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Piracy battles have ISPs stuck in crossfire

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

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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