The RIAA has decided to cease prosecution of file sharers directly, and instead force ISP’s to become the new copyright police.
The RIAA wasn’t even able to truly determine if people were sharing music, so a ginormous ISP is supposed to be able to figure it out?
I have BitTorrent loaded one one of my machines. I’ve used it to make large files of my own creation available to people who need it (most notably my work on adaptive technology) and used it to download similar materials. I’ve also used it to retrieve a working copy of software that I own but that the CD has been damaged.
Is ATT, my ISP, going to know I’m using BitTorrent legitimately, or are they going to assume that because my music library also exists on the same computer that is running BitTorrent, that I must be an illegal music file-sharer?
This isn’t helping anyone; the RIAA is just trying to find more effective means to catch people doing what may be legitimate work. It just gets scarier, doesn’t it? My BitTorrent machine is offline right now, not because of this, but because we are having new flooring put in the room where it resides. I’m debating on a complete uninstall of BitTorrent before I put that machine back on the network.