Will South Africa's ISP become the piracy police?

I saw this article on MyB this morning as well. I really dont think SA would jump on the band wagon that quickly tbh.....
 
The difference is in the States you have the RIAA and MPAA pumping large chunks of money into these ISPs and lawmakers to get them to cooperate, in SA you don't so there is zero motivation for local ISPs to follow suit.
 
I've heard that staff at ISPs already phone account holders and warn them when they notice suspicious behaviour on their accounts and already by law have to forward their details to the authorities if the account holder ignores these warnings.
 
What does happen from time to time is that international anti-piracy groups monitor ip addresses for downloads on P2P downlaods, like torrents, then find the ISP owning that ip address and proceed to send them a cease and desist letter to pass on to the client who uses/d that IP address.

It doesn't hold a lot of legal ground across borders, though, and most ISPs just don't bother with the letters at all.
 
Strifehart said:
Actually I have had a couple of friends' whose Afrihost accounts were completely blocked until they accepted the copyright infringement notification that was issues and "promised not to do it again".
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http://mygaming.co.za/news/news/11650-sa-s-isps-who-sends-copyright-infringement-notices.html
Afrihost is another ISP which sends out regular piracy warnings to subscribers, but is also not too happy about it.

“We merely serve notices from our upstream provider Internet Solutions,” said Afrihost CEO Gian Visser. “It is done due to pressure from IS, and we do not really have a choice other than to warn our subscribers.”
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1. It's not the ISP monitoring, it's random anti piracy groups that get it wrong all the time and are meaningless in South Africa

2. They don't have to notice anyone by law nor is it a legal matter, Afrihost are merely required to do this by IS.
 
Actually - by law, they aren't even allowed to look at what is going through their tunnels.

It's called invasion of privacy. And if I ever got such a cease and desist letter from whateverthefuckAA, I will sue my ISP for invasion of privacy, and I'll win.

Additionally, the whateverthefuckAA groups have ZERO jurisdiction in South Africa. Their threats will remain just that, threats.
 
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It will come eventually, we will sign some messed up trade agreement with USA and import their archaic laws, like Spain.
 
The bigger ISP's in the US are partly owned by the Record and Motion-Picture companies, hence why they were so willing to go ahead with their current plans. When the RIAA/MPAA's agents in the US cite United States law in their complaints to South African ISPs, our ISPs have no obligation to police the issue.

In the case of IS however, they seem to be willing to pander and do forward complaints on to their users. This is probably why Afrihost send complaints to their users - Afrihost has no choice and would probably get shut down by IS if they refused to forward the complaints.

If an ISP actually got a South African Court Order or Warrant, that would be a different story - but I don't think they're doing that. Yet.
 
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