p2pnet - rss feed: AT&T touts new anti-piracy policy
p2pnet.net news:- AT&T decided to risk angering its customers by throwing its lot in with the major Hollywood studios and record labels.
It, “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,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
AT&T is not only America’s largest telephone provider and ISP, it also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers, says the story.
“As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said…”
However, customers are becoming increasingly infuriated by entertainment cartel efforts to use unproven copyright infringement claims to force them into buying ‘product’.
The story has Viacom saying it’s pleased with the move, but, “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,” it has the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation) Fred von Lohmann saying.
The EFF sued AT&T, charging it illegally gave customer phone data to the federal government, and says it’s just filed newly unredacted documents, “describing a secret, secure room in AT&T’s facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers’ emails and other Internet communications”.
These include several internal AT&T documents that’ve long been available online, the EFF’s legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former senior advisor for internet technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains the evidence, says the foundation.
The answer to piracy can’t be trying to stop people from making copies, says von Lohmann in the LA Times. Rather, it should be figuring out, “how to turn them into paying customers”.
In mid-March, “executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Assn. of America separately approached Cicconi with the idea of a partnership,” says the story, adding:
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.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Los Angeles Times - AT&T to target pirated content, June 13, 2007
EFF - Secret Surveillance Evidence Unsealed in AT&T Spying Case, June 12, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
June 13th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Sung to the tune of We’re All Pals Together
June 13th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
I wonder if they will be monitoring only their customer base or everyone who uses their lines (3rd party ISPs).
June 13th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
So if I’m to understand correctly, AT&T is going to kiss up to the powers that be by spying on their own subscribers.
Didn’t something just like this happen last year?
June 17th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Isn’t AT&T the same company that said “77% of all (current release) movie leaks are from insiders?”
http://lorrie.cranor.org/pubs/drm03-tr.pdf
Why yes! It is!
So. AT&T is going to tell the MPAA that 3/4 of the movies on t3h interwebs are from it’s own people, but they are going to provide filtering services to remove those leaked files from the p2p networks.
It’s their network, so I suppose they have a right to do whatever they want with it. But talk about double-dipping. Nice work if you can get it.
Seems like it would be so much easier for the movie studios to get rid of the problem at the source. I’m in favor of executions for any movie industry person (and the direct chain of command for that induhvidual) that leaks a video. And, I fully believe the movie and music studios should make movies and music, and lock it up in a vault without releasing it. That will stop the piracy 100%. I guarantee it.