sound like BS to me.
http://rt.com/usa/supreme-court-massive-fine-569/"US Supreme Court judges have turned down an appeal from a woman who was ordered to pay $222,000 for illegally downloading 24 songs on the now defunct file sharing service Kazaa. The White House advised the court to side with the recording industry.
The March 18 decision to not review the case marks the culmination of a five-year-long suit that made headlines as much over the proposed fine as for being evidence of the music industry’s difficultly in adapting to the Internet age.
Native American Jammie Thomas-Rasset was the first American to challenge a punishment from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), calling the ruling unconstitutionally excessive. Her path through the American court system began in 2007 and has led to three verdicts.
The first judge to hear Thomas-Rasset’s case determined she was responsible for paying copyright holders $222,000 for downloading 24 songs. Court documents reveal that she had initially been accused of downloading 1,702 music files, but the RIAA only sought compensation for two dozen.
Later, on appeal, the judge admitted he had accidentally given the jury incorrect instructions and ruled against the defendant to the tune of $1.92 million - almost $90,000 per song.
Thomas-Rasset appealed that decision as well, at which point the judge dropped the fine to a total of $54,000 in 2009. Another trial the following year ruled in favor of the RIAA for $1.5 million. That number was again reduced to $54,000, before a September 2012 decision that saw the appeals court reinstate the original $222,000 penalty.
The Supreme Court refused to listen to her case at least in part because of a recommendation from the Obama administration, which submitted a brief supporting the RIAA."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/major-isps-agree-to-six-strikes-copyright-enforcement-plan/"American Internet users, get ready for three strikes "six strikes." Major US Internet providers—including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable—have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won't filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth "strike," you won't necessarily be "out."
Much of the scheme mirrors what ISPs do now. Copyright holders will scan the 'Net for infringement, grabbing suspect IP addresses from peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. If they see your IP address participating in a swarm for, say, Transformers, they will look up that IP address to see which ISP controls it, then fire off a message.
ISPs have committed to forward such notices to subscribers—though, crucially, they won't turn over actual subscriber names or addresses without a court order. This is a one-way notification process.
The agreement puts heavy emphasis on "education," going so far as to recast this behavior as some "right to know" on the part of parents unaware of a child's P2P activity. According to today's announcement materials, the goal is to "educate and stop the alleged content theft in question, not to punish. No ISP wants to lose a customer or see a customer face legal trouble based on a misunderstanding, so the alert system provides every opportunity to set the record straight."
It would be much easier to see "education" focus as a principled stand by content owners if they hadn't spent years suing such end users, securing absurd multi-million dollar judgments in cases that they are still pursuing in court. As it is, the shift looks more like a pragmatic attempt to solve a real problem through less aggressive measures after the failure of scorched earth tactics.
In addition, the ISPs were never going to go along with draconian penalties imposed on their own paying customers. The end result, then, is actually a fairly sensible system arrived at years too late, after infringement has already begun its shift away from easily-monitored P2P networks to HTTP streaming and one-click download services which can't be so easily monitored by third parties.
The result is "copyright alerts," a series of messages warning users that their (alleged) activity has been detected and that penalties could result if it continues. These notes continue repeatedly—two, three, even four warnings likely won't result in any penalties—but the scheme certainly does have a punitive component.
ISPs have agreed to institute "mitigation measures" (or, as you and I know them, punishments) based on the collected say-so of copyright holders. These measures begin with the fifth or six alert, and they may include "temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may deem necessary to help resolve the matter."
There is no requirement that ISPs disconnect a user's Internet connection at any point, and indeed ISPs say they will refuse any measure that might cut off a user's phone service, e-mail access, "or any security or health service (such as home security or medical monitoring)." But ISPs are free to disconnect users if they wish (as indeed they have always been).
As such approaches go, this one sounds fairly sane, and ISPs certainly claim the rights to take such actions in their terms of service. The stated goal is to provide enough "education" that the punishment stick can stay in the shed, but there's no avoiding the fact that the "mitigation measures" are the result of private, unverified accusations not vetted by a judiciary. Depending on your view of Internet access—is it a human right as some in the UN think?—such private countermeasures on infringement may look problematic. (The French courts also demanded that any tough measures by ISPs come only after judicial scrutiny, though their system is actually administered by the government; this one, run voluntarily, is not.)
An appeals process does at least exist. Before a "mitigation measure" is taken, users can request an independent review of the accusation, but not from a judge; it remains unclear who exactly will handle the appeal. To keep everyone from using the system every time, there's a $35 filing fee (which can be waived by the independent reviewer). In addition, subscribers can always still sue their ISP in court."
