Last December, the RIAA boldly announced via the Wall Street Journal that they would be ditching mass lawsuits in favor of placing ISPs in the role of content nannies. Under the proposed system, ISPs would send offenders warning letters (something many ISPs have already been doing for years), while quietly adopting a three strikes system for repeat offenders. The RIAA has been hashing this new system out with select ISPs behind closed doors with the supposed help of New York's Attorney General, who recently made headlines for his largely ineffective war on Usenet child porn).

None of the ISPs have publicly admitted to participating in the plan, in part because it's still being hashed out, but also because of the bad press. We've confirmed that Cox is one participant, locking repeat offenders behind a "walled garden" and terminating only the most stubborn of pirates. Back in January CNET confirmed that Comcast and AT&T, both with one foot in the content industry, were also involved in the plan. At a digital music conference in Nashville this week, AT&T's Jim Cicconi stated that AT&T has already begun testing a user warning system with the RIAA:AT&T has told me they aren't fans of the idea of automatically disconnecting repeat offenders, and executives have previously commented that they hope that simply notifying a user of legal implications will be enough to reduce P2P piracy. They probably won't be if users know that ignoring them comes with no penalty, meaning that some kind of three strikes (or four or five strikes?) plan is probably inevitable. If you've seen one of these test warnings, please drop us a line.