ISPs in the US and the UK have to date relied on their status as carriers of information to avoid legal responsibility for traffic they carry whose content they are unaware of. AT&T may change that, though, with plans to monitor and block some traffic.
One of the company's lawyers, James Cicconi, told a panel discussion at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas of his company's plans.
"We are very interested in a technology-based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” said Cicconi, according to the New York Times. Cicconi is AT&T's senior vice president for external and legal affairs.
“We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies," he said. "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.”
Copyright law in the US and the UK offer exceptions for carriers of information, though they must act to remove copyright material being misused when informed of specific cases.
The proposal is a technical challenge and involves an ISP examining all information transmitted on its network to identify and block material it thinks is copyrighted and being used improperly.
Free speech and privacy activists oppose the examination of all of a user's ISP communications, while digital rights activists claim that filters do not take account of the exceptions from copyright legislation for fair use, including those for news reporting, criticism and review and educational use. US law has an additional exception that allows parody.
Cicconi said that the company was trying to find a solution to a problem neither its industry nor the content industry had yet solved. "What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there," he told The New York Times.
AT&T could face customer revolt if it carries through its plans, though. Comcast faced criticism last year when it was found by the Associated Press to be hindering peer to peer network traffic.
