Since options like Napster and Bittorrent first burst out onto the net, content piracy has become one of the biggest problems that major internet service providers face. Every day thousands of ISP customers violate their terms of service agreements with the telecoms to download copyrighted movies, TV shows, software, music, and games, and until recently, have done so with little repercussions.
But why? When companies like Comcast will discontinue your service after just a few missed payments, why are pirates allowed to get away with stealing so much content free and clear?
According to a recent article on TorrentFreak, this lackluster policy of enforcing copyright may no longer be the case with Comcast and its XFINITY internet services. For the first time in its history, the company has made its “repeat infringer” policy public, stating that “Any infringement of third party copyright policy violates the law.” The company goes on to claim that “[they] reserve the right to move a customer account to the next step of the policy upon receiving any number of DMCA notifications from content owners in a given month
Though the telecom giant was still unclear about the exact number of infringements on its copyright policy that will earn a subscriber the “repeat” title, supposedly the company could suspend a user’s account after just one infraction. However, it’s much more likely that Comcast will send out multiple warnings to a user before taking any action; that action first being a suspension of the user’s services, and a full termination if another infringement is detected after their service is reactivated post-suspension.
Primarily Comcast has stated it focuses these efforts on users who violate copyright policies multiple times in a single month. This means that each time a user downloads a protected piece of content (and for each actual piece of content downloaded), Comcast must log, report, and notify the user for every incident.
Considering that Comcast has nearly 30 million subscribers worldwide, logging the activities and violations of all those users on a monthly basis is a daunting task. This is where automation services come in to lighten the load on Comcast employees, while also creating opportunities for greater efficiency and speed of response when handling DMCA notices from third-party copyright holders.
Services like Abusix’s AbuseHQ can help to flag, log, and monitor users who fall into the repeat infringer category and make it easier for large companies like Comcast to manage the thousands of DMCA notices they receive on a daily basis. It achieves this through a combination of intelligent orchestration and adaptable learning algorithms that can help those in charge of monitoring repeat infringers to do their job better and faster than ever before.
