Wednesday, June 13, 2007

AT&T To Police Internet For Copyright Infractions:

AT&T, one of the nation's largest ISPs and internet backbone providers, is now working with Hollywood and the recording industry to create a network-based solution to police copyright infringement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It's not clear if AT&T is planning this content filtering technology only for its broadband and dial-up customers, or if it intends to screen all of the packets crossing its backbone network and delete the ones it considers to be copyright infringing.  It's also unclear how AT&T is going to be able to tell the difference between fair use -- say someone streaming their home MP3 collection to their computer at work from someone downloading a song from an unauthorized MP3 blog.

One thing is pretty certain, AT&T is no stranger to deep packet inspection of innocent Americans' internet usage. It's got the architecture, now it just needs to write add copyright rules to its "terror" rules.

6:55 PM