Verizon To Throttle Pirates' Bandwidth

another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC: "U.S. net firm Verizon has declared war on illegal downloaders, or pirates, who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material. Verizon has said it will first warn repeat offenders by email and voicemail. Then it will restrict or 'throttle' their internet connection speeds. Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders. After that it will restrict subscribers' web browsing activities by redirecting them to a landing page. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for digital freedom, is highly critical of the imminent campaign, saying: 'Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers.' ISPs will be acting as 'Hollywood's private enforcement arm,' it added."

Makes sense for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Reduces traffic on their networks
2. Should reduce the number of inquiries from RIAA etc that they need to deal with, and the staff to do it

Two-Way Street

[guttentag]

In other news, Verizon customer John Doe has declared his Web browsing history and related Internet activity to be a "work of art" created by him and subject to copyright protection. On Friday he announced that any company caught illegally downloading, storing or sharing his copyrighted work will be subject to throttling: a process by which he reduces his payments for their services to pennies per day.

Why isn't this a two-way street? If the consumer did this, Verizon would simply say he had not paid what he owed in full. But here Verizon is unilaterally deciding not to provide the service in full. Perhaps the consumer should have the right to charge the company late fees for services not rendered in full.

Thepromobay

[phorm]

So how will they determine what's piracy and what's legit?
Heavy bandwidth/bt users are pirates?
Those who use thepiratebay are pirates?

The last few things I downloaded off TPB were legit promo albums given out by bands (one band: "Stockholm" is pretty good).
The last few linux ISO's I downloaded, also bittorrent, as well as a few FOSS games.
Wow and many games use BT for updates.
So how would Verizon determine whether I'm a "dirty pirate" or just a guy who makes use of technology?

Re:I've got a way around this

[smartin]

That sort of sounds illegal to me. If the ISP's start generating fake DNS responses or modifying packets, i suspect that they will be spending time in court. Not all bit torrent traffic is illegal.