Fingered By The Movie Cops

Salon has an article about a couple who lost their Internet access because of the DMCA. The article talks about how they were judged as guilty before they had a chance to defend themselves… but, of course, the whole “innocent until proven guilty” bit is criminal law. A company can choose to terminate service for any reason…

It is quite interesting to note that their cable company is Time Warner, which is part of the same conglomerate as Warner Bros. which is a member of the MPAA, which is the organization that complained of copyright infringement. I wonder if an independent ISP or cable company would have made such a complaint. We’ve got Comcast access at home, and Comcast is, at present, not owned by any content producer. I wonder what their policies are?

Unfortunately, this article makes it sound like the DMCA more or less would force Comcast to take a hardline stance. I’m certainly not in favor of people trading in other people’s work, but I know I would be quite unhappy if my ISP terminated access just because some search turned up something that seemed to look like copyright material at an IP address that their logs seemed to show belonged to me at the time. Napster has shown that it can be quite difficult to try to figure out exactly what is copyrighted just from filenames. What should make us think that these copyright patrol services are any more accurate?