Some of the biggest Internet service providers in America plan to
adopt policies that will punish customers for copyright infringement,
and one of the top trade groups in the music biz announced this week
that it could begin as soon as this summer.
The chief executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of
America told an audience of publishers on Wednesday that a plan carved
out last year to help thwart piracy is expected to prevail and be put in
place by this summer. RIAA CEO Cary Sherman was one of the guest
speakers among a New York panel this week and he confirmed that, at this
rate, some of the most powerful Internet providers in America should
have their new policies on the books by July 12, 2012.
Last year,
Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and other
Internet service providers proposed best practice recommendations that
they suggested would help curb copyright crimes on the Web. The end
result largely settled on consisted of a “graduate response” approach, a
plan that would mean culprits could be issued a series of warnings for
illegally downloading suspect material which, after a certain number of
offenses, would lead to “mitigation measures,” connection speed
throttling and termination of service.
"We anticipate that
very few subscribers, after having received multiple alerts, will
persist (or allow others to persist) in the content theft,” the
Center for Copyright Information said in an official statement last
summer as plans were first publicized. Now nearly a year after
developments made by the big ISPs were first discussed, the RIAA’s
Sherman says that online censorship sanctioned by corporate
conglomerates such as Time Warner and Verizon are practically set in
stone.
Discussing the road to realizing how to implement the
policies, Sherman briefly touched on the technical aspects of the plan
this week during the panel.
"Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this
"for establishing the database so 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."
So what does this mean for
you? If you’re an Internet user in America, almost certainly something
significant. Between Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and
Cablevision, those ISPs alone accounted for around 51 percent of the
market in America back in 2008. Figures from June 2010 collected by the
United Nation’s ITU division suggests that there are around 240 million
Internet users now in the US, which means more than three-fourths of the
country’s total population. With those big ISPs only thriving since
their last figures were disclosed, 51 percent coverage of the market
today would mean that around 120 million users can expect to fall under
the umbrella of a massive campaign that could soon see half of the
country at risk of having their Internet shut off.
As RT reported
last year, a flip of the kill-switch is indeed an option that ISPs can
take if they decide they find their customers at fault. That doesn’t
mean it’s the be-all-end-all response, though. Under the “six-strike”
policy discussed last year, each alleged instance of copyright
infringement would prompt the ISP to reach out to its customer in
question and inform them that they have detected a violation of US law.
Strikes one through four would constitute email warnings of increasing
severity, but five through six can come with legal action and end with
the termination of service and potentially time behind bars. Although
cooperating ISPs said last year that they would suspend service after a
certain number of infringements, today they are hesitant to announce
permanently cancelling any accounts — but merely putting them on hold
while users respond to their legal requests.
The explanation for a
change of heart, of course, comes down to money. Earlier this year Cary
Sherman penned a ranting diatribe in the New York Times attacking
opponents of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act —
or SOPA and PIPA, respectively — two anti-Internet legislations that had
the hefty support of the RIAA.
“There's no question that all
the companies that are providing access to music are benefiting in some
way, legal companies, and that's entirely appropriate,” Sherman wrote earlier this year.
“ISPs
have done very well by the availability of music online, because it has
created greater demand for broadband access, and as a result they have
now penetrated to the 66-67 percent level of US households, because they
want access to the content that the entertainment industry offers.”
With
the big ISPs having more than 100 million users at their mercy,
limiting connection speed could easily convince a good number of people
to remediate the alleged violations they are accused of, but actually
terminating service for good could be a grave mistake for the industry.
National Cable & Telecommunications Association President James
Assey said last year that, by implementing the plan,
“We are
confident that, once informed that content theft is taking place on
their accounts, the great majority of broadband subscribers will take
steps to stop it.”
Some companies have already taken similar
steps, but have been met with their fair share of roadblocks along the
way. Verizon has previously sent warning letters to users alleged to be
in violation, but those warnings have in some cases proved to be
bothersome. In one 2010 episode, for instance, a 53-year-old grandmother
was threatened with having her Internet shut-down for sharing
copyrighted material — specifically clips from the television show South
Park — to which she was completely unaware of. In that case it was an
instance of mistaken identity where the woman’s WiFi signal had been
hijacked, by CNet acknowledged that the time that Verizon never bothered
to investigate into the legitimacy of their own claims until after a
third-party became involved in the mediation.
This isn’t to say,
of course, that we are telling you that the RIAA and certain Internet
service providers are the bad guys here. After the SOPA legislation
threatened to terminate a good chunk of online services, many websites
waged a protest earlier this year by taking themselves offline for
24-hours. Cary Sherman then took to the press to turn the fight around
and make it seem like it was the entertainment industry that was
suffering, not sites like Wikipedia, a champion of the protest; Cary
called them out in his op-ed for aiding in a “
digital tsunami” that, along with Google
, “manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship.”
“The
hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the
world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a
misuse of power,” added Sherman.
“When Wikipedia and Google
purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their
stature to present information that is not only not neutral but
affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users
into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political
declarations.”
Cary went on to say that the last minutue decision to drop SOPA was a questionable one prompted by the mass creation of
“misinformation”
and suggested it wasn’t the work of democracy, but rather demagoguery.
Of course, when the RIAA attacked Megaupload for copyright infringement —
which eventually led to US authorities seizing and shutting down the
file-sharing site — the response from hacktivists aligned with the
Anonymous collective was a massive distributed denial-of-service attack
on the websites for the RIAA and a handful of other music and movie biz
sites.
With SOPA and PIPA out of the way for now, American users
of the Web must look ahead before declaring victory in a war against
online censorship. Recently the US fought and won for the extradition of
a 23-year-old UK man who operated a website that American authorities
decided was in violation of US law. If they are willing to ship a
college student abroad to bring him to trial for posting a few links,
will they think twice before turning off your Internet for sharing your
own copies of South Park? That’s an episode you’ll have to stay tuned
for to find out.
