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"The Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan also known as \"Six Strikes\" which goes into effect the week of Feb. 25, is getting mixed responses from Internet activists who one year ago banded together to ward off the much-hated Stop Online Piracy Act.\nCAS is an effort by content owners (mostly in the entertainment industry) to monitor public data on peer-to-peer networks for what they consider illegal sharing of their music, movies or software. Content owners can share the Internet Protocol addresses of alleged offenders to the accused's ISPs, which then sets off a series of escalating actions in an attempt to put the kibosh on illegal activity. These range from emails with links to legal media consumption methods to severely throttling connection speeds or terminating access. Copyright owners, meanwhile, can open lawsuits against users who don't stop pirating content after repeated warnings, a power they have always held.\nSome groups already view CAS as technology advocates' next big showdown: Demand Progress is boldly accusing ISPs of being \"mega-corporations\" which \"serve as judge, jury and executioner.\" Evan Greer, campaign manager at Internet advocacy group Fight for the Future, argues that Six Strikes will \"create a non-transparent system where your ISP is literally spying on you \u2014 watching everything you download and share.\"\nThe claim that ISPs will actually be empowered to \"literally spy\" on people is questionable \u2014 it's the content owners that will monitor peer-to-peer networks and give publicly available IP data to ISPs. The Center for Copyright Protection (CCI), where CAS originated, insists that safeguards to protect consumers' private data are in place. When pressed on his argument that CAS allows ISPs to spy on users, Greer explained she believes CAS violates people's reasonable expectation of privacy.\n\"CCI is claiming that this information is public \u2014 technically, anything you send over the Internet that is not encrypted is public to someone \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t make it fair game to systematically use against individual Internet users,\" she said. \"Most people have no idea that their information is being tracked in this way.\"\nDemand Progress and Fight for the Future, groups which have worked together on technology policy advocacy before, advise concerned users to install a Virtual Private Network (VPN), software which masks Internet users' online activity. \nMeanwhile, many of those against CAS have taken to Twitter to express their views:\n\nAfter epic #SOPA fail, Hollywood found another way to spy on and censor you: cms.fightforthefuture.org/six-strikes/ #SixStrikes\n\u2014 Bean's Dreams(@DreamersRevolt) February 25, 2013\n\n\nPls RT: @att, @comcast, @verizon punishing users for downloads. Tell ISPs to stop #SIXSTRIKES. act.demandprogress.org/act/six_strike\u2026 via @demandprogress\n\u2014 Josh Pirozzi (@JoshPirozzi) February 25, 2013\n\n\nFuck #sixstrikes. Welcome to the beginning of Internet oppression.\n\u2014 Joshua Eakle (@JoshEakle) February 25, 2013\n\nSEE ALSO: Controversial 'Six Strikes' Anti-Piracy Plan Starts Monday\n\nOther groups, however, are taking a \"wait-and-see\" approach before sounding the alarms of advocacy. David Song, Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Project on Copyright and Technology, is cautiously optimistic the program could help cut down on copyright infringement in a way \"that doesn't impair online openness or cause major problems for users.\"\n\"Our ultimate take is it's kind of a wait-and-see, this could work out OK, it could play, in fact, a positive role, but how it plays out in actual practice is just something that we're going to have to closely scrutinize, because there are certainly ways where if something were to go wrong it could end up having an unfair, negative impact on users,\" said Song.\nSong added that CDT doesn't \"believe it would be appropriate to suspend users' Internet accounts based on allegations that haven't been tested in court,\" though he also doesn't believe ISPs will actually go so far as to cut infringing consumers off, even though the CAS agreement allows such a move. \nA spokesperson for Time Warner Cable, one of the major ISPs implementing CAS, told Mashable that it will not throttle data or terminate customers' access as a penalty under CAS, though he did add the provider has long maintained the right to do so under its terms of service.\nFactors likely keeping potential opponents of CAS at bay are several privacy and civil liberties safeguards that Song and others are hoping will prevent undue violations of consumers' Internet experiences: First, account holders accused of piracy can appeal those claims for a small fee, with that fee waived if an appeal is granted or if the consumer demonstrates financial hardship. Second, several well-known Internet advocates sit on a CCI advisory board, which ostensibly exists to give consumers a voice in CAS implementation.\nHowever, it's not yet known how either of those provisions will function in practice. Transparency at CCI, CAS and the involved ISPs has been poor; CAS has been in the works since 2011 but details about the program are only now being public. Among those who acknoledge the need for greater openness in the process is Gigi Sohn, present of Internet advocacy group Public Knowledge and member of CCI's advisory board.\n\" ... I urge both the participating Internet service providers and the content companies to be more open and transparent about how the CAS works and, after the system has been in place for a time, to provide the public data that shows how the system is working,\" said Sohn in a statement Monday.\nAre you concerned about Six Strikes? Share your thoughts in the comments.\nPhoto via iStockphoto, pReTeNdEr\n      window._msla=window.loadScriptAsync||function(src,id){if(document.getElementById(id))return;var js=document.createElement('script');js.id=id;js.src=src;document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0].parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);};\n_msla(\"//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\",\"twitter_jssdk\");"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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