ISPs whiff on protecting copyrights, customers with ‘six strikes’ system

Last week your ISP was just another company charging you a lot of money for spotty Internet access and shaky customer support. Today, it could be your friendly neighborhood copyright cop. That’s because this week marks the start of the “six strikes” program designed to shame file-swapping scofflaws into acting like law-abiding Netizens.

On Monday, AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon began rolling out the Copyright Alert System, aka “six strikes.” This escalating series of alerts replaces the RIAA and MPAA’s previous copyright enforcement schemes, which focused primarily on suing college students, grandmothers, and dead people (not necessarily in that order).

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Per the Center for Copyright Information’s FAQ:

A first Alert means that an owner of copyrighted content — like a movie, TV show or a song — has found an instance of alleged copyright infringement using your Internet account and has sent a notice to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP has then generated a Copyright Alert. The Alert will give you information about how to assure no further infringing activity occurs using their account. …

If the activity continues, you will receive additional Alerts. Those Alerts will be more prominent and will inform you how to address the activity that is causing the Alerts. If you fail to stop the infringing activity, the Alerts will ultimately result in a “Mitigation Measure” — an even more prominent notification and educational activity intended to further deter the behavior.

What exactly are these Mitigation Measures? Per the FAQ, they could include throttling your connection speed, dropping you to a lower tier of service, or sending you to detention — a landing page for a period of time where you complete “an online copyright education program” — before they let you back on the InterWebs.

It won’t, however, mean your ISP will cut you off entirely. Because if you think the country’s biggest retailers of Internet access are willing to forgo $50 to $200 a month just to please Hollywood, you’re crazy. Most of the ISPs have been mum about far they’ll go in enforcing the six-strike rule, but overall they seem less like Raylan Givens in “Justified” and more like mall cops riding Segways.

Time Warner says it will emphasize “education,” sending violators to detention after the third strike. Verizon’s website notes that after the fifth strike it may throttle your connection speed to 256K for two days; after notice No. 6, that probation period extends to three days. AT&T told DSL Reports that it will not throttle users’ connection speeds, even after six strikes have been recorded. Of course, this is AT&T we’re talking about; if it really did throttle speeds, how would you know?

On the other hand, documents leaked to DSL Reports last October indicate AT&T may pass subscriber info to copyright holders for possible legal action after the fifth strike. How are the copyright holders uncovering copyright crooks? The same way they always have: by scanning file-sharing networks for illegal copies, recording the IP addresses of those who’ve uploaded or downloaded them, then contacting their ISPs.

That means, of course, the new system has the same essential flaws as the old system. There may be no way to positively confirm that the person who downloaded a torrent for “The Dark Knight Rises” is in fact the same person whose name is on the cable Internet bill. That’s how the RIAA ended up suing a dead 83-year-old woman in 2005 and impersonating the grandmother of a 10-year-old girl to extract information about her allegedly file-swapping mother in 2007.

If you have an open Wi-Fi signal or run an Internet café, you could be liable for anyone who uses it to download “The Dark Knight.” If you want to fight back, you’ll need to pony up $35 to have your case arbitrated. (If you win the case, you get your money back.)

Considering that file sharing has been on the decline for several years and digital music sales are increasing, you have to wonder why everyone’s going to so much effort for so little. Is it all for show? Is this some kind of grand bargain struck by the ISPs to finally get Hollywood (and its good friends in DC) off their backs? Or is some new civil-rights-violating horror about to reveal itself, with this as the prelude?

Will “six strikes” have any effect at all on piracy? Weigh in below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “ISPs whiff on protecting copyrights, customers with ‘six strikes’ system,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.