Late last year, the RIAA boldly announced they would be ditching mass lawsuits in favor of ISPs sending offenders warning letters, while quietly adopting a three strikes system for repeat offenders. At the time, the RIAA stated that their partner ISPs for the plan would be announced "within weeks." Six months later, CNET notes that ISPs don't seem to be in any rush to sign up as copyright cops. Interestingly, one anonymous ISP executive tells the website the RIAA was too heavy handed in their efforts to force ISPs to play along:Right now, it appears the ISP response-du-jour to RIAA pressure is to try and convince them that sending warning notices to P2P copyright violators will be action enough. Executives at several ISPs we've spoken to like citing a UK study that claims 72% of P2P users would stop with just a warning. However, since ISPs have been forwarding toothless DMCA letters for years with only explosive P2P growth to show for it -- that's unlikely.

ISPs clearly are wary of the PR dangers of palling around with one of the least popular organizations on the Internet, nor do they really want to start booting profitable users off of their networks because they downloaded a few episodes of House MD. It also costs money to implement content filtering technology, something that's been of particular concern to small ISPs who don't have one foot in the content industry.

AT&T has told us they're testing a letter notification system but isn't considering booting repeat offenders. Cox Communications is the only major ISP we know of that terminates repeat P2P violators -- but only after repeat notifications. Cox says they've actually only had to terminate the service of one-tenth of 1% of all users.

While some seem to think the RIAA's announcement last fall was simply about finding a PR way to back away from mass lawsuits, the reality is the agency is still consistently filing suits. It's more likely the RIAA really did think that New York AG Andrew Cuomo -- fresh of his dubious child porn ISP campaign -- could pressure ISPs into playing copyright cop. Now that this tactic has failed, you can expect greater pressure on the RIAA lawyer-stocked Obama Administration to pass new laws that force ISPs to play Internet babysitter.