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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!
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you meant to say, "Everything here is nice and polite, jackass."
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.
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 ?
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.
It seems to me to be more along the lines of, there's no real legal need for AT&T to do this, as they're already immune to prosecution by copyright holders if users transmit copyrighted information across their networks. Thus, the only reason they would have to implement something like this involves the crisp, green lining in their pockets getting a bit thicker.
But IANAL either, so the cycle of speculation continues.