New Zealand: We’re Used To It

Although U.S. legal threat letters may have been a suprise to Australian ISPs, New Zealand has been pushed around by U.S. media companies for a quite a while. It looks like the U.S. media companies try to push everyone around.

Legal threats from giant US media house Warner Brothers are causing a stir among Australian ISPs, but aren’t that uncommon in New Zealand.

A copy of the letter posted on Australian broadband community website Whirlpool, requests the ISPs immediately “disable access to the individual who has engaged in the conduct described above and … terminate any and all accounts that this individual has through you”.

ICONZ general manager Sean Weekes says the Auckland based ISP has received many similar letters from overseas companies.

“They’re usually of a similar size and nature to Warners and it’s usually about a customer who has a collection of music or movie files that they’re serving to friends on an FTP server.”

Weekes says the ISP abuse team will contact the user and point out that they’re in breach of the law.

“Users will typically move the files to another URL so they’ve technically resolved the problem.”

Weekes says they might go for another six months or more before getting another complaint about the activity.

“We haven’t had a single user not act when we’ve contacted them – they’ve all complied.”

Full Article at IDGnet News.