During a panel discussion held for US publishers this week, RIAA chairman Cary Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer.

The deal is not new—the RIAA and the participating ISPs came to this agreement last June. But it has taken time to implement. According to CNET, Sherman explained that "each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system." He gave July 12 as the "start date" for the traffic monitoring to start.
The system involves major labels monitoring BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement, and then reporting that infringement to ISPs, who will monitor their networks for the transgressors.

Then, the ISPs will send goon squads out to capture transgressors and bring them back to the compound for “re-education.”

Just kidding. Sort of.

Once an ISP has determined that you're accessing pirated material, there will be an "Initial Education step" in which customers are informed that they're engaging in an illegal act. A customer may get one or two of these education notices and, if the pirating doesn't stop, they'll be issued another warning. If that doesn't take, the ISP will issue a Mitigation Measure Copyright Alert, which could involve throttling or curtailing the connection, although it won't yet lead to a total cut off. (Here's our rundown on how people can challenge a Mitigation Alert.)

The system still has several holes. Peer-to-peer services will be the most affected here, and materials downloaded using a VPN, downloaded from an obscure torrent site, or downloaded from media portals will likely be unaffected.

Update: The RIAA tells us that Cary Sherman "did not say July 12," as reported by CNET, and that the system will begin sometime in the second quarter of the year as ISPs get their own infrastructure online.



From: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isps-to-police-your-traffic-starting-july-12.ars

 

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They can try. The bulk of my traffic is something I pull down with rsync. Say hello to my little friend ssh. As a bonus, I don't have to worry as much about how much data I've transferred in a month.

If I need to, I can tunnel traffic as well.

Its like zombies, just don't be the slowest one / the easiest one to catch.

dunno why this has only one (now two,) replies... not like i do any of this stuff anyway, but who's complacent with an ISP or any third party monitoring what I do on the internet?!

wow.

 

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If they monitor me, they're going to find out my internet habits are very boring.

 

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I guess this is goodbye to Frostwire and all it's iterations and copies.
Are there download sites out there that provide a VPN tunnel into their downloads that provide the type of content that you could get with Frostwire?
I dont download like I used to 5+ years ago since I just pay for songs I want through iTunes now and I dont do complete movies either but movie snippets sometimes.

 

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For some reason this has the same smell to it as wire tapping. Isnt that unconstitutional? Does the Patriot act waive your rights as far as monitoring is concerned?

I do agree that this sounds very offensive to me!

 

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Is this going to effect the free music sites like Slacker, Pandora and Spotify?

 

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The Patriot Act waives every single one of your rights in fact, but in order for them to apply the Patriot Act to you then you must be a suspected terrorist. That means if they are using the Patriot Act to monitor you then you have more problems then what they see with your internet usage.

I can't believe this is happening personally, though I don't see Charter listed as one of the ISPs that is participating. That leaves me out of it.

 

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I'm glad I don't live in the Land of the Free.

Mind you, if people had nothing better to do than monitor my internet traffic they would have to be living seriously dull lives!