Big Brother is watching you. ISP’s to spy on USA downloaders

Things may change for heavy bandwidth net users in America from July 12th. Major Internet providers will start to take action against their customers who are suspected of downloading copyright material.

Cary Sherman, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says that by this date the major US ISPs will voluntarily begin to monitor their customers, acting as copyright police for the entertainment industry.

They are launching a ‘six strikes' system, which looks to be one of the most effective anti piracy programs to target the US audience.

Digitaltrends say “The “gradual response” program works like this: ISPs will automatically monitor the Web activity of their customers. If a subscriber is found to be downloading copyrighted content illegally, their ISP will send them an “educational” notice saying such activity has been detected from IP addresses linked to their account. If that customer continues to download content illegally, the ISP will send “confirmation notices” to make sure they received the original notices. If copyright infringing activity continues still, the ISP then reserves the right to throttle Web access speeds, or cut off a subscriber’s Internet access altogether, at least until that user agrees to stop pirating copyrighted material. According to CNet, the ISPs have the option to skip these “mitigation measures,” and none have yet committed to completely cutting Internet access.”

Sherman spoke at a CNET event in New York this week and said “Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system.” This will ensure they can “keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion.”

Kitguru says: As this will start in America, many countries and worldwide ISP's will be watching the progress for possible implementation. We could however begin to see smaller providers deliberately avoiding the system with the intention of landing new customers unhappy with the monitoring service.

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