[Tom's Hardware] ISP's will begin to throttle suspected pirates. - Page 21

I'm confused though... the title of the article says "pirates will be throttled", and the content of the article follows that theme. It didn't say anything about throttling those who use lots of bandwidth.

But it does say suspected pirates. I have been suspected to have committed criminal damage but I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The broadband throttle will probably effect people like me (who use a lot of bandwidth) as being pirates.

The article says that if the IP address has downloaded copyrighted materials illegally, it will go through these steps. If anyone is unfairly throttled, I think that is reason for concern/outrage when it happens, but I don't think it's fair to assume that ISPs are just going to randomly throttle whoever uses a bunch of bandwidth, when the article clearly states that it will only be people who download copyrighted materials illegally.

I was "suspected" to of pirated a game back when I was on Cox. Got a call, told them I hadn't downloaded any game and they continued to say I had to delete it from my hard drive (yada yada). I continued to tell them that they can personally send whoever they want to come pick up my legit copy of the game, disc/booklet and everything themselves. I didn't pirate anything, and wasn't going to pay for something I 1.) already had 2.) didn't pirate.

Went to court with both the game company (for basically telling them to F* off) and then later Cox. Walked out having lawyer fee's paid along with not having to pay for the game. Then had my Cox internet disconnected/terminated for free and didn't have to pay the rest of my Cox bill. They had not one drop of evidence to support this claim, neither the game company nor Cox.

All because I was "suspected". Been with Verizon FiOS ever since and not had one issue. Doing the same thing I've been doing since day one of Cox. And then some. And if Verizon ever wants to try to pull the stunt then so be it, I'll drop them and move to someone else. They better be 100% sure that the people they "suspect" are not legitimate users such as myself.

Not really related to this, but is somewhat along the same general lines. Although I've heard a ton of other horror stories not too different from other Cox users. I'm sure if I look I can find the forum/post where I posted the rant and all the information/court docs, but yeah, Cox seem's to be pretty bad like that, at least over here on the east coast.

TL:DR; Moral of the story, they can suspect you of anything and do whatever they want.

Yes they do. We could always go back to the days of IRC sharing etc.
Edited by Warmonger - 3/16/12 at 8:25pm

They do, but can the US and UK get to those logs. If a VPN company is registered in Ukraine, has Ukraine or even better a non-EU country server, there's almost no chance that a mere civil suit can get to those logs.

Looks like they're already doing this. I've noticed in the past week my connection speed has been cut from around 1.6MB/s down to barely 200 KB/s. It's quite frustrating, seeing as almost all of my bandwidth is used by netflix and steam. They aren't targetting pirates, they're just using the piracy hubub of late as an excuse to throttle "pirates" so they can charge you full price for 1/4th service.

they say "suspected" pirates. for some reason the bandwidth hog= pirate logic ended up in someones head. feel bad for mmo players

MMOs don't really use a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming movies from Netflix and downloading games from Steam.