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AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for 'Transitory Digital Network Communications' — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content' but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. 'As the world's largest gatekeeper,' Wu writes, 'AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.' ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu."
We all send copyrighted emails to one another under a license that does not allow AT&T to retransmit the contents without written permission. We then start a class-action lawsuit. IANAL, but that ought to slay the dragon if the judge agrees that the case has merit.
No, really. I mean it
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
¾çäæfds
> Guess it's back to carrier pidgins?
I don't know about you, but I much prefer using carrier creole.
That it's only AT&T doing the looking...for now. Wait until the gov't gets Google on it. Then we're all doomed. We'll actually have to pay for music, movies, and pr0n again. The humanity!
http://xkcd.com/386/
Nothing new. Just the usual corporate policy of "Why aim for the sky when you can shoot yourself in the foot?"
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Step 1: Create something.
Step 2: Sue AT&T when it's inevitably pirated.
Step 3: Profit!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Bow-ties are cool.
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
Your ISP: the ultimate man in the middle. You want real security, hand deliver your public key to all your contacts after first encrypting *it*. With a one-time pad. Which you then proceed to burn. And eat the ashes.