Industry, ISPs End Controversial “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System

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From Consumerist:

Since the Napster era began in 1999, content creators and distributors have really, really hated it when you share their stuff online without paying up. Industry groups have tried many ways to stem the tide but one, a four-year-old cooperative alert system, is being scrapped after basically proving not to work.

Variety reports that the pact among internet service providers, movie and TV studios, and record labels that created the Copyright Alert System is being allowed to expire, and will not be renewed and the end of this particular system has come.

The Copyright Alert System (CAS) is also known as the “Six Strikes” program, because that’s how many warnings suspected infringers get.

If your ISP participates in Six Strikes, it first gives you two “educational” alerts when you are suspected of unlawfully sharing copyrighted material. After that come two “acknowledgement” alerts, that require you in some way to indicate you received and read them, and after that come two “mitigation” alerts, that can include throttling your connection speed, redirecting all of your browsing to a landing page that makes you acknowledge the warning on it, or other “minor consequences.”

. . . .

By Feb. 2014, one year later, Comcast was reportedly sending out 1,800 CAS notices per day to some of its millions of broadband subscribers. At most, if every single alert Comcast ever sent in the first year went to a different account-holder, roughly 3% of Comcast subscribers would have received one.

. . . .

Meanwhile, a court ruled in 2015 that an IP address is not enough information to identify someone as an actual file pirate: anyone using the network can show as coming from the same IP address.

Link to the rest at Consumerist

2 thoughts on “Industry, ISPs End Controversial “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System”

  1. Never mind they had a known track record of false positives for such silly things as any text or picture file with the same/close to name as a song/movie was treated as infringement.

    • It’s also amazing how many, many places are still unsecured. I can roam the city here and find at least a dozen (new ones) every day.

      I got hit with one just a couple of months ago, actually – the son had hard reset the router to set up a new phone, because I wasn’t around to accept the device through the admin – and he didn’t tell me. Dang it, USMCR, so I couldn’t spank him.

      Sigh. I’ve added a daily check that the router is still locked down properly to my hygiene schedule (although he won’t do that again, I should have been more on top of it, as I know better).

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