AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter

[SUBMAN1]

Can't they get the picture yet? If they go ahead and implement straight through anti piracy measures, the pirates will just encrypt. They are wasting their time. The Pirate Bay torrent site has already started their encryption project that will render this technology useless.

-S

January 8, 2008, 7:07 pm AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter

By Brad Stone



For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.


But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.


At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.


Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.


Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.


“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”


Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.


Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.


“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”


I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network.
“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.


After the session, he told me that ISPs like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...rssnyt&emc=rss

[SUBMAN1]

And this is neat considering Comcast is being investigated for the exact same illegal activity right now:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...Q5hpwD8U1UOFO0

-S

[Tchocky]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

Can't they get the picture yet? If they go ahead and implement straight through anti piracy measures, the pirates will just encrypt.

Maybe the measures will effect a reduction in piracy, worth the cost of monitoring? Who knows.

[SUBMAN1]

Sounds Big Brother to me.

[Blacklight]

I think consumer outrage will pretty much put a "ke-bash" on this legislation.

:>

[kiwi_2005]

How did you find out about the pirate bay site? A New poster on here who i only seen once PM me asking for a link to the fix for Bioshock he claims he was heading to some arab state and his PC wont be around so could he have the link straightaway. I never heard a good BS story till i read that one! :rotfl: I knew he was talking sht so i gave him a link to the wrong site - Pirate bay.

I never seen that poster again in subsim:hmm:

Just curious...

Beware of pirate bay it has backdoor scripts.

[Actually i got the fix from megagames.com which is not a pirate site nor supports piracy.] But if anyone askes me where i got the fix from just pisses me off. Haven't they heard of Google or Ask.com even!