The much talked-about Copyright Alert System or simply the Six Strikes anti-piracy plan has finally taken off its wings. The policy came into effect the week of Feb. 25, and is receiving mixed responses from Internet activists. Actually, most of them are in the form of critics by people one year ago came together to ward off the much-hated Stop Online Piracy Act.

The process of creating Six Strikes Anti Piracy policy started when MPAA and RIAA teamed up with five major Internet providers in the United States, and revealed their plans to warn and punish BitTorrent pirates, in 2011. Following the announcement of their alliance and plans, they launched the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and agreed on a system through which Internet account holders will be warned if their connections are used to commit copyright infringement. After giving five warnings, ISPs may take a variety of repressive measures.

“The CAS marks a new way to reach consumers who may be engaging in peer-to-peer (P2P) piracy,” wrote Jill Lesser, CCI’s head, on Monday. Its launch today “marks the culmination of many months of work” to stop piracy and promote lawful alternatives.

“Over the course of the next several days our participating ISPs will begin rolling out the system. Content partners will now begin to send notices of alleged P2P copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of copyright alerts to consumers”, she added.

The major pushers behind the Six Strikes are the content owners in the entertainment industry, who want to monitor public data on peer-to-peer networks for what they consider illegal sharing of their music, movies or software. Apparently, AT&T will block users’ access to some of the most frequently visited websites on the Internet, until they complete a copyright course. Verizon will slow down the connection speeds of repeated pirates, and Time Warner Cable will temporarily interrupt people’s ability to browse the Internet. Now, two remaining providers, Cablevison, and Comcast are believed to take similar measures.

The matter of prime concern here is if ISPs will actually be empowered to “literally spy” on people. As content owners will monitor peer-to-peer networks and give publicly available IP data to ISPs, information shared by public will be available to them in one or other way. The worst part is that most people have no idea that their information is being tracked in this way.