[NewsPoster]

According to reports, the much-delayed "six strikes" copyright enforcement monitoring system will go live over the next week, with Internet provider Comcast launching on Monday. The Copyright Alert System (CAS), run by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) has no official launch date, and has been held up by implementation issues, and the damaging effects of Superstorm Sandy. ISPs AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are all signed up for the system.

The CCI's role is to educate the public about copyright laws and inform of the consequences of any potential violations. Staff will gauge the effectiveness of these actions, the ability of companies identifying violators, and attempting to bring new ISPs into the fold. File sharers will be told how and where they can get music and movies online legally. Copyright owners still retain the right to sue the more egregious offenders. The Motion Picture Association of America's vice president of legal affairs Ben Sheffner said that "we have no plans to sue anybody. We don't. Suing somebody is not part of the system and we have no plans to sue." Executive director of the CCI Jill Lesser wants the public to keep an open mind about the program. Lesser believes that people should "hold judgement in abeyance until the program is up and running which will be very, very soon." The software performing the monitoring of BitTorrent traffic has seen some problems. MarkMonitor, has flagged HBO.com as in violation of the DMCA for violations of its own content in an obvious failure of the system. The report sent to Google stated that HBO.com was using HBO's own cable content without permission. Additionally, the same automated report to the search engine named websites that were writing about HBO content, and thus clearly not violating "fair use" provisions of the law. The Center for Copyright Information claims that it has independent oversight over the Copyright Alert System. Former paid lobbyist Stroz Friedberg for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was hired to monitor the system. After the news broke of the hire and his previous affiliation, the CCI promised to hire a second consultant to supervise the alerts, but no news on a hire has surfaced.

[nowayoutofmymind]

"Former paid lobbyist Stroz Friedberg for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was hired to monitor the system" - what a funny move. That just says so much about the integrity of the so called "system monitoring".

[cgc]

If you want to dispute a claim you downloaded copyrighted material you have to pay. What's going to stop random allegations just to get money out of the people (e.g. like red light cameras)? Maybe we can have some "programmers" write something that makes it look like everyone's illegally downloading content to overload the system with false positives...like a DDOS looking like billions of torrent downloads from trillions of IP addresses (all appearing to originate from Al Gore's house).

...or fake/spoof emails saying that you have the right to dispute the claim (for free), and they take you to a forged website that asks for your info.

[rumplestiltskin]

Received a message from SuddenLink (I was visiting my daughter in Flagstaff) and, after having to enter her account number to restore the connection, it showed the title of the alleged copyright infringement; something called "By Your Side" which, according to a Google search, is a song by Sade. We searched all the drives of all machines that were using her WiFi and couldn't find the file. I suppose it's possible her WiFi password was compromised but, as I was using BitTorrent to download a Linux distro, could it simply be that using BitTorrent is enough to trigger an alarm (whether true of false)?