United States ISPs Looking to Adopt 'Six Strikes' Policy Against Piracy

All the major Internet companies in the world agree that piracy is a growing problem. What there seems to be little agreement on, until recently, is how to deal with that piracy. 

Copyright infringement is one of those violations that can be very hard to stop once it gets going, and equally hard to dictate what the punishment should be. ISPs in the United States seem to have developed a pretty good way of handling piracy claims with a “Six Strikes” policy that has seen popularity in various parts of Europe.

This particular program, officially called the Copyright Alert System, was supposed to go into effect a few years ago. Head of the Center for Copyright Information (CCI (News - Alert)), Jill Lesser, is now confident the program will get underway before the end of the year.

Unfortunately, details of this particular program are not completely known, but it doesn’t appear that this is too harsh a system at first glance. In fact, it appears that the system is rather tame compared to what some of the other solutions that have been pitched have called for.

A user suspected of committing piracy will basically receive a series of warnings. It is possible that as the warnings go along, they could include small punishments, such as slowing down their Internet connection until they’re finally kicked off the Internet.

Lesser also said the ISPs would really be the ones who decided what the ultimate punishment would be. It is possible that some Internet companies would never go the final step once a user “strikes out,” but that particular choice would be more readily available for those companies who wish to firmly pursue those who are engaging in copyright infringement.

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