Possible Copyright Filter for ISPs

[MC]

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

“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 M.P.A.A. and R.I.A.A., for the last six months about carrying out 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.”

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.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/

 

[Avenger]

Big Brother sees us.

 

[TehMuffinMan]

wouldnt this sniff out copied porno too?

we're doomed

 

[Dokutayuu]

Big Brother sees us.

Now that's goodthink. Good old Ingsoc.

I doubt it'll work. The internet is huge, you'll never be able to do it. Some nerd will always have a way to beat the system. Nice effort but I doubt it'll work.

 

[Adaptus]

I don't think it'll get through.

The industry may be losing some money, but say the porn industry hasn't flat lined yet, and porn has been readily available all over the internets pretty much the day they plugged them in, so I'm guessing they're doing alright.

I only see this angering a lot of people.

 

[MF29]

Why won't they just let us be?

 

[Avenger]

Why won't they just let us be?

Because "we" are stealing. Grand theft information.

 

[elNarr]

...And so , the censoring began and mankind had no liberty over saying what they want or do something without being observed.

Everything is being restricted soon, cool.

 

[Avenger]

@Legendary: If you were the owner of, say, a fruit store, and half of your customers started stealing their fruits rather than purchasing them, what would you do? Installing a camera in your store would obviously restrict your oh so precious liberty, along with many others', so obviously you would just let people steal.

Right?

 

[Zeonix]

If I had a fruit store, and my customers started copying my fruit, without ever actually taking them, I'd be pissed, but they aren't actually stealing my fruit. My fruit are right where I put them, and haven't been touched by anyone.

File sharing isn't stealing. Copying isn't stealing. The system was built around physically handing over items, something that isn't happening when we copy information.

 

[elNarr]

@Legendary: If you were the owner of, say, a fruit store, and half of your customers started stealing their fruits rather than purchasing them, what would you do? Installing a camera in your store would obviously restrict your oh so precious liberty, along with many others', so obviously you would just let people steal.

Right?

I did not mean that. Some of us actually aren't supporting piracy, you know.

This will go further than only the issue of getting piracy away from internet.

Here in Finland, they're going to make it possible for police to monitor everything you do if you download more than they set as the amount. This will probably happen to the rest of the world.

Then goes the porn , search engines get censored, you can think of the rest.

 

[DaRkOwNs]

heh, trust me. they wont be able to censor the internet, not without just getting rid of it altogether.

 

[elNarr]

That is correct.

They will start doing the things little by little.
I'm not talking about the "complete" censorism over internet in the next few years.

I am more like pointing out to 2030ish.
Sure, it's a long time to get there, many things will happen, but it will eventually happen.

 

[Avenger]

Zeo, it was a metaphor. Hence fruit rather than say, music. By downloading music for example, free off the internet, the vendors, artists and music companies suffer. Why wouldn't they want to stop their profits from dwindling?

Not saying that these stores and such should exist in the future, though, as it's become obvious that the Internet will likely make music-stores obsolete. I just hope they make all the music we pay for through the internet 320 kbps or FLAC quality.

 

[Zeonix]

The artists don't suffer when we copy music. The artists suffer when (not if) record labels screw them over, which is why many of them are rebelling and attempting to find new business models. Yes, record labels aren't making as much money as they used to due to backlash and the general mentality that music is free. Does that mean they're right to screw over the average consumer? Am I taking food out of their mouths? Are they going to be poor? Nah. That's why your scenario isn't applicable to this situation.

If I were to download an album, and I liked what I heard, I'd buy the album afterwards. That's my way of contributing to artists. I'd much rather donate directly to the artists in the way that I donated/exchange money for a service to Saul Williams, though. I'm not willing to give my hard earned money to a company that intends to **** me in the ass first chance they get.

 

[Rocky]

If I had a fruit store, and my customers started copying my fruit, without ever actually taking them, I'd be pissed, but they aren't actually stealing my fruit. My fruit are right where I put them, and haven't been touched by anyone.

File sharing isn't stealing. Copying isn't stealing. The system was built around physically handing over items, something that isn't happening when we copy information.

They aren't stealing your fruit, but because they now have their own copy of the fruit they don't buy yours and you're stuck with a whole lot of fruit that you can't sell.

Somewhere on the line somebody is getting screwed, whether its the artist or the record company or the music store that has a bunch of cd's that never sell.

Anyway I'm guilty of plenty of illegal downloading and I don't plan on changing anytime soon.

 

[Enix]

Well I'm no network administration expert, but my schools ISP is filtered (not client side) and we use proxy servers to get around it, I'm sure we could get around it the same way if this ever happened.

 

[sub]

It's pretty amazing if you think about it. Has there ever been a precedent for this? I mean, an entire industries product is able to be reproduced effortlessly at no cost to any would be consumer.

I'd be scarred ****less if I was in charge of one of the big four record labels. Music is becoming something that people no longer view as having monetary value. I know a lot of people on this forum would argue with me over that, but I think its fair to say that the majority of people out there are now accustomed to paying nothing for music. The big four record companies are **** out of luck, unless they can somehow weasel their way into touring revenue.

I don't know how negatively this affects artists, though. They pretty much always got ****ed over by the record industry, album sales netted them little to nothing. Artists got all of their money from touring. So the only thing that will change will be the absence of a middle man, and I don't see anything wrong with that. We're going to see ISP's attempt to block this traffic, but I don't think theres a chance in hell that they'll be able to stop pirating. It's now a culturally acceptable thing, despite what any lawyer will tell you about how wrong it is.


As for other pirated material like movies and video games, they'll both be fine. The files are too big for the problem to become as rampant as the music industries problem.

 

[Hibiki]

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/

tl;dr = "We would like to prevent 'teh warez' but there isn't any way to do that. Oh well."

This will never amount to anything and is basically a waste of time because this is just random speculation on what they would like to be able to do.

 

[MC]

tl;dr = "We would like to prevent 'teh warez' but there isn't any way to do that. Oh well."

This will never amount to anything and is basically a waste of time because this is just random speculation on what they would like to be able to do.

Comcast already does something similar to what the article discussed, what's there to stop other ISPs from doing the same?