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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.'"
Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue
No, the MPAA's #1 issue is their high prices and crappy movies.
Encryption is only for criminals.
Captain Copyright told me last night.
1) the DMCA allows for safe harbor IF ISP's don't otherwise filter content. So if they start filtering copyright, they can be held liable for other illegalities - 419 scams, stock fraud, child porn.
2) The **AA's will therefore lobby for an exception to the DMCA for their stuff.
3) Congress will grant it.
Any questions?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
ISPs try to do the same thing with spam, and spam still arrives in my inbox. It seems logical then that the best way to get around ANY filter is to change the name to one with genitalia spelled in leetspeak. On an unrelated note, my download of TransP3N1Sformers[2006]DvDrip[Eng] - aXXo is almost done.
People in this country always tout their freedom as the single greatest thing that differentiates them from many other countries. What we filter isn't so much important as the fact that we might filter at all. And if we filter the internet on a corporate or government level, how are we any different from countries like China?
And if ISPs should filter our content, then why shouldn't other service and content providers outside of the internet be responsible for censoring what we consume, say, do as well? Parents can filter what their children consume. I can filter what I can consume. It should stop there.
If they are willing to accept all of this liability, then I have no problems at all with them filtering network content. I'll still pick one of their competitors that doesn't, however.
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Yeah, I had the same reaction. If ISP customers buy internet service for (among other reasons) clandestinely downloading movies, then that customer is one more customer you might not have had before. The only thing ISPs have to lose by limiting downloads is more customers.
...Unless you take his quote as a veiled threat, i.e. "You'll have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing things our way, since we will bend legislators over our knee to provide us with the tools to bitchslap you into line if you don't come around." I'd say that's a logical reading of the quote that seems to conform well with the **IA modus operandi and way of thinking.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
See the problem here is that the MPAA is calculating this $6 billion/year number by saying multiplying the number of pirated copies (a number they can only estimate and they probably highball it) times the retail cost of a legitimate copy.
The problem with this is that it completely bypasses all microeconomic theory.
In simple terms, there are a huge number of people that will consume your good if it doesn't cost them anything (or next to nothing), but as soon as you raise the price a little bit, the number of people willing to buy the good drops substantially. This is called the price elasticity of demand.
While there is some limited evidence that the market for piracy has shrank the overall market, it's difficult to tell how much of an effect piracy really has. There are so many other factors (dilution of purchase points, ease of access to new/unsigned bands, etc) that there's some evidence that the total market for media has actually increased substantially, but the record labels are being left out of the equation.
Piracy isn't good, but it is a result of a free society and the deadweight loss (basically: if you tax someone or restrict prices via regulation, the decrease in income from the economy is greater than the income from the tax, so there's 'lost' production that never occurs) incurred by preventing it is astronomical.
IANAE, BIAAEM (I am not an economist, but I am an economist major and I hope to get a PhD in economics down the road)
The ISPs will have to get equipment that can tell the difference between encrypted BitTorrent traffic & all other encrypted and non-encrypted traffic. Eventually, the equipment requirements to do that will cost as much as any bandwidth savings.
That still wont address other issues like legal BitTorrent use, the large amount of false positives they'll get, customer complaints about Service X being slow for some reason.
Theres no way this will be s good thing for ISPs in the long term.
also...
if ISPs join together and reject this, theres a chance they can use a common carrier type of defence but once they try to actively filter BitTorrent, wont they be blamed every time they fail.
Interesting response if you get a letter from the MAFIAA... My ISP filters piracy so I shouldn't be able to download anything illegal and if I can its their fault.
> Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue
Can't the Navy or Coast Guard help them with this?
WTPOYSAIYHTWIANTITEIA? (What's the point of your stupid acronym if you have to write it all next to it to explain it anyways?)
I think we should take a note from modern day politics. I think they should stop referring to music that people downloaded without paying as "stolen" or "illegal" but we should refer it "undocumented music" or is on a "guest-listenership plan"
:D
After all, people are just taking the music that no one wants to buy, right?
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"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson