Earlier this week leaked AT&T training documents indicated that most major ISPs would be launching the entertainment industry's "six strikes" anti-piracy effort on November 28, but the organization tasked with enforcing the new system insists that date is not "set in stone." Speaking to The Hill, the Center for Copyright Information's (CCI) Jill Lesser commented on the leaked documents, noting that the launch date of the program could still be fluid:

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"There are [implementation] dates in draft materials that are not set in stone and we don't want to create any expectations we can't meet, but we're really close and we'll start seeing alerts over the next several weeks," said Jill Lesser, the executive director of the Center for Copyright Information (CCI).

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The program has seen significant criticism for assuming guilt, requiring that accused pirates pay $35 to contest their innocence, relying on often-unsound IP address evidence, while potentially driving up the costs for all broadband users as ISPs pass on program deployment costs to consumers. Each ISP's program will be slightly different, but Lesser indicates no ISPs will sever user connections. However, at least one ISP will throttle user connections, and some will implement walled gardens to lock users down until they read "educational" material:

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"In one case there's a temporary slow down of [Internet] speed, but that doesn't impact access to sites," Lesser said. "That's not the way this works at all." "When you're in a walled garden, all you essentially have to do is go through the education [material] and then you're out of the walled garden" she said.

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Lesser also suggests that "nothing happens" after you reach the maximum six strikes:

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"If you continue to engage in copyright infringement, you're not going to continue to get alerts," she said. "In our mind, we're going to target consumers that respond to these alerts. The alerts stop after that last level and nothing else happens under the program."

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That may not be the case. The language of the agreement between ISPs and the entertainment industry suggests that the data collected during these warning processes may be used to file lawsuits against potential users. Proxy and VPN service providers say they have seen an uptick in subscriptions as users who consume pirated content employ measures to hide their BitTorrent habits from the prying eyes of ISPs and the entertainment industry.