Generally speaking though I think we both recognise that bandwidth is an inexact way of going about detecting copyright infringement. You wouldn’t even know which artist should get paid for any fine given to the alleged infringer.

We can do better than that — we need trials.

As I said before I don’t condone criminal acts but I also think industry needs to get its game up so that we can do what we want to without paying and arm and a leg. With digital distribution channels there is no need for anything to be as expensive as it now is. Less cost will generate more use and still cover all expenses and profits.

I’ve been told that it’s due to the expensive connections going out of the country (Eg, the cost of the Southern Cross Cable and others). New Zealand still has data limit packages because the bottleneck is in these cables and ISPs are, I think, charged by volume and so they pass this on to their customers. Other countries are more populous and surrounded by other large countries and so they can distribute the cost more effectively which reduces the costs so much that they can remove data caps.

In short: we’re stuck at the bottom of the south pacific and data is expensive here

But honestly for a normal family that does not consist of pure computer geeks 20GB data is a LOT. Legal downloads are limited to things like movie trailers and youtube (ok, I’ll admit that’s sketchy on the legal side). So why are there 40GB and 80Gb+ packages? Why is the rest of the world on flatrates?

All I’m saying is that “illegal use of the internet” is widespread and manifests itself in high volume downloads. Hence the need for high cap data plans. This need will fall should the restrictions around download be enforced. Resulting in a drop of revenue for the ISP’s. So actually your ISP’s are your friends. They want you to use bandwidth legally or illegally.

What I can foresee is that with enforcing this law all the illegal actions will vanish off into VPN/SSL/SSH’d networks and portable HDD’s at gaming evenings. In effect nothing will change just the means of transportation. The down side is that us legal users will be scrutinised as if we were criminals with no or little legal influence of how that is done and when. Bear in mind that scanning for illegal content means scanning ALL content! CONTENT!!! So all your emails are read and saved, all the websites you surf to inclusive of content, all your downloads, all your movie trailers.

Please tell me we want all this for ourselves in NZ.

And it doesn’t stop there. The main body asking for this is RIAA. That is a US company trying to enforce their might. That means all our content will end up in the hands of Americans at some point and you can’t tell me they won’t look if I’m -apart from being a notorious downloader- also a Al Qu*** supporter. …Orwellian all this is.

We’re in a world of greed and it isn’t on the side of the criminals here. I think the criminal behaviour we see here is actually a response to the out-of-touch copyright industry. We’ll see how it develops. I think the ISPs will suffer even more than the users. They will get the flak from both sides. Government and customers. And they will be more likely to oppose 92a if it turns out to go wrong.

Gamers presumably chew through bandwidth (Eg, how World of Warcraft uses Torrents for distributing its data).

We have 2 adults in our house and we don’t steal stuff. We routinely use 20Gb per month, and I’d be happy to have more at my disposal.

I download numerous podcasts, often in fairly high quality video. I watch various legal videos online – perhaps iTunes movie trailers, for example.

There’s plenty of legal stuff out there that can easily blow out those bandwidth limits.

Nice consistent way of putting it. And nobody cares ….yet! We will see what happens in March and the ensuing legal actions.

I’m still hoping that ISPs are too greedy to kick people out of their network. Why would people need 10-40GB traffic accounts if they don’t steal stuff? There’s really not enough legal stuff to download to justify that volume. So people are going to downgrade their ISP accounts which will lead to less turnover and profit. But…

In America all TV series and stuff is available free of charge on the internet (with ads). Not so here. At least not everything. Maybe this will change that or at least the demand.

That’s the positive but I’m sure this is just going to be a big ego/greed trip for the SONY’s and RIAAs of the world.

Cheers Oliver