WTF: Beginning in July, ISP’s will start monitoring and policing user activity

The entertainment industry are some sneaky bastards - yeah, I am looking at you RIAA. So, remember the whole SOPA thing where we came together as one Internet to stop the evils of Hollywood bribing lawmakers to track our online activities and shut down sites like Tumblr, Reddit and YouTube?

It seems Hollywood is at is again. But this time they know that they can’t get a law passed like they tried with SOPA because of how the Internet reacted to it. So they went to Plan B - control of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

There is no law that needs to be passed now. Big Hollywood just needed to shake a few corporate hands and now there is a new “policy” in place (not law). The new policy which is being adopted by all major ISP’s will have the ISP’s “voluntarily” track user activity and police offending users in a “gradual” manner.

Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon are some of the providers that are going to voluntarily commit to this program, sponsored by none other than the RIAA. Here is how the program works, says CNET:

The program, commonly referred to as graduated response, requires that ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn’t stop, the ISP is then asked to send out “confirmation notices” asking that they confirm they have received notice.

At that time, the accused customers will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don’t stop pirating material. If the customer is flagged for pirating again, the ISP can then ratchet up the pressure. Participating ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls “mitigation measures,” which include throttling down the customer’s connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating.

The ISPs can waive the mitigation measure if they choose and not one of the service providers has agreed to permanently terminate service.

This sounds really infringing on my rights, but I am not a lawyer by any means. This doesn’t sound kosher, so it may be time to rally the virtual troops again. This isn’t good ya’ll.