World's Worst ISP: Exetel!

From a story on ArsTechnica:
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ISP as copyright cop: Aussie ISP kills all user multimedia files nightly

By Eric Bangeman | Published: June 27, 2007 - 09:01AM CT

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.

That would certainly have the effect of removing any copyrighted content that shouldn't be there, but it also makes it hard for customers to share their own slideshows, home movies, and music, because, as Boing Boing notes, Exetel will automatically delete content that isn't infringing. "Sorry you can't watch the clips of Junior's footy match, mum. My ISP nuked it last night."

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