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Six-Strikes System Starts In U.S.
New submitter mynameiskhan writes "Major internet service providers today will start monitoring the internet traffic to their customers' computers and will warn them if they download copyrighted materials using peer to peer network. The article says, 'A person will be given up to six opportunities to stop before the Internet provider will take more drastic steps, such as temporarily slowing their connection, or redirecting Internet traffic until they acknowledge they received a notice or review educational materials about copyright law.' Furthermore, if you appeal the warning you will be required to pay $35 to state your case. Have the ISPs have had enough of RIAA pestering, or are they siding with RIAA?"
Termination of subscribers’ connections is specifically mentioned by the Center for Copyright Information as a penalty that will not be imposed under the Copyright Alert System. The strategic partnership between rights-holders and ISPs makes it obvious why the CAS does not—and in fact cannot—threaten to terminate Internet subscriptions as a penalty for alleged copyright infringement: the five ISPs participating in the CAS would never voluntarily agree to give up the revenue associated with allegedly infringing subscribers. In theory, rights-holders could perhaps convince ISPs to terminate allegedly infringing subscribers if rights-holders were willing to compensate ISPs for the associated loss in subscription revenue. In practice, however, the cost of such compensation for rights-holders would far outweigh the benefits to rights-holders of halting the average alleged infringer.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
If one side has to pay to participate in the "trial", and the other doesn't, then one side has an incentive to just suck it up, and the other side has no disincentives to stop.
Just like DMCA takedowns. If there is no penalty for filing, companies will just robo-spam.
Captcha: tedious, just like the appeals process will be.
Who wants to take bets on how many days it is until we get the first false positive story?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
If I'm paying extra for a higher speed, how can they throttle my connection, based on an ALLEGED infringement..??
-Myke
Don't be silly. Wikipedia didn't tell anyone to be upset over this.
The REAL bullshit is you are guilty until you PAY to prove your innocence and there is ZERO protection or penalty for fraudulent claims, so pretty much anybody can say "infringed" and get you shut down with no penalty on their end or recourse on your end.
And before anybody says "The ISP don't want to lose customers" remember how they are overselling the hell out of their lines while not adding capacity? i have a feeling the ones given strikes won't have a damned thing to do with copyrights, it'll be the ones the ISPs want to toss for actually using what they PAID for. get close to the cap? well you must have infringed because our data says you shouldn't do that. I've already seen similar shit in my area where an ISP claims you have a "virus" and pulls your plug if you use more data than your average grandma. I finally walked in with my Xandros laptop and said "Show me a fucking virus or give me my money back" but there is no telling how many they pulled the same shit in for daring to use YouTube or watch netflix.
BTW you can kiss that "future is the cloud" bullshit buh bye, the ISPs are gonna make the net all but unusable so they can keep all the profits as CEO bonuses instead of laying lines. Capitalism, ain't it grand?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's not necessarily a waste of $35, since if they are unable to verify the alleged infringement, you get the $35 refunded, and the "strike" is removed.
Just how many claims do you think will be overturned by a group of people that were picked by the same people who made the claim?
In particular, when the entire evidence of infringement for these claims consist of an IP address, a date and time, and the name of a torrent, exactly how are you going to prove that you didn't infringe? When the party making the claim of infringement doesn't even have to prove that the named torrent was their copyrighted content (much less any of the other things needed for infringement, like proving uploading), how can you possibly defend yourself? Even if you aren't running any bittorrent software at all, how can you prove that? And, if you are running bittorrent software, how can you prove that you were not part of that torrent at that time?
This is one of the many problems with "guilty until proven innocent"...often you have to prove a negative, and sometimes that can't be done.