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AT&T Announces Plans to Filter Copyright Content
An anonymous reader writes "The LA Times reports that AT&T has announced plans to work with the Hollywood movie studios and major recording labels to implement new content filtering systems on their network. The plans raise many troubling legal issues including privacy concerns, false positive filtering, and liability for failure to filter."
I was wondering when they were going to give up their common carrier status. Now they can all go to jail for monopoly!
Yeah, I don't get that either. They can have the absolute best filtering software in the world, and it will all go tits up the moment the client encrypts his communications. The users will continue to swap pirated material, and AT&T will find itself on the legal hook for it.
I mean, how stupid can you get?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... when AT+T takes down an iTMS download of a purchased movie for being a copy. Which, of course, it would be. Merely one being paid for correctly.
This is not surprising in the least. AT&T has a dishonourable history of sticking it to the consumer whenever anyone asks them to.
Most notable is the current lawsuit against them alleging collusion with the NSA in massive illegal domestic wiretapping.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
We need to wait for all those dinosaur top managers to retire.
Practically every business I know is managed by someone who started managing before the personal computer revolution. It surprises me, but in more than a decade they don't seem to have learned anything. They hit blindly without understanding what they are doing, or even caring what they are doing.
We are seeing in our culture HUGE disrespect for technically knowledgeable people. The wild imaginings of someone who knows nothing are considered better than the counsel of those who have learned how things work.
If Firefox and Apache both made HTTPS their default protocol instead of HTTP, AT&T wouldn't be able to invade any of our private traffic that happens to get routed over their WANs. Then they'd have only their Net Doublecharge, preferential routing between IPs paying their extortion fees, to work against us, and that gambit will likely get killed by the government that otherwise protects AT&T's resurgent monopoly.
If we act now, while we still can, before AT&T and their telco/cableco cartel shuts us down.
--
make install -not war
It won't work. If they block P2P, people will use a different port. If they search traffic for P2P, people will use encryption. If they look at traffic analysis, people will figure out how to disguise traffic patterns. And so on.
And by people, I mean that a few clever hackers will implement it and everyone will just use it (kind of like bittorrent).
Of course, they could start by blocking youtube... that'll make them really popular.
Well, the figure for losses about bootlegs I can kind of believe. After all you have to pay cash for a bootleg, and that is real money which isn't going to the copyright holder. The figure for online piracy seems like one of those bogus ones. It is only a loss if the person would otherwise have paid. I doubt that they have a good way of measuring that.
And finally, can we PLEASE get some accuracy in the titles. Everything (bar public domain) is under copyright. If they filtered out copyright content, there would be nothing left for the customers. How would they even find the public domain content without any search engine's copyrighted front (and filtered) page?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As I understand it, the telcos aren't common-carriers with regards to so-called "data services" anyway, so they can perfectly well get away with this. Granted the distinction between a voice service and a data service is technologically non-existent anymore, but from a legal perspective it's still very important (as it happens, I have AT&T's Callvantage VoIP service at home ... which set of laws would apply to AT&T in the case?) That's part of the law that does need to be changed, I think.
Now, whether or not they'll have many customers when it's all over is another story. The moment my ISP starts making decisions for me about what I can and cannot download is the day I find another provider. If there aren't any other providers, then I'm going to drive to Washington, D.C. (probably none of us will be able to actually board aircraft at that point), grab Orrin Hatch and a few other select Congresspeople by their lapels and shake some sense into them.
What's amazing about this is the level of influence the media companies are able to wield, in both the government and private sectors. Honestly, they must have some part of their organization whose only job it is to dig up dirt on Congressmen and corporate CEOs. Otherwise I can't see why AT&T would just roll over on this.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Exactly. By the time AT&T gets anywhere with filtering, BitTorrent clients will come with encryption enabled by default and will all select a random set of ports.
Is AT&T suggesting they can somehow go up against an encrypted, data-heavy connection using random ports? Or even well-known ports like 443? You can't very well just block long transfers, either. If you do that, P2P clients will be programmed to cycle connections, only transmitting one MB or such per connection before resetting.
Best to build for the capacity you sell to your users. If you can't handle what you sold, downgrade their plans, raise prices, or install new lines.
I'm not for piracy at all, but the ISPs should stay out of criminal and civil matters altogether until they have a public order from a judge instructing them otherwise.
ISPs are not common carriers. There is a difference between voice and data, according to (stupid) law.
I had been considering switching from Comcast to AT&T as soon as DSL became available at my house... so much for that idea.
