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

Re:we've already done this to death

[Anonymous Coward]

about common carrier status

And as many replies stating that AT&T's internet service is not common carrier, dammit! They lobbied hard to make sure it was that way, because maintaining common carrier status is fucking expensive (what, you think having a dialtone every single time you pick up your phone without having a window where the phone company can say "ok! nobody make a call, we're going to reboot some switches!" is cheap?!), and because violating the common carrier rules doesn't mean you "lose common carrier status", it means you go to jail. Think about that, some guy at the post office reading your mail doesn't mean the post office stops being a common carrier, it means the guy goes to jail.

This is why they have to have special laws with exceptions written just for them that protect them from being sued!