AT&T's Six Strikes Starts November 28th, Costs $35 To Contest Piracy Charges

Not too long ago we reported on the upcoming flagging system that AT&T, Comcast, TimeWarner and every other major ISP is supposed to put into effect starting November 28th. If you thought PIPA and SOPA were bad, be prepared because if you view any copyrighted material that the RIAA or MPAA deem “illegal” you could be paying up to $35 to waive away piracy charges levied against your account.

This should come as no surprise given that in the United Fascist States of Corporate America, any law or change in consumer policy usually means that somewhere in that legal lingo consumers will be getting rectally gouged by some corporate douche bags and by all accounts you'll be paying one way or another to ensure that the 1% keep controlling the majority of the world's wealth that everyday people will never see, touch or even smell throughout their entire lifetime.

Anyway, looking further into the trainee documents leaked for AT&T's upcoming scheme, DSL Reports has found out that any time an account is flagged for piracy there will be a fee included if you want those flags to go away, as stated in the report...

The “Fair use” argument is a good one. As some of you may know a lot of websites were recently bludgeoned by Microsoft's legal scare-team into removing any and all videos of Halo 4 that they didn't approve, no matter how long or how short the videos were. This means that if you decided to watch any of those videos that have been hit with DMCA restrictions and copyright flags your ISP could flag you as a “pirate” even if all you did was watch a video of Master Chief march past the camera and remove his helmet. No "fair use" leniency in sight.

As mentioned in our previous coverage, after being flagged multiple times web pages will automatically redirect you to an enlightenment page where you'll need to take a course in copyright education. Again, this will happen regardless of the content you access, so long as the RIAA or MPAA have flagged it as “illegal”, and with all the videos on YouTube that get hit with copyright restrictions, it's easy to see how non-pirates will be on the receiving end of needless account badgering.

There's also no way to appropriately tell what kinds of content will or won't be flagged to set off the alerts. It's obvious cam footage of theatrical movies will easily get you flagged but anything else beyond that is potentially fair game, especially for content not available in your country (and with YouTube's new policy on blocking content outside of specific countries, this means that visiting sites or trying to access content to bypass those copyright blockades could also flag your account.)

If you're not stoked about this you can contact your local internet service provider about it and politely talk to them about the change or simply switch to a different ISP. You can also use what's called Virtual Private Networks or a TOR browser to bypass all the incessant snooping.

While we don't condone piracy here at Cinema Blend, no one should be bullied into only experiencing content that corporations deem suitable for you to experience. Remember, they don't make money without you and you don't have to play by rules that they constantly change to suit their agendas.