AT&T mulls copyright censorship at the network level

AT&T is considering adding content filters to its network. These will try to figure out if your network connection contains a copyrighted work, and censor any communications that are believed to be infringing.

This strategy will work for approximately 30 seconds -- about as long as it takes for people who like to download copyrighted works to switch to using an encrypted protocol -- and thereafter it will be primarily useful to bullies and schemers who will use it to silence critics (by claiming their works infringe and getting them censored) and prevent competition (by raising the cost of operating an ISP through the inclusion of the spyware and the hardware to run it on).

Of course, AT&T has already shown its commitment to its customers by helping the NSA conduct wholesale warrantless wiretapping on the entire nation -- adding a censorious, expensive, and useless piece of spyware to its network operations is entirely in keeping with its behavior.

“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

Link (Thanks, Virtual Tours and Leon!)

• [nzruss]

  But we have choices!!! You don’t have to go with AT&T !!! Let the market decide!!!

  Unless you live where I live – I have the choice of:

  AT&T – Nuff said.

  SBC: Oh wait… they’re AT&T…

  Charter Communications – (let there be hope!!!)
  Our Charters network is actually an AT&T network. The only time I see ‘Charter’ is on my invoice or if the tech has to come to the house in his ‘Charter truck’. If there is a problem at with the network beyond the house -its fixed by AT&T techs. (all of this according to the Charter tech that came to my house recently.) Where we live, Charter is just a front for AT&T.

  Some great scam AT&T have got going here.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever worked for a corporation with unnecessarily dumb policies that cost it potential income.

• [xopl]

  Dear Danegeld who I want to punch in the mouth for either being a troll or for taking a huge shit on the US Constitution that hundreds of thousands of people have died for,

  I think you know where this comment is going.

  Sincerely,
  me

  P.S. Fuck you.

• [hemidemisemiquaver]

  John Edwards talks a whole heap of shit about corporate interests in this country, which I like. But when asked to provide an example of a good corporate citizen, AT&T always comes up. How can anyone, after the wiretapping scandals, the net neutrality issues, price gouging, and now this, consider AT&T to be anything but harmful to the American people? They may be helpful to the government, but its customers are surely getting the shaft.

• [Jeff]

  I wonder how Apple is going to respond to this? I don’t have an I phone, but it uses ATT. As for being able to encrypt? As if it’s not going to be an issue with the Feds…ever. Let’s say that in the not-to-distant-future, we have AI with enough bandwidth and processing speed to sift through every data packet with great ease. And quantum computing will blow encryption to insane levels of complexity. We have a right to privacy, or so it seems, but when will we begin to think of that meme as outdated and unworkable in the AI erra? We might not want people with cams in our bedroom, but we are already familiar with the idea that what goes through the airwaves or through lines, is not really private. It’s a fantasy. I have encryption ability, but what a pain.

• [Tim Howland]

  The Volokh Conspiracy guys have a pretty interesting take on this:

  The Wiretap Act makes it a federal crime and a civil wrong permitting the recovery of punitive damages and attorney’s fees for intercepting the contents of a person’s communications over an interstate communications network. Although there are no cases directly on this, network-level scanning of traffic for copyrighted content is likely to be deemed an “intercept” of the contents of communications. And while there are exceptions for interceptions by parties to communications (18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d)) and for monitoring narrowly tailored to protect the network provider (18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(a)(i)), it’s hard to see how those exceptions would apply to network-level monitoring for copyrighted information.

• [joe]

  @ #11

  You could always use the VPN feature inside the phone.

  As for encryption being a pain, check out Tor (Just Google Tor) for all your encryption needs. It encrypts and then “hops” your data through multiple encrypted networks. It’s pretty neat and I believe it changes the entirety of your net traffic to be encrypted (Save for email, IM which wind up in cleartext anyways)

• [quoderat]

  I contacted a bunch of AT&T corporate drones reference this issue.

