Last December, the RIAA boldly announced via the Wall Street Journal that they would be ditching mass lawsuits in favor of placing ISPs in the role of content nannies. Under the proposed system, ISPs would send offenders warning letters (something many ISPs have already been doing for years), while quietly adopting a three strikes system for repeat offenders. The RIAA has been hashing this new system out with select ISPs behind closed doors with the supposed help of New York's Attorney General, who recently made headlines for his largely ineffective war on Usenet child porn). None of the ISPs have publicly admitted to participating in the plan (though we've confirmed that Cox is).

CNET has discovered, not too surprisingly, that both Comcast and AT&T are among the plan's dozen or so participants, though no carrier wants to admit as much on the record. Insiders at the two companies say the carriers are "skittish" about the negative press, certainly in part because of fear customers will flock to non-participating ISPs (like Verizon). Insiders note that so far, the plan still isn't much of one -- and no formal agreements have been signed:The irony of course is that for years piracy was broadband's "killer app," quietly used by ISPs to lure dial-up subscribers to broadband. Now that the market is saturated, and carriers like AT&T and Comcast have become network operators and content companies, they've found it's in their best financial interest to clamp down on P2P piracy. Both Comcast and AT&T certainly have the financial resources to put forth a serious anti-piracy effort.

AT&T is not only planning to participate in the RIAA's three strikes plan, they're also testing caps, metered billing and piracy filters. The entertainment industry would love it if all ISPs would follow AT&T's lead either voluntarily or by force -- but so far they've had no luck passing laws requiring that ISPs become piracy police. Without laws, ISPs are still protected by safe harbor provisions under the DMCA, allowing them to say no to their new job as babysitter. That will let some ISPs sit back and catch the fleeing pirates from participating ISPs as new customers.

Even if the plan were put into law, the system raises far more questions than it answers, including who pays, who tracks offenders across multiple ISPs, what happens to ISPs who don't cooperate, who'll oversee the fairness of the system, and what the grievance system is for the falsely accused. That's going to be expensive, prone to error, and would require a lot of new regulation for carriers who don't much like regulation. If piracy's history is any indication -- it wouldn't slow piracy's growth anyway.