If you're a copyright owner who has gone to the trouble and expense of tracking down online copyright infringers, don't send warning letters to Verizon without striking a deal first; Verizon simply chucks them in the bin.

Do a deal with the "big V" and Verizon is willing to forward warning letters on to its subscribers, but that's it. No customer information is exchanged and no sanctions are implemented—and Verizon has been handling the issue this way for years.

That's why today's report that the RIAA has signed a deal with Verizon to forward notices breaks no real ground, though the arrangement certainly does expand the scope of Verizon's letter-forwarding.

Everybody's doing it

Verizon refuses to play Web sheriff, but it is upfront about its willingness to forward warning letters.

"Verizon receives notices from owners of copyrighted works (such as movies and other content) that identify Internet connections they believe are being used to download or upload content in possible violation of the copyright laws," says the company to customers. "Verizon has made individual arrangements with certain of these copyright owners to forward their notices on to the customers involved (without identifying the customer to the content owner)."

Verizon did such a deal with Disney back in 2005 and has similar deals in place with other companies that it won't divulge. The Disney deal helped secure certain Disney content for use on Verizon's network, though; part of the price for gaining access was helping Disney control online infringement by passing warning letters along to Verizon subscribers.

What Verizon is getting out of the RIAA deal isn't clear. A Verizon source tells Ars that the deal, if it has in fact been signed, would likely be a 90-day trial run but would also just be "more of the same" for the company. And don't even think about calling it "graduated response"—there are no sanctions, and the company is keen to point out that it is not in the business of enforcement.

When the RIAA last year announced it was abandoning its widespread litigation campaign for a graduated response push, we assumed that at least some ISPs would have signed on by now. That does not appear to be the case, though as we reported earlier this year, several major US ISPs do already forward copyright infringement notices from the record labels.

AT&T, Cox, Comcast, and Verizon all forward copyright infringement notices in some way, but Cox appears to be going furthest when it comes to sanctions. Many ISPs clamp down on their very heaviest users due to capacity concerns, but Cox explicitly acts on copyright warnings. After a customer receives multiple notices, Cox can toss them into a "walled garden" and they will be shown a "special screen when they log onto the Internet" that explains the issue in more detail. Users then must contact Cox directly to talk about the issue. Nearly all accounts are reinstated at this point; Cox says that it has actually terminated less than one-tenth of one percent of accounts to which it has sent letters. That arrangement goes back years, however, and has nothing to do with the RIAA.

Does forwarding these warning letters get results? Hard to say. AT&T told us earlier this year that a pair of trials it did were quite successful at preventing repeated infringement even without sanctions (making mom and dad aware of what was being done on the family Internet account was often enough to stop infringement).

Surveys on this question in the UK have been mixed, showing that letters were likely to get good results simply by stripping away the anonymity that Internet users often feel. But a follow-up survey suggested that, if those receiving the letters know that sanctions are off the table, compliance tumbles.

As for what the RIAA wants, the group has made it clear to us on multiple occasions that warning letters alone are a good step forward, but that a real graduated response system with increasing sanctions is really needed to give the warnings some teeth.