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New Zealand fines its first illegal file sharer

New Zealand's Copyright Tribunal has slapped down its first "three-strikes" penalty — the guilty party must pay a NZ$616 fine for sharing a Rihanna song.

Nic Healey Senior Editor / Australia
Nic Healey is a Senior Editor with CNET, based in the Australia office. His passions include bourbon, video games and boring strangers with photos of his cat.
Nic Healey

New Zealand's Copyright Tribunal has slapped down its first "three-strikes" penalty — the guilty party must pay a NZ$616 fine for sharing a Rihanna song.

Rihanna at the 2012 Australian premiere of Battleship.(Battleship Premiere - Rihanna image by Liam Mendes, CC BY-SA 2.0)

This is the first time that a person has been fined under the Copyright Tribunal's three-strikes rule, and the case actually dates back to 2011.

The guilty party — a Telecom ISP customer — reportedly shared the Rihanna song "Man Down" via the BitTorrent client uTorrent. The first "detection notice" was sent in late November 2011. Subsequently, a "warning notice" was sent in June 2012, when the person was found to have uploaded the song again, and a third and final "enforcement notice" was sent at the end of July.

The final fine of NZ$616.57 (around AU$495) was arrived at by the tribunal after some truly byzantine calculations — TorrentFreak has an extended rundown of the deliberation proceedings.

It's hard to tell whether this is a success for the three-strikes rule or not; while no one wants to pay $500 for a Rihanna song (not even "Umbrella"), it's hardly the book-throwing result that the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) would have wanted after 15 months of waiting. Whether it will function as a deterrent or fodder for Kiwi comedians remains to be seen.