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ISPs To Filter Traffic For Copyright Holders?
Dr. Zarkov writes "At a CES forum, representatives of AT&T and other ISPs discussed the need to filter traffic at the network level, to stop the transfer of copyrighted material. An AT&T spokesman said they 'would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. "We've got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there's no doubt about it," he said.'"
What they really mean, is that there's no way it can be done without pissing off enough customers for a class-action lawsuit against them.
Who gets to identify "copyright" and how do those with permission to use said materials bypass the system for legitimate reasons? Who is going to pay for the resources needed to store signature files for each copyrighted work on earth and the hardware needed to perform comparisons of any download with the signature database in realtime in such a manner that it doesn't adversely affect network performance?
Finally, wouldn't all these techniques be rendered useless by encrypted tunneling software short of making encryption over the internet illegal in itself? And who gets to enforce that?
8==8 Bones 8==8
This is quite interesting to follow since here in Sweden the debate climate has just made an interesting turn. For the first time, politicians in our parliament has come out in support of scrapping the current laws against file sharing on the grounds that enforcing them requires giving either ISP:s or rights owners too much insight into people's personal communications, thus violating our privacy.
This was sparked by a government report suggesting that the law should be changed to require ISP:s to scan the network traffic of their customers and possibly terminate the internet service if multiple violations were made. One thing we should not here is that in Sweden, the ISP:s are strongly opposed to monitoring their customers and wish to remain providers of a service, not the internet police of rights owners.
The main problem in this whole issue is that people tend to think that just because something can be done with new technology (such as monitoring what I send over the internet to my friends) it's ok to do so. Free societies value personal freedom and the freedom to keep our private lives to ourselves. No one would dream of suggesting that the postal service should start opening people's mail to see if there's something illegal inside. If it's not right in the analog world, it's not right in the digital world either.
Now I'm just waiting to see how long it takes the rest of the EU to catch on. There's a big chance that we'll see soon see the largest changes to copyright laws since they were originally thought up. Personally I'll be satisfied with a clarification that clearly states that it's illegal for anyone to monitor my personal communication regardless of what medium I use, unless specifically required to do so by a court of law (as in other wiretapping cases).
Check out Freenet - total anonymity and total encryption is the goal. All that's needed for it to work is for more people to download and run nodes.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
A tiered internet is exactly what I was thinking. They haven't gotten their way from Congress, so they have to find some excuse to do it anyway that might pass legal muster. If they can blame copyright infringement for the necessity of blocking certain packets, they can extort money from others by saying it's an ugly truth of the world we live in that some of their packets will occasionally be mistaken for "illegal" packets. For a fee they can hire more people to make the filters more accurate. Then they can go back to Congress and say "See, a tiered internet is necessary!"
simple, they make tons of money overselling. they love people who pay for, say, a 5MB pipe and only use it for checking their emails and looking up recipes and whatever.
if they switched to an actual-transfers system, they'd lose all kinds of money on those people.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
AT&T [or ANY ISP] should NOT be in the policing business. ISPs are transport providers, and this is not their responsibility any more than it is the job of a bus or taxi driver to do a background check on a passenger before transporting them, or perhaps to search each passenger for illegal substances (or containers that MAY CONTAIN an illegal substance)... It is also not up to the ISP to decide what is right or wrong, so putting them in the middle is wrong. We pay our ISPs to get us to the Internet, and we want to get to the WHOLE Internet, and we want to be there FAST. Anything else is a law enforcement matter and should require a wsrrant to search, just as it would if you were at home. We're giving up our freedoms here people.. Once the infrastructure is in place, they could search for ANYTHING..
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