In what appears to be almost a weekly occurrence, I once again find myself writing about Hollywood's continued fight against technology. This week a program know as the "Automated Copyright Notice System" (ACNS) is being rolled out at campuses around the country. The ACNS system is designed to make it easier on ISPs and universities to monitor their network for copyright infringement.
The software is said to work in the following way (or some close variant of the description to follow): A University running ACNS would send a message telling a student that they are sharing an illegal copy of a movie or song, and that their access to the internet is cut off until the file is removed from their system. It is unclear if a student will have the ability to protest or exactly how the software scans a users hard drive for illegal content.
Again I just don't think Hollywood gets it. If I am a student and I want to share my music collection with other students, I will simply switch to the file sharing network that isn't being monitored well by the ACNS... and I can promise you that sharing networks will be devised to avoid ACNS. Hollywood should put more time into making their content easily available online for a reasonable price, and less time fighting a losing war. This past summer when the RIAA started suing people for download music they claimed online file sharing really took a hit, what the RIAA missed is that all the sharing didn't stop, it just moved to less mainstream applications like BitTorrent and eDonkey.
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