said by Ars Technica :

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Envision a world where your ISP does the copyright policing at the behest of the movie studios, television networks, and music labels, where no copyrighted content stays up on a user's account for more than 24 hours. It sounds like a dream for Big Content, but it's also a nightmare for customers of Australian ISP Exetel.

An Exetel support page which features the top ten support questions from the previous month. A frequently asked question from customers is why their multimedia files keep disappearing from their accounts. Exetel says that it takes a "hard approach to copyright issues," and since April 2005 the ISP has run a script that deletes all multimedia content with common extensions including .avi, .mp3, .wmv, and .mov.

That would certainly have the effect of removing any copyrighted content that shouldn't be there, but it also makes it hard for customers to share their own slideshows, home movies, and music, because, as Boing Boing notes, Exetel will automatically delete content that isn't infringing.

Customers can opt out of the nightly multimedia sweep by sending an e-mail asking that their accounts be exempt from the automatic nuking. In order to preserve files from automatic deletion, the account-holder needs to affirm that he or she is indeed the copyright holder of the files, that there is no copyright on the files, or that the copyright holder has granted permission for the files to be hosted.

NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton would love this. Last week, he called for ISPs to spend more of their time spying on users while suggesting that Safe Harbor provisions protecting ISPs for liability in the case of users posting copyrighted materials be stripped from the law. Cotton believes that service providers do only the bare minimum necessary to comply with the DMCA. He'd like to see broadband ISPs forced to use "readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content."

AT&T broadband customers take note: this is what the future may look like for you. AT&T has said that it plans to develop and deploy the means to keep illicit copyrighted material off its network. Chances are that it will be a far more sophisticated tool than Exetel's automated script, possibly something along the lines of traffic-shaping hardware that is able to detect what protocol is being used by looking at the packets.

Australian law may be one reason that Exetel is so aggressive about copyright enforcement, but the ISP's approach of treating its customers as being "guilty until proven innocent" is disturbing. If Big Content gets its way, it's an approach that will become more common.

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