A little more than three years ago most of the large ISPs joined a new anti-piracy initiative crafted by the entertainment industry dubbed the Copyright Alert System. In CAS, users are given warning letters for copyright infringement as has long been industry practice, but ISPs will also give users a slap on the wrist for the behavior, ranging from brief filtering of websites to temporary throttling of their connections -- until targets acknowledge receipt of "educational" anti-piracy material.
The warnings escalate ("strikes") in the hopes of scaring pirates straight until the system effectively deems users are beyond hope -- at which point -- nothing happens. There's no mechanism to track targeted pirates between ISPs, and no political will to create such a system.
Originally it was feared that the entertainment industry would continually revise the program until it became more and more draconian. That obviously hasn't happened in large part thanks to ISP resistance to anything beyond what's currently in place. By and large most ISP executives I've spoken to privately to about the initiative have acknowledged that scaring tots into not downloading pirated material doesn't work for long, most realizing such systems can be easily bypassed via VPN and proxy anyway. As such, they're not keen on spending more money on the issue.
And while the CCI (the Center for Copyright Information, tasked with overseeing the program) has suggested the existing six strikes program has been a smashing success, few if any stats have emerged indicating that all the money spent has actually accomplished much of anything. BitTorrent traffic has declined, but most analysts believe that's due more to the emergence of legitimate streaming services than anything done by the RIAA, MPAA and its ilk.
And the folks behind the program don't appear to be doing much of anything. Torrent Freak points out that the system's Twitter account has laid dormant for more than a year, and the CCI has issued just three press releases since the program went live.
Still, CCI Executive Director Jim Kohlenberger tells TorrentFreak that the system continues to be a success.
“The system continues to work smoothly, effectively, and as intended,” he says.
“We’ve seen that consumers are interested in the activity happening on their network, that they respond to educationally focused efforts, and are thirsty for more information on the amazing new ways to ethically access content where, when, and how they want," he added.
As it stands the current system is operational until October, at which point the entertainment industry's partner ISPs on the initiative (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable) need to agree on another expansion of or modification to the program. But expanding the program further is a tough proposition, given many countries have abandoned similar efforts after realizing such programs cause more problems than they "fix."
With such systems now out of vogue and politically-powerful ISPs still strongly opposed to footing the bill anyway, it should prove interesting to see just what the entertainment industry's next-generation of ISP-side copyright enforcement will look like.
