Anonymous Comrade writes: "The weirdest thing happened to my household ISP account and I wanted to share it because it could happen to you. All of this happened about a week ago.

Last weekend, after a long weekend away, couldn't get into our email.
Our ISP is Time Warner Road Runner. My boyfriend called TW, and all they could figure out was that the guy in charge of consumer network security, who was evidently the ONLY person who could restore our permissions, had deleted our email accounts and was now out of the office for a week.

The next morning, we got an overnighted document saying that the MPAA
had complained that someone at an IP address assigned to us had distributed copyrighted material. Therefore, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we were having our accounts suspended for a week pending written assurance from us that we would no longer distribute such material.


What the hell?!?! When my BF called to find out what had happened,
he finally learned that the MPAA had alleged that we had posted
copyrighted material to Usenet. Because of this complaint, without
even trying to contact us to get our side of the story, our email
accounts were suspended. We had to re-establish our usernames once
the whole thing was straightened out. Luckily, our usernames were
still available. We were vindicated when my BF sent TW a portion
of our logs. There was actually no activity at all at that time.
This lead me to believe that the MPAA picked an IP address at random,
which happened to belong to us at the time, and made the whole thing
up. But I don't know why they would do that.

It could happen to you. I found all the bleating about copyrights by the MPAA and RIAA very amusing until one of them managed to interfere with my internet service. Then it became Big-Brother-scary."