New Zealand Enforced Anti-Piracy Law

[Guest Black-Widow]

The country recently introduced its new legislation on illegal file-sharing, but dedicated downloaders aren’t going to back down but rather find ways to circumvent it.

Finally, the first round of copyright infringement warning has been shot under the country’s new legislation. However, the users’ response to this law hasn’t been the one New Zealand authorities expected. It appeared that instead of reducing the level of piracy, the copyright law has only pushed downloaders to find new ways of infringing it.

Actually, not everyone is trying to hide from the officials – some people admit that they are just waiting for their first warnings. Indeed, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that users sharing copyrighted content have simply switched mechanisms. The experts suspect that there was little net-change in the sharing of protected content.

The country’s Network Operators’ Group of the WAND Group has revealed the numbers reflecting the way of the traffic flowing in New Zealand. The group used new ways of measuring traffic and managed to accurately identify the “purpose” of packets. Their approach was called “mildly penetrative packet inspection”, and it required just 4 bytes of application payload instead of full DPI. The method also examined first payload-bearing packet in each direction only, and classifications based on payload signatures, size and ports. As a result, the group received a much “lighter” measurement burden coupled with 95% accuracy.

During the last year, the traffic remained constant, but after the “three-strikes” system was implemented in September, there was a 75% drop in measured peer-to-peer traffic. It followed the same course in the beginning of 2012. In addition, secure tunneling and remote access protocol traffic volumes increased almost twice within this period, which shows that online censorship isn’t doing well.