Music Business

Major U.S. ISPs Launch Anti-Piracy System: ‘6 Strikes And We’ll Throttle You’

image from www.copyrightinformation.orgA long promised U.S. Copyright Alert System (CAS) finally went live earlier today.  Starting with Comcast and followed by AT&T, Cablevision,Time Warner, and Verizon later this week, major ISP's will issue escalating punishments to suspected P2P infringers, reducing their connection speeds after 5 or 6 offenses.

While agreeing to educate, send notices and throttle bandwidth, the ISPs have not agreed to shut off offending consumers. Content partners can begin sending notices of alleged P2P copyright infringement to ISPs today. 

Depending on the service provider, the ISP’s range of actions may include:

  • A temporary reduction in Internet speed;
  • A temporary downgrade in Internet service tier or
  • Redirection to a landing page for a set period of time, until a subscriber contacts the ISP or until the subscriber completes an online copyright education program.

Though not functional for today's launch, a process is being put in place for consumers to rebut charges of infringement.  This video explains how CAS works:

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16 Comments

  1. I think there will be a lot of contract violations when ISPs throttle bandwidth or block access to the internet until you contact them.
    Unless the ISP receives legal documents from a judge, they can’t change your account due to hearsay. they are contractually bound to provide the service that you signed up for regardless of 3rd party claims.

  2. They’ll just change their contract terms. Most of them can just send you an e-mail or letter saying they’ve done that because it says so in the contract you already agreed to.
    It *might* under some circumstances give you a way out of you contract early, though, if you disagree with the changes.

  3. This could be a totally awesome thing? I mean it does seem like we’re all going to get “throttled” with threats with that creepy video. But if we remove the free download alternative, people will probably flock to streaming more than they already have. Then maybe artists will have more leverage with streaming services than they currently do since people won’t be downloading it free elsewhere.

  4. What people don’t seem to understand is that you can never kill piracy, and no the media companies crack down on pirates people won’t just give up and return to buying everything legally. A lot of pirates never bought anything legally to begin with and plus what the large media companies will never understand is that pirates are resilient. Once one method of pirating content becomes harder to use people will just flock to the next one. A stupid solution to a stupid problem.

  5. Our band depends on The Pirate Bay providing sharing of our albums for exposure, since Record Co’s are useless and outdated. This is a last ditch effort on their part to try to remain relevant with a product the market has told them is not viable. By doing this, they will be unfairly eliminating independent bands ability to get people to show up at our live shows, the only place bands actually makes any money anyway. Enough is enough is right. I am organizing.

  6. I don’t agree with this at all. Even though some people pirate things and never actually buy them. I play a lot of games and I download the games as a demo of some sort. If I like it, I go out and buy it. If I don’t, I just stop playing it and uninstall it. I’m not about to go pay $100+ every week to find out about games that just aren’t fun.

  7. Six strikes seems pretty generous, since I’m only going to give them one before I cancel my contract.

  8. Bands hardly make any money when they sell music. It all goes to greedy music companies for distribution costs. It’s time the antiquated music industry evolves to meet the times rather then spend all of it’s money to litigate for control.

  9. VPN takes care of all this uploads and downloads alike so you can pirate all you want you can set one up on your own with free software or if you trust a third party to do it you can pay them to

  10. Not true. Other than collateral damage issues (bad evidence collecting, or bad match to ISP customer), the Six Strikes program will not affect indie artists using The Pirate Bay for approved distribution.
    A third party organization is going hunting on the Bit Torrent swarms. They are hunting, specifically, for content they have been hired to find. If your indie band has not hired these guys to send DMCA takedown notices, your music can be distributed freely by BitTorrent.
    The ISPs are not hunting all uses of BitTorrent in the Six Strikes program.

  11. It’s Big Brother practicing to flex his muscles. Algotracker is being installed world wide and that scares the hell out of me.

  12. Not true. A VPN still has to use an IP address. The only difference is rather than you receiving the warning, the IP address associated with the VPN will.
    Example: You log on to your laptop using a a work VPN. You are on a private network but when you download whatever pirated material your work receives the warning, throttle, strike or whatever.

  13. You are forgetting the legal action being taken against the P2P services themselves. Indie bands won’t have P2P to rely on if all P2P services are blocked.
    The ISPs are looking for what you are getting. The government is looking at how you are getting it. As nou stated above “It’s time the antiquated music industry evolves to meet the times rather then spend all of it’s money to litigate for control.” This goes for the movie industry as well.

  14. Even using proxies just adds more IP addresses to the mix. Every time your computer communicates with the ‘net, it broadcasts an IP address. That is a requirement. Masking it shuts down communication.

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