This can’t end well but for whom is still an open question

We all know how the Recording Industry Association of America – otherwise known as the RIAA – loves nothing better than suing people who don’t have computers or are single mothers on social assistance in order to make their educational point about how evil it is to infringe on copyrights. However some of those court cases aren’t doing so well for them so they are talking up how they are getting out of the suing business and now working with ISP to go after file sharers. In line with this new line of attack against those nasty evildoers out there who are destroying the recording industry single handily involves making deals with your ISP. They said last month that they have already enlisted the help of some major Internet Service Providers but declined to name them.

It turns out that among the list of participating ISPs is AT&T and Comcast – or at least this is what three sources close to the companies told c|net recently. As c|net points out in the article none of the ISPs involved have actually signed any paperwork on the deal. Apparently the companies are a little skittish about consumer backlash. Regardless of backlash the way it is supposed work is that the RIAA will forward any take down notices to the ISP of the offender who will in turn establish a series of responses for the chronic offenders. The responses will grow in severity as the number of violations go up and word is that this will include suspension of service as well as total service termination.

An RIAA spokesman declined to comment, and a Comcast representative said he wouldn’t confirm the company’s participation. An AT&T spokesman said this: “While I’m not in a position to comment on the RIAA announcement, we believe that consumer education is a key component to enabling customers to find and use legal methods to access the content they want…we have also consistently said that automatic cutoff of our customers is not something we would do.”

So in other words the ISP will take the highly questionable word of the RIAA about who is an offender and cut off their service. Well I guess that is one way to get rid of those people without computers or single moms who wouldn’t know a bit torrent client if it bit them.