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[FYI] Piracy battles have ISPs stuck in crossfire



http://uk.news.yahoo.com/010608/152/bufbu.html

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Friday June 8, 03:45 PM  

Piracy battles have ISPs stuck in crossfire  

By John Borland, CNET News.com  

As Napster's heyday fades into Internet mythology, its influence is 
being etched in an increasingly tense game of cops and robbers that 
has Internet service providers caught in the crossfire.  

ISPs are stuck in an uncomfortable digital dragnet as record 
companies, Hollywood studios and independent copyright bounty hunters 
target their subscribers as pirates. Increasingly, service providers 
are even being asked to cut their subscribers' connections, a last-
ditch proposition that these companies ordinarily avoid at all costs. 

Although many ISPs are complying, several of the largest are putting 
the brakes on the most severe of these requests, saying copyright law 
simply doesn't cover the new file-swapping services. The resulting 
tension outlines what will likely be an increasingly contentious 
battlefield as file trading shifts from centralised services such as 
Napster to new networks such as Gnutella and others that can be 
approached only one individual at a time.  

[...]

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