Talk about a choice between Giant Douchebag and Turd Sandwich...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Here's the problem as I see it: AT&T knows that ISPs have to compete on service, price and network superiority. There's not too much room to "add value" to their network (i.e., offer proprietary services that work best on AT&T's network). They're betting that by adding legit content and keeping off 'pirate' content, they can create a network that not-very-expert users who want video-on-demand etc will use, and that their competitors will do this anyway to keep up.
And what they will probably do is aggressively packet-shape so that folk who encrypt traffic will see lousy transfer rates AND lobby for exemptions to common-carrier rules for copyright defense.
It doesn't make too much sense, but hey, no one expects good business from AT&T.
This will render ecommerce impossible, and I'm sure that if they go to that extent, they'll block VPN and ssh, which will make a home internet connection useful only for instant messaging, viewing porn, and arguing endlessly on slashdot. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
what are you talking about? We don't endlessly argue on slashdot!!! Everything here is nice and polite.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
Unless you believe that companies (AT&T, Google, MS) and government agencies (Big Brother) have a right to listen in on every conversation you have, review every site you visit, and examine every transaction you make, then either don't let them or stop complaining.
Instead of sending everything by postcard, send everything by envelope (encrypted), and stop expecting every lawyer, politician, company, government agency, and identity thief to respect your privacy.
I'm guessing they're not going to like a file transfer of casablanca.mov
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think you meant to say, "Everything here is nice and polite, jackass."
If AT&T is going to start watching every single thing its users does and the users have no recourse whatsoever, I say it is time to end the monopoly that cable and wired ISPs and phone companies have in most areas and let competition reign. If I had the choice between a company that is going to spy on me and give anything they think is suspicious to the RIAA/MPAA or paying a few extra bucks to a company that will truly honor my privacy, the choice would be extremely easy.
Instead, I'm stuck with one cable company and one DSL company servicing my area. Thanks, local government.
I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but when I put the url of piratebay in my browser a blocking service page came up. First time I saw anything like this. I get DSL in Chicago thru, I guess it's AT&T now...
This is all well and good if it's like a parental control thing but I'm a 50 year old paying customer and I'm not used to getting flipped off by my ISP. I suppose I should be looking over my shoulder.
AT&T is not AT&T now, because the name was sold to an abusive west coast telephone company named SBC.
My understanding is that everything else of value in the original AT&T was sold piece-by-piece, and SBC bought mostly just the name. My understanding is that the SBC trademark was worse than useless because the company is so abusive. So, the managers bought another name.
Apparently, for $16 Billion SBC got AT&T's VOIP customers, and the AT&T name.
AT&T's VOIP customers were Sheila and Gerald Funk, who have since moved to Elbonia. Wait... That last sentence my contain an error.
So, what we are seeing is SBC mismanagement under a new name. Soon just saying the name AT&T will cause people to become upset.
Real time is the KEY here. They promise to block and not to just detect.
Sure, you can detect ssh, etc, known protocals and block them.
But if today the server encripted an MP3 file with rot13 no computer would automatically detect it as an mp3. And tomarow they just do it different. Tomarrow they make a jpg out of it. Change the extention and Bob's your uncle.
An application is written that everytime it starts it downloads a plugin with todays encription standard. There is no way they could even think of keeping up without breaking things for there customers on a daily basis.
Well, given block/chunk size in bittorrent clients, they should recover from any sporadic disconnects after 1-2 blocks are transferred, will have an increased overhead in terms of new connections, but should still work... I also have to agree that AT&T should stay out of content blocking... I know that if I hosted britney_spears.mp3, which turned out to be a commentary file, and it was blocked, I might have something to sue about... AT&T is opening a can of worms on the legitimate side alone.. I know for a fact I wouldn't use AT&T for services before, let alone now.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I still think one of the most brilliant developments in practical cryptography was SSH. The idea of simply caching the public key on the first connection and checking to see if it has changed on later connections is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack on that very first connection, but it still solves 99% of the problem with 1% of the effort. That's the proper model for any new effort to routinely encrypt everything, all the time, to make the haystacks as big as we can.
...that in many countries, when a carrier censors content, it automatically loses "common carrier" status and becomes liable for what it carries. In other words, AT&T probably can't be sued right now for movies on their lines, but if they censor those lines and miss something - however accidental - they are liable. In the UK, carriers have been sued into bankrupcy after losing common carrier status. I don't know if this is true in the US, but if it is and someone wants to go digging for gold, they would be doing everyone a huge favour.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's an entirely different story when you have two resourceful parties who want to communicate and will deploy all sorts of resourceful defenses and countermeasures -- starting with end-to-end encryption -- to ensure that they can continue to communicate. Stopping spam is absolutely trivial by comparison.
