Japanese Internet service providers are launching a new initiative to stop the sharing of copyrighted material by users of peer-to-peer platforms. Some 1000 Japanese ISPs agreed to work together with copyright holders to identify and cut off users who repeatedly share copyrighted files, according to the Yomiuri Shimbun.

 

The Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association say they will work with copyright the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and publishers and the Association of Copyright for Computer Software to come up with guidelines for warning and disconnecting users who share copyrighted files.

 

Copyright owners apparently will bear the burden of identifying IP addresses of repeated offenders and will notify ISPs, who will issue warnings, followed by temporary and then permanent disconnection.

 

The new program illustrates the complexity of Internet network management and application freedom issues. In this case, it is not strictly P2P that is the issue but copyright violations for which ISPs might be held liable. Legal P2P applications use is a separate issue, more directly a matter of preserving quality access for most users under conditions when a few users consume a disproportionate amount of access bandwidth and resources.

 

The issue is bound to grow in the future as more video content is delivered to end users using the public Internet. And it seems inevitable there will be changes in the way Internet access is packaged and priced, as a result. The issue is perhaps not the viability of flat rate or banded pricing, but rather the level of pricing for various types of access, based on quality, value of the bits, time of day or other metrics.