Starting tomorrow, major ISPs will begin enacting the 6 strikes rule thanks to our friends at the RIAA and MPAA.


If you are found to be illegitimately sharing or downloading content, the 6 steps will begin: 
  1-4) The first four infractions will result in an alert or notification.  These alerts will continue to get more and more invasive possibly redirecting you to a landing page to click through several steps to acknowledge the rules.
  5 and 6)  The ISP will begin mitigation efforts which may include reducing your Internet speeds or permanently redirecting you to a page indicating you must call the ISP to discuss the matter before they will turn it back on.


This is purely up to the ISPs but most don't include any plans to disconnect the users as they don't want to lose customers or have to deal with lawsuits.  However, the plan requires that the ISP must have some form of automated system to know how many times each customer has been notified.


source:  http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57397452-261/riaa-chief-isps-to-start-policing-copyright-by-july-1/

I'm pretty sure Comcast was part of this six strikes agreement. The six strikes thing was kind of the compromise between the ISP's and the RIAA/MPAA. So the the *AA's will stop subpoenaing the ISP's for this user information (which is typically quite costly to the ISP, multiplied by the thousands of requests they make) as long as the ISP's have some sort of internal method which will track/notify the subscribers. Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Verizon, ATT, Cablevision etc. are all part of this agreement.

**All of the above is taken from distant foggy memories when six-strikes was first announced, I have no source to verify any of it.

I believe the ISP/Telco people should get all their lawyers together in a giant circlejerk and decide what they need to do to maintain their common carrier status and then stick to that.  Set some permanent ground rules for all parties to play on rather than every couple of years have some soulless RIAA/MPAA suit come up with some bullCrap new game to play.

The DMCA has gotten insane with copyright holder bots reporting huge amounts of Crap (increasingly inaccurately too may I add) to websites who have to increasingly respond to all this, and its a lot of work expense for websites to handle without getting paid.  A provision that they need to pay for this or have to pay automatic penalties for misreporting stuff would be a great thing.

will this affect my prons?