MPAA Boss Makes Case for ISP Content Filtering

creaton writes "At the annual UBS Global & Media Communications Conference yesterday, MPAA boss Dan Glickman banged on the copyright filtering drum during a 45-minute speech. Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue and told the audience that it cost the studios $6 billion annually. His solution: technology, especially in the form of ISP filtering. 'The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected ... and I think that's a great opportunity.' AT&T has already said it plans to filter content, but others may be more reluctant to go along, notes Ars Technica: 'ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high.'"

Comments

Re:Neat

[caffeinemessiah]

No one has told this guy about encryption yet?

This is why the recent BitTorrent lawsuit against Comcast is so important...once they realize that they can't look inside encrypted packets, they're just going to block all p2p traffic. But even that is going to be hard, because at the encrypted UDP packet level, what really distinguishes a BT packet from, say, a Skype packet which is also encrypted by default? Screw encryption, what differentiates a DRM-free MP3 flying in from iTunes or Amazon from one coming through a modified BT protocol which uses port 80 and fake http headers?

In short, this is the dumbest idea and any implementation will be necessarily half-assed and is going to affect people.