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AT&T Invests in Filtered Networking
Filtered Coward writes "Last summer, AT&T announced its intention to begin filtering copyrighted content at some point. The telecom has now bought a chunk of Vobile, whose core product is VideoDNA. "Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.' Vobile claims that VideoDNA is good enough to be used on video when transmitted over a network. 'Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone.'"
Ohhh, a stupid car analogy, cool.. Ya know what it's more like? It's more like the government enacted some special laws hundreds of years ago that made it so only the manufacturer of fuzzy dice could transport those fuzzy dice on the road for the 19 years after manufacturer, then anyone could transport them. But the manufacturers of fuzzy dice wanted to maintain their stranglehold on the fuzzy dice transportation business so they lobbied the government to have a 20 year extension placed on their monopoly.. then it became 50 years, then 70. The government was happy to oblige because the original intention of the law, to encourage the creation of fuzzy dice for the public, never really made much sense anyway.. cause what good are fuzzy dice when you can only hang dusty old ones in your car, anyway. Obviously you could enjoy the fuzzy dice behind closed doors but the real purpose of fuzzy dice is to make a public statement, so really, ya gotta wonder who is buying all these fuzzy dice. As it turns out, not to many people do buy the fuzzy dice.. cause, as I've said, all the interesting uses are forbidden, unless the fuzzy dice are really old. And now that people are being harassed by lawyers for displaying recently acquired fuzzy dice, we really need to install fuzzy dice detectors on every street corner to make sure the ones on display are sufficiently old.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There are no "content owners". There are "copyright holders" and they have the rights ascribed to them by copyright law.. of which I am opposed and believe should be drastically reduced, if not immediately and completely abolished.
How we know is more important than what we know.