The article doesn't mention AT&T as an ISP. It merely states they plan on filtering this content as it runs across their network. Well, the bad news is that most ISP data in the US traverses the AT&T network in the form of optical longhaul systems ( Read that Sonet ) at some point in it's journey. Your ISP leases lines from Company X who, in turn, leases their lines from AT&T. Is similar to when your WoW session is hit with a lag storm and you start yelling at your ISP to ' FIX YOUR SH*T ', when it's actually an optical level issue on lines owned by someone else that is taking the data longhaul across the country. Sprint, AT&T, whatever ) Given the technology that allowed the NSA to split the optical signal so they could watch traffic, I wonder if they're considering applying their ' filtering ' technology in the same manner. In other words, would they act as big brother over all the data packets that travel ' their ' pipes and filter anything they feel is necessary ?
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA applicable to carriers (there are different provisions for hosts and caches) requires, in part, that, for its protection to be available, that the "transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage" of material be carried out "without selection of the material by the service provider". (17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(a)(2))
I don't know if there is any case law yet on this, but at first blush it would seem that the more selectivity the carrier applies to what content is allowed and what is blocked, the less clear it is that they are within the protection of the safe harbor. And while it might seem paradoxical that the carrier could become more liable for copyright infringement for blocking some infringing materials, there is a good reason for this—it makes a carrier choose whether it wants copyright to be the responsibility of the users (and thus, it is "hands off"), or whether it wants to seek the potential rewards (in terms of favorable details with copyright holders to monitor and enforce) along with the potential costs (in terms of liability to those whose rights are violated despite the carrier's intervention) of taking a "hands on" policy.
Yeah? And what would people switch to? Dialup?
For example, where I live the only broadband I can get is Comcast. If they fucked over the customers like AT&T I'd have no other choice.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Bingo. That's the whole idea. This internet thing has been nothing but a headache to those in power anyway. You get foul-mouthed hippie bloggers who say bad things about our sainted politicians, you have web sites that actually help people find the lowest prices on products, and there are even ways for people on the internet to send messages that are hard to eavesdrop. We can't have that, now, can we?
The ideal internet for the people who run things would be a place where people shop, watch movies and TV (but only what they pay for) and buy songs from iTunes and msTunes and sonyTunes and warnerTunes. It's OK for folks to talk to one another, as long as they do it over a clear channel (say!) and they can post pictures of their dogs and babies but not police beating protesters or (God forbid!) that troublemaker Michael Moore.
Once this mess of an internet gets straightened out, people will have all the freedom they could want, as long as it's within these reasonable parameters.
Oh, I forgot: THE CHILDREN! THE CHILDREN!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Every post on Slashdot is copyrighted -- it's a creative form of expression in a fixed medium (namely bits on a disk somewhere). Yet here they are... How can that be? It's because the posters are granting a public license to view their work, implicitly by placing it in a public forum.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the content flowing through AT&T's networks are copyrighted. It's not sufficient that a work is copyrighted, but rather that the exchange itself is a violation of copyright. But how can the computer know? If you have a license to the work through some asset purchase, it's not infringing; if you have a license agreement that grants certain rights to obtain/distribute copies, it's not infringement; if you are using the content for academic research, the purpose of criticism, or in parody, it's not infringing. So, how is their computer system to know, a priori, of the legal arrangements, or your intent to use a work? What if you live in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize the copyright (e.g., it may be public domain because the copyright expired in your jurisdiction).
The point is that it's technically not feasible to police copyrights. AT&T may be inerefering with network traffic on behalf of a third party for fun and profit, but they are most certainly not protecting copyrights. It's a little disingenuous.
How is it that they think they can judge intent? Even if they're only going to look at major Hollywood productions, how do they know that a given transmission is pirated, and not the exact same transmission, but with license agreements in place to allow the distribution? What's the difference between a download from iTunes Store and a download from another host online? Are they going to maintain a whitelist of "legitimate" sites that can distribute copyrighted material?
Nevermind the fact that if they're going to start protecting the interests of the major studios, why aren't they going to "protect" the interests of the rest of us? How do they know the difference between me uploading my photography to my website and someone else sending copies around that infringe on my copyrights?
The entire concept is ridiculous. There is technically no difference between a legal and an illegal transfer. It's all in the offline licenses and agreements that have (or have not) been made.
Because there is no money to be made by saving the children.
As for traffic filtering and shaping, the battle between ISP and user will end only when they agree on QoS markings and policies that are advantageous to both. This can happen.