Worse still, ISP emphasizes it doesn’t verify infringement claims, that it only forwards warning letters from copyright holders who themselves have no way of knowing what individual is truly responsible.
More than a year ago the RIAA declared “peace in our time” and supposedly ended – cases still abound more than 1 year later – the controversial strategy of suing its customers, and said it planned to form voluntary partnerships with ISPs instead.
It now seems Verizon is one of those ISPs.
For according to cNet the ISP has admitted to a policy of disconnecting suspected file-sharers. I say suspected because they never get a chance to counter or refute the charges against them, taking the word of copyright holders as gospel.
“We’ve cut some people off,” says Bobbi Henson, a spokeswoman for Verizon Online. “We do reserve the right to discontinue service. But we don’t throttle bandwidth like Comcast was doing. Verizon does not have bandwidth caps.”
Comcast rolled out 250GB data caps back in October of 2008 as have Time Warner and AT&T.
Henson added that the disconnected customers were isolated cases, and that most have heeded the first warning to stop illegal downloading.
“We’ve found that we don’t have to warn most people a second time,” said Henson. “Most people stop. Or they tell whoever is doing it to stop.”
Or perhaps they get wise and use VPN services, Usenet, switch from KaZaA to BitTorrent, or from public to private tracker sites.
These are what I always recommend.
Henson also emphasized that Verizon does not divulge personal information of suspected file-sharers to copyright owners without “due process,” i.e. court order, and that those who believe they’ve been improperly notified can contact Verzion to sort the matter out.
Either way, it seems the RIAA has found an easier way of scaring music fans, the sad thing is is that that’s exactly what it’s doing – scaring them. Rather than focus on giving them the price, availability, and selection of content they desire they instead try to scare them into buying only what they are kind enough to offer.
Stay tuned.
What about if pptp is not supported and open vpn doesn’t work? Guess will have to take chances being non anon & using peerblock.
Some days, I wish my predictions weren’t as accurate as they so often are. First predicting OiNK’s demise, now this – a shade of three strikes coming to the US with ACTA merely being a last resort, not the first resort. -.-
gee people use a VPN already for crying out loud…
Right? Bundle with a Usenet account for 5 bucks extra (Giganews) and never worry again…
The big problem is that this kind of knowledge is for the educated people who know plenty about file-sharing. The real victims are going to be those who barely even know what copyright even is. The only message that could be hoped that this sends is that the ignorant will be the meat shields while many more will continue what they’ve always been doing.
Virtually nothing has changed since Kazaa was the big thing in filesharing.
tbh, I don’t think that anyone could manage to “stumble” upon p2p without being immediately made aware of inherent copyright issues and the benefits of anonymity. If anything it’s ignorance imho.
btw, had to smile when you mentioned Kazaa. Remember their mouthful advertising about being incorporated in Vanatua hence “untouchable” lol
“emphasizes it doesn’t verify infringement claims”
sounds like you could frame someone.
if you have a grudge against your neighbor you could submit a false claim and get your neighbor busted or wreak havoc on your neighbor