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.
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