The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has gone on a five year brand degradation campaign as they try to stamp out file sharing, has decided to hand over the reigns of policing illegal file sharers to Internet service providers (ISPs). Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening:
- Contributions from record labels have lowered. RIAA needed to think of a cost cutting measure.
- The RIAA is making an agreement with ISPs in an effort to stop the legally ugly and brand damaging practice of demanding the account information of suspected illegal file sharers.
- When the RIAA suspects someone is sharing files illegally, they will notify the ISP and either the RIAA or ISP will send a warning letter.
- There’s a new three strikes rule that isn’t clearly defined, but at each level it gets more aggressive. So at the first stage it could be a warning letter, then maybe bandwidth throttling, and then maybe kicked off the network.
- ISPs are playing along because large companies like Comcast have their own entertainment properties for which they hope to generate money and don’t want to lose it to file sharers.
- ISPs are also eager to help out because file sharers are often bandwidth hogs and they’re all for getting those users to tone down their activities.
This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 12/22/08 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.
