So this may not be new to some of you, but apparently, ISP providers are now going to respond directly to copyright infringement claims. Basically, if you download media illegally, and the owner captures your IP address, they send a notice to your ISP. Your ISP will then send you a warning. After 6 warnings, if you do it again (with Comcast anyway), they will throttle your bandwidth. If you keep doing it, they will cancel your account and can report you for copyright infringement crimes.
I found this out by accident today when I logged into my Comcast account to pay my bill. I saw 51 emails in an email account I never use. So I opened it and lo and behold, 30 of them are emails from Comcast about copyright infringement. They even listed the names of the songs I was downloading. Apparently this went into effect July 1st with Comcast.
I’m very unclear as to the mechanics of this and how “they” (the owners of the copyrighted material) are able to track your piracy and IP address. All I know is I used torrents to download music.
As soon as I get home, I’m going to purchase a VPN service. This completely eliminates the ISP’s ability to take action against you because your IP address is anonymous.
As I was researching this, I came across this article that I thought was pretty helpful. It seems not all VPN services are created equal. If any of you guys are using VPN’s and you care about your privacy, I suggest you read this article.
http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/
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