Aussie ISP kills all user multimedia files nightly
Found on Ars Technica on Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Envision a world where your ISP does the copyright policing at the behest of the movie studios, television networks, and music labels, where no copyrighted content stays up on a user's account for more than 24 hours. It sounds like a dream for Big Content, but it's also a nightmare for customers of Australian ISP Exetel.
An Exetel support page which features the top ten support questions from the previous month. A frequently asked question from customers is why their multimedia files keep disappearing from their accounts. Exetel says that it takes a "hard approach to copyright issues," and since April 2005 the ISP has run a script that deletes all multimedia content with common extensions including .avi, .mp3, .wmv, and .mov.
I wonder what idiot came up with that idea. Not only does it annoy customers greatly (and quite a few will probably switch their ISP), it doesn't really help. They delete .mp3 files? Oops, I renamed them to .foo accidentally. When they try to fight that by actually analyzing each file, I could just upload the copyrighted works in an encrypted .rar archive.