Guilty until proven -- oops, no way to prove otherwise

Ready for your ISP to disconnect you for copyright violations with no evidence and no recourse? Welcome to the brave new world of the RIAA-Comcast alliance:

Last week it was made clear that both AT&T and Comcast are participating in the RIAA's secret plan to make carriers content cops, willing to disconnect repeat offenders (though AT&T tells me they're not sold on automating that last part). Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny writes us to note that if Comcast wants to play the role of piracy police, they're going to have to do a much better job. He cites instances of users being targeted who'd never even heard of the content they'd supposedly pirated -- and cases where piracy was blamed on users by MAC address, even when the modem they'd used had already been returned and redeployed to other users. Given many carriers can't even get bills and customer support right yet -- there's no reason to think this new system will be any different -- particularly without any independent oversight or a publicly reviewable grievance process for false positives.