AT&T Wants to Filter Traffic for Copyright Infringement
Posted by CodeWarrior in on January 10, 2008 at 5:49 PM
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1006059
AT&T Wants to Filter Traffic for Copyright Infringement
"January 10th, 2008 by Justin Ryan
The New York Times is reporting that during a panel discussion Tusday at the Consumer Electronics Show, internet service provider AT&T revealed that it has plans to begin filtering customer's internet traffic in a search and destroy mission against copyright infringement.
The discussion — which included Microsoft and NBC, among others — centered around plans to use network-level filters to discover and eliminate content that could potentially be copyright violations. AT&T revealed that it has been in talks with the RIAA and MPAA — the anti-P2P arch-fiends — for over six months to establish digital fingerprinting to prevent file sharing. According to NBC's representative "The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status."
Free speech groups were quick to point out the negative effects of network-level filtering, especially the potential for materials created under the Fair Use doctrine, including parodies, to be blocked. According to the Times, the participants — none of which are particularly noted for their free speech advocacy — were unmoved.
"
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OK Boyz and Girlz...it's high time for a good old fashion CodeWarriorz Rant, and what better place for what I am about to say than a site with the name "BOYCOTT" in the URL?
AT&T is a corporation and a business. And, as such, where does it gets its money? One would THINK that the main source of its revenue stream is from folks like me and you.
Well, to quote Howard Beale, the anchorman main character from the 1976 movie NETWORK,
"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more."
I am angry, nauseated, infuriated, frustrated, and generally pissed off that the majority of Americans, who, if they acted in a concerted fashion, could BANKRUPT AT&T by a serious boycott, don't do anything to protect their own interests.
I believe that if the ISPs start this crap of monitoring packet flow looking for alleged
copyright infringement, the actions of the RIAA and MPAA will pale in comparison.
We already know how the telecoms bent over for their government masters and gave up personal information on untold numbers of law abiding citizens.
If the proposed actions do not amount to invasion of privacy, then I'm not sure what does.
Read this :
bits.blogs.nytimes.com
"Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.
Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.
“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”
I asked the panelists how they would respond to objections from their customers over network level filtering – for example, the kind of angry outcry Comcast saw last year, when it was accused of clamping down on BitTorrent traffic on its network.
“Whatever we do has to pass muster with consumers and with policy standards. There is going to be a spotlight on it,” said Mr. Cicconi of AT&T.
After the session, he told me that I.S.P.’s like AT&T would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. “We’ve got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there’s no doubt about it,” he said."
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I am not a customer of AT&T and will never be a customer of this bunch of jerkoffs.
But, if you are, what do they have to do to finally make you echo the words of fictional
anchorman Howard Beale (portrayed by Peter Finch who died before winning his award for his excellent acting), that you too are "Mad as Hell, and aren't gonna take it any more."
I keep referring to the Beale speech because it perfectly encapsulates my feeling(s), and
I couldn't hope to doing half as good a job. Check out this page... http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork2.html
"Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take this anymore!!" "
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Well, I will make one change...I do think you (meaning consumers in general) need to take five minutes, and a forty one cent stamp, and write AT&T and let them know in NO uncertain terms, that we are ready to boycott their little company. Consumers made them, consumers gave them the money they have, and by God, consumers can BREAK them.
AT & T, nor any ISP, has no business filtering peoples service. YOU pay for that service, and you did not ask them to filter it for you...this is madness!
Who owns the infrastructure? Who owns the ISP service and the support that goes with it? Who sells the bandwidth? Who answers to the regulators?
Time for everybody to drag out the contracts they agreed to when they contracted for internet service. Read your contract and TOS. I am not a lawyer, and I am not happy with this, but they just might be on solid ground if they want to limit what you do with the bandwidth they sell you, or they want to place terms on your activities. OR they want to charge extra for it.
I am afraid this will have to go to the courts and be fought in every venue, in every instance. And, I am afraid this is the response we'll get...BOHICA.
The only recourse we'll probably have is voting with our feet, or just complying. I still say this:
STOP TRADING IN RIAA MATERIAL. STOP DOWNLOADING IT, STOP BUYING IT, STOP GIVING IT AIRPLAY. DO NOT LEGITIMIZE OR PROMOTE ITS USE IN ANY WAY.
Maybe it's time to take it one step further, and seek to boycott ANY goods and services connected to the RIAA.
Their contracts are pure rubbish to the customer. We're not versed in legalese and have you ever tried getting a company to write out a contract that a customer CAN understand and abide by? The contracts could say just about anything and customers will sign it to get the advertised service.
Aside from that though, isn't this an issue for the FCC? It seems to me that its in direct violation of network neutrality. If AT&T's filtering effort has the same result of the previous effort to filter "indecent" material from the newsgroups...the FCC should be hopping mad. The bots made a mess of things, filtering everything that remotely was indecent - including a wide variety of medical support discussion groups.
If AT&T limits its scans to digital fingerprints then the simple solution seems to be encryption. So the only people who are likely to get burned by this are people who don't adopt or are completely innocent (misidentified traffic). In this case, I'd just say boycott AT&T - everyone should have ditched them when they let the wolves spy on the sheep. At the very least, I expect to read about a class-action suit against AT&T in the very near future...
I think that customers, whether they are talking on the phone, or surfing on the net, have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the content of their communications would not be easedropped on unless there was a compelling law enforcement reason, and in the case of a phone tap for example. FISA requests, a warrant or legal document based on probable cause as to why there is a belief that a particular person is breaking serious laws.
In other words, would ANYONE think it is proper for a phone company to filter out curse words or to tattle on you for eveything you discussed in private phone conversations?
Granted, a telcom may own the hardware through which communications are facilitated, but in my mind, that fact alone is not legal justification to violate your rights of privacy.
I agree with Tinker, that this action, if carried out, begs a class action lawsuit.
Since Leflaw is a lawyer and a class action lawyer, if he sees this post, I would like to see his opinion (I always defer to Leflaw in legal matters).
As a final note, the USPS owns the post office trucks, hires carriers, but they don't have the right to routinely open everyone's mail to see if you are planning anything illegal...just as a matter of course. The Inspector General has to have probable cause that you are probably engaged in illegal activities, and it can't be just a "hunch" or a "feeling".
~Code
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Example: The foregoing is Copyright (C) 2008 by CodeWarrior. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, distribution, or repurposing without express, written permission is prohibited under Title 17 of the US Code (US Copyright Act).
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