AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter (or Big Brother has arrived)

[trekgeezer]

AT&T, the people who allowed the NSA to phone tap everyone on their network without a court order and wants immunity from lawsuits over it, is now going to cave to the RIAA and MPAA.  It'll be interesting to see which other join in with them.

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

[CheezeFlixz]

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

Yep big brother is just around the counter for some, is your ISP watching you?

From Andrew:  just fixing the link

[dean]

Sure it'll probably get bad here as well, but I keep being thankful that I don't live in a country where I feel like everyone is watching me, let alone doing anything about my internet habits...

[Jack]

Doesn't really make sense to me.  The ISP's don't have any financial stake in who downloads what, they're not losing any money because of people downloading copyrighted material.  Yet if they implement filtering software, they'll anger a whole lot of customers, who will switch to a different ISP that doesn't have that software.  And if the software screws up, it will be an order of magnitude worse for them.   They'll run the risk of losing a whole lot of money for something that wasn't costing them anything in the first place.  Just to be "nice guys" and help out the record companies? 

[CheezeFlixz]

Yep I posted this story in weird news too.

Big Brother is watching you.

[nshumate]

Doesn't really make sense to me.  The ISP's don't have any financial stake in who downloads what, they're not losing any money because of people downloading copyrighted material.  Yet if they implement filtering software, they'll anger a whole lot of customers, who will switch to a different ISP that doesn't have that software.  And if the software screws up, it will be an order of magnitude worse for them.   They'll run the risk of losing a whole lot of money for something that wasn't costing them anything in the first place.  Just to be "nice guys" and help out the record companies? 

It's because new measures being discussed in Congress (at the behest of the heavyhanded RIAA) would make ISPs liable to some degree for copyright violations facilitated through their services.  If such measures pass, it would have an extreme chilling effect on ALL sorts of content being shared or downloaded, as the gunshy ISPs would shut down anything that might possibly be in violation of copyright, just to cover their asses.

[raj]

Here's a law professor's take on it:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_01_06-2008_01_12.shtml#1199939550

snippet:
" 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.

  To avoid liability, these providers probably would need to amend their Terms of Service so that users would explicitly consent to allowing their ISPs to monitor them for copyright violations."

[Jack]

It's because new measures being discussed in Congress (at the behest of the heavyhanded RIAA) would make ISPs liable to some degree for copyright violations facilitated through their services.  If such measures pass, it would have an extreme chilling effect on ALL sorts of content being shared or downloaded, as the gunshy ISPs would shut down anything that might possibly be in violation of copyright, just to cover their asses.

Yeah, I should have guessed that congress was involved.  Seems like the equivalent of the record companies filing lawsuits against the manufacturers of cassette decks because they facilitate the duplication of albums. 

[Jordan]

Yikes! I think they (the RIAA and the MPAA) are wasting more time and money on protecting their asse(t)s, than actually putting that cash towards creating good music and films.

As worrisome as all this is, I think things will work out just fine. The nerds are always one step ahead and will find someway to continue the flow of information on the web, wether the stuff being shared is copyrighted or not.