Measuring the impact of the copyright amendment act on New Zealand residential DSL users

Abstract

The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 (CAA) is a New Zealand law that aims to provide copyright holders with legal recourse when content is illegally shared over the Internet. This paper presents a study of residential DSL user behaviour using packet traces captured at a New Zealand ISP before, shortly after and several months after the CAA coming into effect. We use libprotoident to classify the observed traffic based on the application protocol being used to identify and examine any changes in traffic patterns that may be a result of the new law. We find that the use of peer-to-peer applications declined significantly once the CAA was in effect, suggesting a strong correlation. We also found that there were increases in tunneling, secure file transfer and remote access traffic amongst a small segment of the user population, which may indicate an increased uptake in the use of foreign seedboxes to bypass the jurisdiction of the CAA.