Comcast working on new anti-piracy scheme, moving beyond “Six Strikes”

Comcast is developing a new scheme to combat digital piracy in the United States, according to a new report from Variety. The country’s largest cable operator “has begun preliminary discussions with both film and TV studios and other leading Internet service providers about employing technology, according to sources, that would provide offending users with transactional opportunities to access legal versions of copyright-infringing videos as they’re being downloaded.”

Comcast declined Ars’ request for comment.

Variety also reported that in “the new system, a consumer illegally downloading a film or movie from a peer-to-peer system like BitTorrent would be quickly pushed a pop-up message with links to purchase or rent the same content, whether the title in question exists on the [video-on-demand] library of a participating distributor’s own broadband network or on a third-party seller like Amazon.”

Comcast, unlike most of its other ISP competitors, also owns vast media holdings. The company's assets include Universal Pictures, NBC, and other cable TV channels—so Comcast could stand to directly benefit from pushing its customers to buy its own products.

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"Obviously, giving people accessible, affordable alternatives to illegal downloading will reduce infringement," Sherwin Siy, the vice president of legal affairs at Public Knowledge, told Ars. "But complaining that the CAS [Copyright Alert System, aka the "Six Strikes" rule] doesn't lead right to an online store probably isn't the real problem. Or if it is, new problems are raised, such as, whose store and whose content? Comcast has the distinct advantage of being one of the biggest ISPs and simultaneously a massive content producer."

"All of the same questions that have applied to CAS as it got underway apply here, and now a few more: what's the buy-in among other ISPs?" he added. "Other copyright holders, big and small? What role and voice will consumers have in this process? And if there's a financial transaction built-in to this system, how do you prevent it from incentivizing false positives or even from becoming a form of blackmail? All of those questions need to be answered before this gets underway, otherwise it could look like you're using the trappings of the law to market your services."

Technical details of the proposed unnamed scheme were not disclosed. The cable giant, along with five other major American ISPs, began using the CAS in February 2013. The Center for Copyright Information, the group behind CAS, has yet to reveal any data since its implementation.