Since AT&T is already monitoring your phone, I guess it’s no surprise that AT&T may not be a good refuge from those who are trying to dump Comcast for their throttling of online traffic:
AT&T Inc. may begin monitoring traffic over its online network in an effort to stamp out theft of copyrighted material, its chief executive said Wednesday….
“It’s like being in a store and watching someone steal a DVD. Do you act?” Stephenson asked.
The problem is that, it’s not exactly the same. If someone walks into Wal-Mart and takes something without paying, that’s obviously stealing. There isn’t anything in Wal-Mart that you can just walk away with for free.
However, if you take something off of the internet without paying, that may be perfectly fine. Even if something is copyrighted, downloading it might be fine if it’s under fair use or if the copyright holder gives permission or doesn’t care.
Copyright law has always put the burden of stopping copyright infringement on copyright holders themselves. While AT&T has to do something about copyright infringement when notified, they don’t have to do anything about it otherwise (and in fact, some may argue that they can’t do anything about it).
Also, this would seem to put ISPs in legal jeopardy when they aren’t supposed to be. What happens if NBC demands that Time Warner filter and they refuse? Or Time Warner filters, but not as strictly as NBC wants? In theory, Time Warner should be protected since they have no obligation to actively look for copyright infringements. However, if they go into an agreement with NBC to do just that, and NBC thinks they suck at it, can they then sue Time Warner?
And, of course there is the issue of whether their monitoring of all of your traffic is legal to begin with.
Theoretically how it would work is AT&T would sniff packets and block anything that was infringing. My issue with this is that, it’s going to have to be pretty specific on what it’s sniffing, or else it might block both illegal torrents of Heroes as long as those streaming episodes of Heroes that you can legally download from places like Netflix. However, if it’s that specific, then it’s a lot more work for the ISPs - and a lot easier for downloaders and torrent makers to get around them. And I haven’t even gotten into encrypted traffic yet.
And, of course, there’s the issue that if the government asked for internet records like they have for phone records, AT&T would already have it and could just hand it over.
To my delight/horror, apparently Microsoft said they opposed this idea at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. I’m not sure what to think about me and Microsoft agreeing on something.
