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.'"

Comments

Why does AT&T want this?

[nb(a)Quibux]

In the article, AT&T's Mr. Cicconi is quoted as having said: "We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this."

Why are they so interested in this? Because there will be pressure on smaller ISPs to do the same, with the difference that for smaller ISPs, roughly the same absolute cost divided by a much smaller number of customers is a much greater per-customer cost?

Re:Why does AT&T want this?

[Rosyna]

Why are they so interested in this?

I still think it's because they oversold their network capacity and don't want to spend any new money on upgrading their infrastructure to match the capacity they advertise. The fix to this is to implement network filtering that prevents customer from using the bandwidth AT&T has sold them.

Re:Why does AT&T want this?

[Alexpkeaton1010]

The Parent is 100% correct. AT&T doesn't care at all about protecting content holders rights. The AT&T bosses look at the huge expense in upgrading the infrastructure and ask, "Why do we need to do this?". The poor engineers then have to explain that x% of there traffic is due to Youtube, y% is due to World of Warcraft, and z% is due to Bittorrent. To solve the Youtube and World of Warcraft problem, the answer to AT&T is of course a tiered internet where Google and Blizzard have to pay extra to guarantee that there packets get through. There is no one to charge for Bittorrent, so the answer is clearly to ban it. This is all about saving AT&T the cost of upgrading there infrastructure.

Re:Why does AT&T want this?

[Maniac-X]

Technically, everything is copyrighted. My website, your website, this website, all copyrighted. It may not be officially registered in the copyright office, but anything that is created by anyone is subject to (and protected by) copyright law. Does that mean that they're going to filter the copyrighted content on my personal website (ie, everything I created that's up there) as well? This is a legal breach of net neutrality. Comcast is already under investigation by the FCC for this, and they're looking at $195,000 per affected customer. I expect if AT&T goes through with this plan they'll be fined as well, so the bigwigs should really look at that while figuring their money-saving options. Spend X amount of money on upgrading their bandwidth capacity to fill demand, or spend $(customer*200,000) on fines for violating Net Neutrality.

Re:Why does AT&T want this?

[compro01]

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.

The friendly way about it...

[Loibisch]

The friendly way about it is not to mess with people's traffic in the first place. Once you have filtering equipment in place it can easily be misused to filter out anything any power with enough money might wish to black out.

You do not want to open that box...

No More Network Congestion?

[zotz]

Since pretty much everything these days is automatically copyrighted at the time of creation or fixing, I guess the days of network congestion will soon be pretty much over then?

all the best,

drew

uh huh...

[Bones3D_mac]

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?

i download copyrighted material everyday

[LiquidCoooled]

i download copyrighted material everyday and if my ISP stopped it then I will be very annoyed.
Practically every page I download has a copyright, including the one I am reading now.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2007 SourceForge, Inc.

How can they differentiate unauthorized copyright from authorized?

AT&T is my ISP

[An anonymous reader]

And I think this is total Bullsh*&*^&*(&^*& CARRIER LOST...

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic

[Slyswede]

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).

Re:And then they wonder

[jedidiah]

Nope. It's upper management that insists on thinking of the stockholder as their ultimate customer rather than the person they actually sell to. This is an idea that's been popular on Wall Street for a long time now. Couple it with the "this quarter" mentality and you have a real recipe for disaster.

A board chairman really shouldn't give a rats *ss what the stock price is.

That represents money that the company has already raised.

Management chooses to be not to be in it for the long haul and are incapable of providing any leadership.

Mangement needs to be able to sell the idea of proper management too.