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| 7:16pm EDT, Thu Sep 2 |
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RIAA Reportedly Picks up Comcast, AT&T for Anti-Piracy
By:
The Online Reporter
Publish Date: January 30, 2009
Complete articles are posted three weeks after they have been sent to subscribers. To request a copy of the current edition, e-mail paperboy@riderresearch.com .
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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has reportedly
added Internet service providers AT&T and Comcast as some of the
first to participate in its new anti-piracy campaign that would send
letters to file-swappers and terminate the accounts of repeat
offenders.
CNET News and a few other sites are citing sources close to the
companies involved, though it’s likely any involved companies will
not come out about the service for fear of bad press.
The RIAA has said it would begin taking this approach and drop its
heavy-handed litigation of individuals, modeling the new idea after
the three-strikes policy that has found its way to other countries
like France.
Everyone involved has reached a tough point in this whole debacle.
The RIAA has presented no good alternative to file sharing, and its
previous tactics proved to strengthen the resolve of pirates instead
of acting as a deterrent. Though, with deals like this, the RIAA can
leave the consumer out of the equation when presenting proposals to
ISPs.
The RIAA has finally found a common vein with ISPs: money. It’s easy
to see how the RIAA stands to benefit from booting pirates off their
Internet connections, but it wasn’t until recently that ISPs really
began to take a look and see they could make money from this too.
While it’s possible that the RIAA is providing some sort of cut from
digital downloads or a possible music partnership for its ISP
partners, it seems likely that the RIAA finally made a convincing
argument about bandwidth hogs.
A user who downloads massive amounts of music is going to be hurting
bandwidth with his constant song downloads and uploads — and is
probably doing the same with movie content. The ISP will now get to
say, “The RIAA is telling me you’re downloading its content
illegally; stop or this will make us terminate your service” — or
something similar, which will most likely be worded as to almost
blame just the RIAA but not quite.
The user then changes his behavior, repeats the behavior and is
terminated, or leaves his ISP for another that doesn’t work with the
RIAA. His previous ISP now has more bandwidth available it can sell
because he isn’t clogging the pipe.
The RIAA has taken the heat pretty consistently over the years and it
would take a lot to get it in the good graces of the average Internet
user, so perhaps it would be willing to take the heat for this kind
of campaign if it means fewer illegal music downloads.
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