If you’ve ever downloaded a torrent in the past few years, you might have received a warning message from your ISP informing you that you might have infringed upon a copyright, and that repeated offenses would result in penalties such as throttling of internet speeds. However it seems that the program has been laid to rest.The idea behind these copyright alerts was to warn users that they were taking part in illegal activity, piracy, and that hopefully these automated alerts would scare some users and deter others from continuing their practice. This was a pact put together by ISPs and record labels, but like we said it seems that all parties are not extending the pact anymore which means that in the future, don’t expect to see these copyright alerts.
However this does not mean that piracy is now OK, but rather it seems that it was decided that maybe this wasn’t the most effective way to combat piracy. According to Steven Fabrizio, executive vice president and global general counsel at the MPAA, “These repeat infringers are the ones who drive ongoing and problematic P2P piracy. In fact, an estimated 981 million movies and TV shows were downloaded in the U.S. last year using P2P.”
He adds that the system “was simply not set up to deal with the hard-core repeat infringer problem. Ultimately, these persistent infringers must be addressed by ISPs under their ‘repeat infringer’ policies as provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”