Slashdot Mirror
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."
They're a small network compared to the other global players. Even if you add up their SBC+ATT operations it's still not as big as other players in the market.
we have a lot of abuse going on which includes but is not limited to
now it appears the government may be looking into the entire mess and there are some folks screaming about privacy violations
guess what kids: the supervision is warranted by the bad behavior and mis-use of the net. a done it to yourselves
the rest of us have a right to have computer running without virus codes so we can communicate and conduct business without ditzy-bopping hackers trying to get in our face or rob us