By the end of the year, several major national Internet Service Providers (ISP's), combing forces with motion picture and music organizations, will roll out an new Internet policing system designed to penalize and 'educate' subscribers who download or share copyrighted material. The new system, called "The Copyright Alert System" or CAS does not rely on any existing laws and ISP participation is completely voluntary.
It's interesting to note that most of the ISP's taking part in CAS also have vast media holdings and will directly financally benefit from stopping subscribers from downloading content for free.
Under the new system, users will be flagged and warned each time they're found downloading or sharing copyrighted materials. After the sixth warning, the subscriber might face being dropped from the ISP entirely in addition to any legal actions the rights holder may pursue. This creates a dangerous system that forces every user to become a network security expert to assure infringment isn't happening on their connection and discorages users from sharing their wireless connections openly (something else the ISP's have taken aim at recently) for fear that it might be used to download content.
The Anonymous Collective has taken aim at ISP's who've chosen to take part in the effort and has posted a good summary of what the CAS system is and how it works here.
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