Here's the deal. The RIAA is in the process of switching to a European-style graduated response through ISPs. Pretty much, if the RIAA suspects you of sharing their cash cows, they'll log your IP address. They send your IP address to your Internet provider, who looks your account up through the IP adrress. They'll send you friendly warnings telling you to stop file sharing. After you have been notified several times, the ISP will suspend your service. Further penalties may still be forthcoming, though RIAA has reserved the right to sue people that ignore their ISP's notifications and/or service suspensions.
Of note here, the ISPs will not share your personal information with RIAA (you IP address by itself is not personally identifiable), until such a time as the RIAA sees fit to sue you for ignoring your ISPs warnings.
An ISP's participation in this program is supposed to be completely voluntary, without government enforcement.
I find one of the more interesting notes here to be the simple benefit ISPs get from participating in this: freed up bandwidth. With Comcast's attempts to monitor and ban certain traffic across their networks and the net neutralty debates that have sprung up recently, ISPs have been introducing usage caps. Customers can do whatever they want over the network, but they can only do X amount of it. So, if there is in fact a drop in bandwidth usage as customers start to realize their activity is being tracked, does that mean ISPs will lift the bandwidth caps?
Small tangent to help me answer my own question. Over the past several years, airlines have started adding and increasing fees to "combat the rising cost of fuel." However, as fuel prices have plummeted over the last several months, we haven't seen any of these fees go away. As their underlying motives become clear: they wanted more money, plain and simple. Sicne bandwidth capping saves ISPs money, I doubt we'll see those go away.
Back to the RIAA, however, it will be interesting to see the long term effect of this action as it related to the heinous amounts of lawsuits they file. The idea here, of course, is that this is supposed to basically stop all future lawsuits. Yet, I have a feeling that they will continue to sue people, just because they can. Sure, it's a PR nightmare to sue people, but hey, why not? It's obviously an ineffective and costly measure of enforcement, and it's also very, well, public, but they reserved the right to continue doing it anyway.
If you're currently involved in one, you're still SOL.
It will also be interesting to see what the file sharing community does in response to this. I predict more encryption and more useage of obscure protocols.
On the whole, I think that the RIAA is too primitive to the constantly evolving technologies and the shifts in consumer demand that they create. Nobody likes DRM, and nobody wants to rent music. People want to own what they buy. Until the RIAA can create a new system of licensing that actually meets the demands of the people buying music, people will continue file sharing.
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