[Whimsical Friday is a light-hearted note on any technology that impacts our lives in some form or fashion.]
Several major US Web providers, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon, and the entertainment industry developed a “six strikes” plan to combat, educate and punish people sharing copyrighted files online.
Matthew Decarlo reported for TechSpot that...
[this plan] officially called the "Center for Copyright Information" (CCI), the organization is being established jointly by the film, music and television industries along with the ISPs. As part of The Center, ISPs will issue "Copyright Alerts" to notify alleged pirates of their unsavory behavior. Warnings may begin as a formal letter or email to inform accountholders of the unscrupulous activity (this has occurred for years, so it isn't anything new).
Failure to heed those warnings will initiate another tier of alerts as ISPs begin to nag suspected offenders with pop-ups or by redirecting specific pages. If the accountholder refuses to comply, ISPs will progress to a series of "Mitigation Measures," including bandwidth throttling, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP (it's unclear if this will block access to all sites), or "other necessary measures."
Regardless of how you feel about the RIAA or piracy in general, piracy is illegal and copyright holders should be compensated for their work. Unfortunately, the formulation of CCI is the beginning of legalized online monitoring. If you weren’t already convinced, anything, I mean ANYTHING, you do online is monitored and traceable, and now it can be legally reported to another party.
The question remains where does online monitoring by big brother stops? Since I constantly browse healthcare sites, will I start receiving targeted healthcare advertising because the ISP sold my online activity to marketers? Will an employee be terminated because their employer found out via the ISP the employee posted their resume on several job boards? Now that ISPs have legal standing to monitor “suspected” traffic, can they be trusted?
The Center for Copyright Information has the potential to be a slippery slope.
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