On Wednesday, the New Zealand government convicted its first offender to fall under the "Three Strikes Law." The RIANZ http://www.rianz.org.nz/rianz/rianz_homepage.asp An unnamed offender was fined a total of $616.57 for the illegally downloaded material.
The amount required to prosecute the offender totaled $250,000; which leads to the question of whether or not it is really worth the expenditure to prosecute an individual for copyright infringement?
Similar problems were occurred in France when HADOPI, when the socialist party spent 16 million Euros for 60 agents to dispatch 1 million email notifications to copyright infringers. RIANZ is not happy with the resulting figures and feels that the infringement fees should be dropped to $2 per notice, but this was rejected by the Government. RIANZ argues that if the fees were set at $2 per violation, it would be able to process 5000 notices per month. "We believe this level of notices would have more fully realized the aim of the law."
This will be an important consideration as the Copyright Alert System will begin processing strikes notices in the United States very soon.
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