AT&T to censor the Internet

[<rms () computerbytesman com>]

Looks like AT&T is going to implement its own version of the Great Firewall
of China.

 

Richard

 

=========================================================================

 

Via Slashdot:

 

http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi-piracy13jun13,1,402794.st
ory?coll=la-headlines-pe-business

AT&T to target pirated content

It joins Hollywood in trying to keep bootleg material off its network.

By James S. Granelli, Times Staff Writer
June 13, 2007 

 

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to
keep pirated films, music and other content off its network - the first
major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and
record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the
most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice
president.

The nation's largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates
the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its
customers and those of other providers.

As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized
that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in
an interview Tuesday. The company's top leaders recently decided to help
Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.

"We do recognize that a lot of our future business depends on exciting and
interesting content," he said.

But critics say the company is going to be fighting a losing battle and
angering its own customers, and it should focus instead on developing
incentives for users to pay for all the content they want.

Few doubt that piracy is a significant problem. The major U.S. studios lost
$2.3 billion last year to online piracy and an additional $3.8 billion to
bootleg DVDs, according to industry statistics. AT&T can help only with the
online losses, which the industry said were growing faster than those from
counterfeit DVDs.

Cicconi is in Los Angeles to talk at the Digital Hollywood Summit conference
in Santa Monica this morning and hopes to discuss the initiative there.

Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom Inc., its Paramount
movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start
devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or
Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission.

Cicconi said that once a technology was chosen, the company would look at
privacy and other legal issues.

"We are pleased that AT&T has decided to take such a strong, proactive
position in protecting copyrights," Viacom said in a prepared statement.
"AT&T's support of strong anti-piracy efforts will be instrumental in
developing a growing and vibrant digital marketplace and will help ensure
that they have a steady stream of great creative content to deliver to their
consumers."

But public interest groups are wary.

"The risk AT&T faces is fighting the last war by spending money and energy
plugging an old hole in the wall when new ones are breaking out," said Fred
von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
The San Francisco digital-rights organization has sued AT&T, alleging it
illegally released customers' phone data to the federal government.

Technology is putting unlimited copying power in the hands of consumers, Von
Lohmann said, so the answer to piracy can't be trying to stop them from
making copies. 

"The answer should be to figure out how to turn them into paying customers,"
he said.

AT&T's decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a
digital rights advocacy group. 

"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make
customers angry," she said. "The good news for AT&T is that there's so
little competition that where else are the customers going to go?"

Verizon Communications Inc., which has fiercely guarded the privacy of its
customers, has refused so far to offer a network anti-piracy tool. It
defeated in court the recording industry's demands to reveal names of those
allegedly involved in downloading pirated songs.

In mid-March, executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Assn. of America
separately approached Cicconi with the idea of a partnership. Content
providers have long looked for a network solution to piracy, but no operator
had been willing to join with them.

Efforts to date have focused on filtering and other technologies at the end
of uploads and downloads of pirated material, but those have largely failed.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America has engendered a barrage of
criticism for its efforts at suing people who download copyrighted songs
illegally and who trade in bootleg music CDs.

"They've tried the whack-a-mole approach, and I don't think they're
winning," Cicconi said.

  _____  

james.granelli () latimes com

 

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