Coming soon if RIAA has their way ... "AT&T - Your World. And Your Privacy. Delivered."

RIAA launched a new tactic in its war of terror against file sharers. It's trying to make your ISP an agent for the record industry.

What is amazing is the gall RIAA exhibits. There is no benefit to the ISP. The Internet company is being asked to voluntarily invest its time and money to increase its storage costs and procedures, send additional notices to the customer, and compromise customer privacy, all just to make RIAA's job easier.

Here is an excerpt from the RIAA letter to ISPs:

To assist you in extending this option to your subscribers we will e-mail to you, along with the evidence preservation notice, a letter for you to forward to the subscriber. That letter will explain that the subscriber has been targeted for suit and that he or she has the opportunity, in advance of that suit being filed, to contact us to resolve the claims. Whether they want to contact us at that time will be entirely up to them, but if they do not, they will not be eligible for a discounted settlement rate.

We can extend this Pre-Suit settlement option only to those ISPs who agree to maintain the log file for the IP address for at least 180 days. This timeframe is necessary to allow sufficient time to pursue the Doe lawsuit and subpoena if settlement discussions are not fruitful. If you will not agree to forward the early notices to subscribers and maintain the log files for 180 days, then our members will simply proceed as before with an immediate Doe lawsuit against the subscriber, followed by a subpoena as allowed by the courts.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), wrote in response:

As if suing thousands of music fans isn't bad enough, now the RIAA wants to conscript ISPs into helping them streamline the shakedowns. The major record labels sent a letter to ISPs across the country asking them to trade away customers' rights and make the overzealous file sharing lawsuits more profitable -- and the RIAA even has the audacity to suggest that this is all for your own good.

ISPs currently have no obligation to maintain IP log files, and that's a good thing when it comes to protecting your privacy. Those log files can serve as Internet breadcrumbs -- your ISP and any third party that has access to them can retrace your online activities.

But the RIAA wants ISPs to maintain (and disclose) a customer's IP logs for six months whenever the RIAA says the user may have infringed copyright. In exchange, the record companies will reduce its initial lawsuit settlement demands. Of course, the actual customer would have no say in the matter. The RIAA letter says it wants the information kept because it could "exculpate" the customer, but of course those same records can also implicate the user. Funny, the labels don't mention that.