For the past several years, anti-piracy Company Rightscorp has been moderately successful in forcing smaller margin ISPs in the United States to collaborate in a low-tier copyright trolling operation.
The way it operates is relatively simple. Rightscorp monitors BitTorrent networks, obtains the IP addresses of alleged infringers, and gives DMCA notices to their ISPs. Rightscorp expects ISPs to forward these to their clients along with an attached cash settlement charge.
These demands are usually for small sums ($20 or $30) but most of the larger ISPs don’t forward them to their clients. This denies Rightscorp (and clients such as BMG) of the opportunity to generate income, a situation that the anti-piracy Company is desperate to change.
One of the difficulties is that when people who receive Rightscorp ‘fines’ refuse to pay them, the company does nothing, leading to a lack of regard for the company. With this in mind, Rightscorp has been trying to get ISPs committed to forcing people to pay up.
In 2014, Rightscorp said that its goal was to have ISPs place a redirect page in front of ‘pirate’ subscribers until they pay the fine.
“we really want to do is move on from termination and move to what’s called a hard redirect, like, when you go into a motel and you have to put your room number in order to get past the browser and get on to browsing the Internet,” the company said.
In the three years since that statement, the company has raised the issue over but nothing concrete has come to achievement. However, there are now signs of fresh movement which could be vital, if Rightscorp is to be believed.
“An ISP Good Corporate Citizenship Program is what we believe will drive revenue associated with our primary revenue model. This program is an effort to garner the attention and eventually inspire a behavior shift in any ISP that chooses to embrace our suggestions to be DMCA-compliant,” the company told stockholders yesterday.
“In this program, we ask for the ISPs to deliver our notices referencing the infringement and the settlement offer. We ask that ISPs take action against repeat infringers through suspensions or a redirect page. A redirect page will guide the infringer to our payment screen while restricting all but essential internet access.”
“We have shown the tenacity to support two major litigation efforts started by two of our clients, which we feel will set an example for the entire anti-piracy industry led by Rightscorp. If you can predict the law, you can set the opposition,” the company concludes.
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