Pulling the plug on Illegal Downloads
February 14, 2008
Downloading copyrighted material from the net is free and easy for lots of people who don’t have a conscience or care about the future of the media. Whilst up ’til now they’ve been pretty much getting away with ripping off the entertainment industry without a second thought about being caught. That’s about to change. Or at least it could provide the head honchos with more power to limit your downloading fix.
Your ISP is about to get in on the act of enforcing copyright protection. Firstly by sending you a friendly email informing you that you happen to be infringing copyright and reminding you that it’s common decency to pay for such content. If you choose to ignore this friendly reminder, and continue to download the latest episode of Lost, you’ll be suspended from the service. Not too dissimilar to reports that reveal Comcast (American ISP) is restricting access to P2P BitTorrent services. Finally, your contract with the ISP will be terminated if you still refuse to be an honest consumer.
Sounds like they’re going to finally crack down in a big way on pirates. They’ve attempted to stop it at the source, but many being based in Russia it’s proved difficult to enforce. They even tried signing deals to distribute shows legally via BitTorrent; clearly missing the point that such people were drawn to P2P services because they offered up content for free not because it was cool to use BitTorrent software. Now they’re gonna attempt to go for the humble consumer. But with so many downloading content illegally, it could prove to be more complex than they imagine. And how are ISPs going to react to cutting the contracts of so many of their customers?
So stop downloading illegal content or they’re gonna pull the plug.
