The good news (depending on how you look at it, exactly) is that the RIAA has announced that it will no longer issue blanket lawsuits against individual file sharers.  Instead, at least in the US market, the RIAA plans to issue a series of notices to your ISP.  After each notice, it would be your responsibility to contact your ISP to turn your Internet connection back on.  Three strikes, and your ISP would permanently blacklist you from their service.

As many critics have pointed out, this may actually be worse than being a defendant in a lawsuit, since in a court of law you are innocent until proven guilty.  With the new system, the RIAA doesn’t need to produce any evidence, and your ISP will likely comply with their request to avoid any legal shenanigans.

Meanwhile, in Australia (where they are still planning to ban the entire Internet, more or less), trials of the effectiveness of the Internet filters are underway, with Australia’s Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy indicating that BitTorrent and peer-to-peer traffic would also be entirely blocked by the new filter. (Maybe he read about the Australian duo that shared over 10,000 terabytes of movies?)

While it’s undeniably likely that the mass majority of traffic on the Internet today is BitTorrent and P2P traffic, it’s already been proven in the US that tools like Sandvine (which Comcast was using much to the annoyance of their customers) manage to block out lots of other types of traffic beyond just BitTorrent,  including Skype and IPTV.  In addition, it’s impossible to tell legitimate sharing of content, such as the sharing of various Linux distributions and OpenOffice, from illegal file sharing of copyrighted materials.

Let’s hope that the economic conditions of 2009 ultimately lead to the end of these kinds of discussions.  It wouldn’t make any sense for Australia to continue forward with plans to install expensive filtering software and equipment, and to maintain it, given the current global economic situation.  In the same regard, it’s unlikely that the RIAA will continue to have the economic influence necessary to persuade ISPs to annoy their customers with guilty-until-proven-innocent warning messages and potential blacklisting.  What ISP would want to turn away a paying customer?

Filed under: Consumer Web, Privacy