This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 7th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Major internet service providers now have a private method for dealing with people who get their content

illegally on the internet.

Was it an attempt to merely avoid coercive enforcement?

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, at the Cato Institute, comments.

The ISPs and the major copyright holders have gotten together with an agreement about how to address online copyright infringement.

The terms of the deal are essentially that copyright holders would notify ISPs when they believed that an Internet protocol address being used by one of the ISP's customers is engaged in copyright violation.

The ISP would then pass along a notice or series of notices

with sort of graded intrusiveness to the customer, ultimately, potentially resulting in the customer receiving

degraded internet service if they didn't respond adequately to the notices they received

through their ISPs from the copyright holders. to the entirely clear. They've tried to get away very much from the idea that one's internet

service would be entirely cut off, but they're talking about slowing down internet

access or depriving you have access to some services like the web. You'd still be able to make phone calls

because that's important using a voice over internet protocol for example because

your 911 service might come that way. But various qualities of your

internet service could go away if you failed entirely to respond to the

ISP's notice. A person can initiate apparently the

I SP's notice. A person can initiate apparently a challenge to the notices by paying

$35 to the ISP to look into the allegation. That's controversial to some. There are arguments on both

sides, so there's a little bit of controversy coming from every direction. The idea that you

should have to pay your ISP in order to determine whether

or not you've been violating copyright law and should get continued service from them.

...