  AT&T needs to be smacked down, hard, before they manage to take all our freedoms away.

  It’s amazing that people like Danegeld cannot see what is happening.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  But what if my network connection contains my own copyighted work, or someone else’s copyrighted work that I’m transmitting with their permission? I do that all the time.

  Danegeld, are you deliberately trolling, or was that a joke that didn’t quite work?

• [ill lich]

  I heard the US EPA was going to use a similar approach with pollution– they were going to dam up all waterways and only allow the H2O molecules through, stopping all other molecules as possible pollutants. Sounds efficient.

  Oh yes, “presumption of innocence” is a horrible horrible thing, that’s why our government has brought back “presumption of guilt” for everyone boarding a plane. What’s next, “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out”?

• [BlackTiger]

  “optimal way to approach this” in what world?

  And, their use of the term ‘digital fingerprinting’ makes me wonder if their plan is to try and catch and check every packet, or look for ‘tags’ on liscensed content packets?

  I mean, it really doesn’t sound feasible. There must be network overhead for this… IE, loss of speed?

  I hope no-one at AT&T is wondering why their subscribers are leaving, after all of this nonsense.

• [joe]

  The ability for a publisher (read, MPAA, RIAA, etc) to insert a digital “watermark” that is distinct enough from the normal data would be a ridiculous undertaking considering the multitude of different codecs, formats, bitrates, you name it.

  Thing is that if they were so gung-ho that they set their “sensitivity” to the watermark so low, they may wind up getting false positives or, perhaps, may be so specific and obviously out of place that the watermark is easy to circumvent.

• [Crash]

  I’m sure a lot of the problem, unspoken, is that filesharing users eat a lot of upstream network bandwidth, enough so that the monthly pricing model starts to break down. What would happen if ISPs started to charge metered bandwidth, made users pay by the megabyte the same way the ISPs themselves do upstream?

• [Gilbert Wham]

  Abject lunacy. I’m glad my little ISP promises not to filter/shape. They do charge for upstream though, but so do most UK ISPs. Check out ADSL24 when BT get through with you Cory. You’ll be much happier.

• [chris]

  [Raises his hand multiple times]

• [Bilsko]

  shouldn’t we also be questioning why AT&T — a content delivery provider — is taking it upon itself to do this at all. Shouldn’t it be the content creator’s job to determine the proper rights management controls (I’m not advocating blanket DRM rights here).

  Transferring the control to AT&T at the network level is kind of like letting the highway maintenance and DOT workers enforce speed limits.

  As for what traffic gets to use AT&T’s networks…its plays out the same way. We don’t let DOT workers determine which vehicles are acceptable for highway use, again that’s for law enforcement to manage.

• [Absent]

  The UK government is considering forcing ISPs to filter out illegal file sharers unless they can come up with voluntary scheme themselves.

  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/09/lord_triesman_copyright_interview/

• [danegeld]

  It should illegal to send any encrypted data, unless the encrypted stream contains the session key encoded with AT&T’s and the NSA’s public key, so that they can decrypt any given stream and check it for copyrighted content or terrrrism.

  That whole “presumption of innocence” and “free speech” thing is a load of liberal bulls**t anyway.

  The best thing is, these schemes are already in existance. Google “differential work factor cryptography”

  http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5764772-claims.html

• [Jeff]

  ATT must think there is a good reason to do so, and hopes to make money for its share holders. It’s capitalism at its best. It’s a mean jungle out there where preditors lurk in the shadows, waiting to eat you alive. We’ll see who survives.

• [Riblets]

  Back at the Boardroom

  CEO:”Alright, so how can we regain mass media control over the internet like we had before people could generate their own content and share it online? The internet is just utter chaos and it needs to be cleaned up.”

  RIAA:”I’ve got a great idea, you break up piracy and you’ll be able to gain the control you’re looking for!”

  hugs and kisses ensue.