a raft of other features.
If you buy a 1Gbps connection with 80, 85 or 100 per cent utilisation over a month, then that's what you want it to have to make it work as intended. Not less.
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Danielle, in reply to
Guys, just give up the telly, Go to rehab or something. I got rid of mine in 2007 and I so haven’t missed all the time I wasted looking at little moving people.
I feel like there should be an internet law about television discussions. The longer they go on, the greater the likelihood of someone popping in to say "I gave up my TV 87 years ago and I've never missed it for a day! Particularly as I gave it up before it was even invented, because I knew it would rot my brain the second I even HEARD of the possibility of its existence! You poor peasants, in thrall to its horrid glow!" Or, you know, something which implies that.
To which I respond: I fucking love TV and I'm not giving it up. Cheers for the suggestion though.
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Martin Lindberg, in reply to
I feel like there should be an internet law about television discussions.
There is, of course, this old story from The Onion: Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own A Television
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than watch television,” Green told a random woman Monday at the Suds ‘N’ Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment’s wall-mounted TV. “I don’t even own one."
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