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AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop

Posted by Zonk on from the sorry-i-was-surfing-too-fast-occifer dept.

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."

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not just copyright .... by boaworm · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yea, that's the whole point of the article, you should really try and read it ;-)

    --
    Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
    Aristotele
  2. Re:Encryption... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    that doesn't work, all they have to know is that some ip address is serving up copyrighted material on a given port and shut of that port for that server.

    I think you misunderstand how a Virtual Private Network works. The first thing you must understand is that there is not spoon^W ports. Once you realize that there are no ports, then you only need to route packets over a secure channel that's indistinguishable from valid business. Is this user networking with his small-business employer, or a pirate spreading illegal wares? Impossible to tell from the traffic itself.
    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  3. Re:Who do I use for Internet access now then?? by acoustix · · Score: 5, Informative

    This issue isn't just limited to AT&T customers. It affects everyone because AT&T is a tier 1 provider, meaning that they provide backbone access for several ISPs. They are looking to sniff *all* traffic, not just traffic of their DSL customers.

    Nick

    --
    "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
  4. Re:we've already done this to death by Cheerio+Boy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? That's what I did until I could go with RCN. Speakeasy DSL costs more, but they have highly technically skilled customer support people, an expectation that their customers run servers, and a rock-solid network. I highly recommend them.

    Your packets will still likely go through an AT&T network and thus still be inspected.

    Because AT&T is so large this will affect a good chunk of the Internet - especially US networks.

    Hell their backbone runs the entire length of the us.

    This map is from 2000 so it's probably much more invasive now:

    http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif
    --

    "Bah!" - Dogbert