Major ISPs, Content Owners Implement Copyright Alert System

Participating ISPs will implement CAS “over the course of the next several days,” CCI Executive Director Jill Lesser said in a blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/W7hmfK). “Practically speaking, this means our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged P2P copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of Copyright Alerts to consumers,” she continued. The ultimate goal of the system is to educate subscribers and point them toward legal ways of accessing the copyrighted material, not punish them, and users who think they have erroneously received notices can submit an appeal with the American Arbitration Association, she said. A leaked discussion draft of Verizon’s CAS implementation plan included two notifications via email and voicemail and two educational notices that subscribers must acknowledge they've received, as well as Internet speed reduction for two or three days -- to be delivered after a subscriber’s account has accessed infringing content more than four times. Participating ISPs either did not respond to requests for comment or directed us to the CCI, which could not provide information on the ISPs’ specific implementation plans.

Subscribers should reserve judgment until the system is up and running, Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge and a member of the advisory board to CCI, told us. Sohn said she wishes CCI had been more transparent throughout the process of drafting the CAS. As an advisory board member, Sohn said she “really encouraged the folks on both sides to be more transparent and know what’s going on. The default has been otherwise, and that’s unfortunate.” There is “a humongous trust deficit” between CCI and Internet subscribers, she said. “There’s a culture change that needs to take place."

Sohn said she hopes CCI will be open about how the system is working as it’s implemented. “There’s a lot of very useful data that can be gleaned from a system like this,” including data on the number of notices issued and the number of appeals filed, she said.

Consumers and consumer advocates have some concerns, but they will have to wait to see how well the system is implemented, said David Sohn, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and director of the organization’s Project on Copyright and Technology. Lesser is a member of CDT’s advisory board. David Sohn said he’s waiting to see how certain details of the system are implemented, including how the system ensures that account subscribers get the notifications as opposed to being read by other members of a household. He said he will also be curious to see “how often the system ends up making mistakes” in identifying infringing material. “I think there are just a lot of questions."

CCI has “chosen to do the right thing” in the past, David Sohn said, and he’s optimistic the group will continue to do so. The first indicator of the group’s motivation is its advisory board, which includes individuals “with a real track record of consumer advocacy,” he said. Another is CCI’s willingness to reconsider including account termination as a mitigation measure, he continued. Under the CAS memorandum of understanding, ISPs could terminate the Internet service of repeat infringers, which “struck [us] as a very serious problem,” he said: But “the ISPs and the CCI have come out and said publicly that that is not what the ISPs intend to do.” However, “if that were to change in the future, I think I'd be very concerned about it,” he said.