This has "sick burn" written all over it. The RIAA wants to save their own money by asking companies to lose their own. I'm actually rather surprised it took someone to actually stand up and go "wait a minute" before there was any coverage as to how much BS this is.
Up until about a year ago I was data security coordinator for a very large cable ISP. A large portion of our team's time was spent dealing with DMCA copyright complaints.
At this point, by law, an ISP must accept copyright complaints and have a publicly registered copyright agent (At our ISP, our team's director was the registered agent). The DMCA gives ISPs some choice in how they handle the complaints, but they can not be ignored. I fear this ISP owner may not be fully aware of current obligations(I am not speaking about non-actionable RIAA threats or future plans).
We hated this work. Our main focus was catching criminals that were committing crimes either utilizing or against our network. With an online customer base in the millions we would get thousands of complaints a day. If a big movie came out on Friday, for the next week or two we could get upwards of ten thousand a day. We feared Star Wars openings like you wouldn't believe. You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer.
Our only solace in this work was something that my manager made clear was a department goal and practice. That this menial task was meant to protect the customer base from the copyright holder's carpet bombing mentality. We kept accurate data and because of that, were able to simply discard a large portion of the complaints as inaccurate. When the evidence was clear, we forwarded the complaint to the subscriber by email and snail mail. We instructed our subscribers to not contact the copyright holder to discuss it as this would just enable the holder to get identifying info(name, address) without a subpoena.
We also warned our customers that after a single complaint the copyright holder may subpoena our records and take them to court. Out of the almost million complaints a year, I saw an insignificant amount of cases ever go this far. The DMCA complaints were largely a scare tactic and often nothing more.
I was not privy to any knowledge of the compensation we received for completing this process, but did gleam from over hearing from the higher ups that we did indeed receive some money for the process or were in process of creating contracts to do so. I wish I had more info on that aspect to share with news.y.
The guys doing this work hate it, but the law forces it onto them. Until the laws change, no security department is going to bend over backwards for these guys.
It was an amazing and exciting job despite this issue.
On a lighter note, for your random facts file, the movie "Mean Girls" was the number one infringed file for 4 years running. Lots of laughs were had seeing what kind of weird and random stuff the people were downloading. Fun times.
"You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer."
I absolutely agree and we did our best to automate as much of the process as possible. There were a few problems that required a pair of human eyes though. First, no copyright holder sent a complaint in the same format. Some sent a simple email with a file name and ip/time stamp while others sent a long poorly rendered xml file that was automatically sent from some contractor's hacked torrent client. There was no rhyme or reason to the manner in which we received the data. Another issue was file name problems. The copyright holder would send out complaints for a user sharing the movie "Dune" when in reality the file was only a copy of pictures taken dirt biking at the local dunes.
The automation mostly came in pulling known data like our IP block from the complaints, and having a good IP logging system. We broke the process down to 3 steps, each very quick. A complaint only took 3-5 seconds to process, so the issue was just the sheer volume in them.
When the end result is the possibility of a lawsuit, it is in everyone's best interest to maintain a human element in the chain.
"...noting that it's especially difficult nowadays because it's extremely easy to spoof IP addresses."
Is it really? It may be easy to spoof the IP of requests in protocols like HTTP (assuming the networks don't filter erroneous packets), but the RIAA doesn't typically go after people who merely download, they go after the people who share.
It seems like it would be much harder to spoof an IP when you're trying to act as a server (as the people who are sharing on BitTorrent and other P2P networks are) since you need to actually receive the requests to know what/when to respond with.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons they only go after the sharers (and of course, to cut of the supply... like going after drug dealers instead of drug users)
