Edited from Digital Music News
If U.S.-based, your surfing will be monitored in the future, and you will be warned and dealt with if caught accessing infringing content. It’s part of a program that starts this summer, and is potentially an effective method for handling the piracy problem.
As part of a plan between Time Warner, Comcast, Cablevision, AT&T, the MPAA, RIAA, and others, users will be subjected to monitoring and surveilance, and issued warnings for infringing content. That allows ISPs to avoid cutting cords, driving customers to rivals, and provoking inevitably horrible headlines. The RIAA and MPAA still get to enforce – and potentially curb – stealing, though they’ll be forced to exercise restraint.
The project features lots of warnings, throttling, and ‘graduated responses,’ but ultimately lacks serious enforcement teeth. And that may be enough: warnings alone have proven a deterrent in countries like the UK and France, and now, the US is giving it a serious try.
Downloading a song, movie, or album discography in a compressed folder can trigger a detection from the RIAA, who then alerts the ISP and sets a warning in motion.
“Alerts will be non-punitive but progressive in scale,” the CCI relayed. ”Successive alerts will reinforce the seriousness of copyright violations and inform the recipient how to address the activity that is precipitating the alerts. For subscribers who repeatedly fail to respond to alerts, the alerts will inform them of steps that will be taken to mitigate the ongoing distribution of copyrighted content.”
For those who ignore warnings and move huge quantities of illegal content, ‘mitigation measures’ kick in, which feature:
- bandwidth throttling
- ‘splicing’ of sessions to redirect users to educational pages
- disconnection implied.
“ISPs are not required to impose any mitigation measure that could disable a subscriber’s essential services, such as telephone service (to call 911), email, or security or health service,” the group explained.
That still leaves the door open to cutting the range of ‘non-essential’ services.
This approach will avoid splashy headlines like “single welfare mother of four sued for 3 billion dollars for downloading Brahm’s Lullaby”.