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."

Comments

How to beat it

[ProteusQ]

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.

Re:we've already done this to death

[Tetsujin]

Nah, carrier Swallows. I'll bet she does... Oh yes...