The system was created by the Center for Copyright Information, which was formed in September 2011 by the Motion Picture Association of American and MPAA members, Recording Industry Association of America and RIAA members, AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon Communications. Well now that’s an innovative bunch who are always looking out for the little guy…
The CAS is close to launching and it is designed to monitor internet traffic of the customers of the companies above to eliminate the sharing or transferring of copyrighted content. One of the unintended consequences of this program is that small businesses that operate free WiFi hotspots for their customers (pretty much any retailer nowadays), could get punished. A little known fact of Comcast and Verizon’s user agreements are that customers are NOT ALLOWED to share internet via WiFi hotspots. I’m not aware of this ever being enforced, but I suspect it will come to the forefront as the CAS entangles many small businesses in it’s big-company net.
Thankfully, netBlazr doesn’t participate in this sort of program. We are still required to pass along DMCA notices from the government but we would never snoop our customer traffic and play deputy for the MPAA and RIAA. Our customers in Boston’s Back Bay, South End, Newmarket, Feway, Symphony, and Roxbury are safe, and will always Free their Broadband with netBlazr!
Check out the great analysis in this FierceBroadband article: http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/six-strikes-rule-could-slam-unauthorized-public-wi-fi/2013-01-21?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal