The first "Six Strikes" notifications were sent out this week by Verizon and Comcast, and Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar got a copy.

America's largest ISPs took the chickenshit step of agreeing to voluntarily police copyright on behalf of the movie studios and record labels, with a "six strikes" system that involves a series of ever-more-dire warnings and punishments for unsubstantiated copyright complaints from Big Content. — Read the rest

Joly from the Internet Society writes,

As Boing Boing readers will know, the Copyright Alert System, the result of a deal between big content and big ISPs, is a graduated response program – popularly known as the six strikes – that escalates from nastygrams, to copyright school, to Internet throttling.

The Center for Copyright Information is the organization behind America's "six strikes" plan, where the major ISPs and phone companies have signed up to voluntarily degrade your Internet connection, and even disconnect your family based on unsubstantiated, guilty-until-proven-innocent accusations of copyright infringement. — Read the rest

Men "dressed as armed security guards" who lurked outside a polling place in St. Peterburg, Florida, were not hired or directed by the Trump campaign, according to a spokesperson for it.

WLFA 8 news reports that the men claimed otherwise when deputies spoked to them. — Read the rest

It's been five years since America's super-concentrated telcoms sector announced their "voluntary Copyright Alert system" (AKA Six Strikes), a system that said that if your someone in your household was accused of six acts of copyright infringement, everyone in your house would get the internet death penalty, having your net connection terminated.

The giant, criminal rootkit distributor and the dying, sleazy extortion racket want a judge to say that ISPs should disconnect people from the Internet on their say-so.

The Copyright Alert System — a "voluntary" system of disconnection threats sent to alleged file-sharers, created by entertainment companies and the large US ISPs — has just celebrated its first birthday, having spent $2 million in order to send out 625,000 threats to people it believed to be infringers. — Read the rest

The Center for Copyright Information — a company established by the RIAA, MPAA and various ISPs — to oversee the American six-strikes copyright enforcement status has had its company status revoked and faces fines and other penalties. It appears that they forgot to file their government paperwork and pay their fees; they promise that they'll be back online once it's sorted out. — Read the rest

Redditor Federal Reservations has made a handy post enumerating all the regressive, authoritarian, corporatist policies enacted by the Obama administration in its one-and-a-bit terms. You know, for someone the right wing press likes to call a socialist, Obama sure makes Richard Nixon look like Che Guevara. — Read the rest

The US-Korean Free Trade Agreement came with a raft of draconian enforcement rules that Korea — then known as a world leader in network use and literacy — would have to adopt. Korea has since become a living lab of the impact of letting US entertainment giants design your Internet policy — and the example that industry lobbyists point to when they discuss their goals. — Read the rest

You may have heard Jill Lesser, Executive Director of the Center for Copyright Information, explain that America's six-strikes copyright punishment system would not harm open WiFi. Adi Kamdar explains why Ms Lesser's totally mistaken:

Termination may not be part of the CAS, but that's not the point—the program still uses "protecting copyright" as an excuse to seriously hinder a user's online experience.

As America's phone and cable companies roll out their "six strikes" plans (which they voluntarily adopted in cooperation with the big film companies), it's becoming clear that operating a public Internet hotspot is going to be nearly impossible. Anyone operating a hotspot will quickly find that it can no longer access popular sites like YouTube and Facebook, because random users have attracted unsubstantiated copyright complaints from the entertainment industry. — Read the rest

The American Six-Strikes regime — through which ISPs voluntarily agree to punish their customers if the entertainment industry accuses them of piracy — has been delayed, again, to "early 2013." The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) — which will act on the entertainment industry's behalf — blames Hurricane Sandy for the delay. — Read the rest

Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN about the new US "six strikes" copyright regime, an unholy alliance between the major entertainment companies the the nation's largest ISPs, which gives your ISP carte blanche to spy on all your private Internet traffic on the off chance that you might be interfering with Universal Music's profit-maximization scheme. — Read the rest