As of February 26, 2013, five of America’s largest internet service providers will be putting into effect a copyright policing and enforcement program aimed at curbing online piracy of copyrighted digital content. Officially known as the “Copyright Alert System” but dubbed “Six Strikes” by the media and watchdog groups, the program is the result of a collaborative effort between the entertainment industry and the five ISP’s (AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon) aimed at stemming illegal piracy made trivial and commonplace by peer-to-peer filesharing protocols like BitTorrent and popularized by infamous sites like The Pirate Bay. According to the Center for Copyright Management (formed specifically to manage this program), the aim of CAS is not punitive, but educative. ISP customers suspected of engaging in infringing behavior will be warned multiple times, may have their bandwidth limited or accounts temporarily disabled until they attend what you might think of as the copyright law version of traffic school.
What this means for you:
The subject of copyright infringement is a touchy subject on the digital frontier. As you might have suspected, there is a lot of money at stake, and the entertainment industry has enough lawyers to invade a small country. They also have plenty of powerful friends in Washington, DC who aren’t above floating ruinous legislation to protect Hollywood’s royalties at the expense of hard-won digital freedoms and privacy. Rather than seeing everything setback decades by politicians and lawyers, the ISPs have struck a deal with Hollywood to police themselves to keep the government out of their business. Digital rights activists have raised a stink about the “Six Strikes” program, primarily because several of the big 5 haven’t really formalized the rules that will be used to govern how infractions will be handled. On top of this, there is a $35 charge to appeal any supposed infraction, driving the “innocent until proven guilty” crowd into a frenzy. It’s still way too early to tell if or how this program will work, but it’s moving forward, whether the internet likes it or not.