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There are several conflicts of interest here. Companies that both search for copyright violators and provide internet service (e.g. Time Warner) will be strong
by beloch 14y ago
There are several conflicts of interest here.
Companies that both search for copyright violators and provide internet service (e.g. Time Warner) will be strongly motivated to send out massive amounts of spurious warnings to their own users. By doing so, they can effectively throttle anyone using large amounts of bandwidth even if it isn't for illegal file sharing. The review fees will also allow providers to "tax" high-bandwidth users unwilling to be throttled. i.e. If a user requests a review their ISP can pocket the fee and simply throw out the warning without wasting any resources actually reviewing it, only to send another warning the following month.
The truly diabolical aspect of this policy is that the copyright owners do the "monitoring". While using spurious warnings to cut bandwidth costs and squeeze more fees out of their own users, they can also issue just as many warnings against users of other ISP's to ensure that there is no benefit to switching providers. It is even possible that some companies may actually send out massive amounts of spurious warnings to users of competing ISP's as a way of pressuring them to switch ISP's.
Solutions? There needs to be a sufficiently strong penalty for issuing warnings that aren't valid.
- belorn 14y agoIt's worse, you forgot to add that media companies also get free (and to some degree directed) advertising for each notice. ISP and media company both profit for sending en-mass those notices, and the party who has to bear the costs is the customer.
- revelation 14y agoObviously the solution needs to be a legal framework that disallows my internet provider from sending me harassing notices or willfully degrading my service. For the latter, that might already be the case.