I must have missed it somehow — or perhaps it just didn’t sink in, because the words were just too ridiculous for my mind to comprehend — but an AT&T executive last week floated the idea of filtering everything that goes across the telecom giant’s network, according to this piece at Slate by law professor Tim Wu (who I would like to nominate as the new Larry Lessig) and also this New York Times piece. Apparently AT&T’s James Cicconi thinks that going through your virtual mail — opening every package and checking the contents — would a great idea.
It’s odd that this bizarre suggestion comes from a guy who is involved in legal affairs, since as Tim Wu points out in his Slate piece, implementing what Cicconi is talking about would undo decades of legal and regulatory history as it applies to the major telecom carriers, and open AT&T up to an almost limitless array of potential lawsuits and other legal action. At the moment, carriers are protected because they don’t filter things for copyright infringement, etc. Once they do, all bets are off.
From the sounds of it, AT&T has been talking to the record industry and the movie industry (i.e., the RIAA and the MPAA) about technology that could fingerprint copyrighted material — which brings me back to a topic I wrote about recently, in which I wondered what would happen if everything was “watermarked.” Could the telecom carrier argue that checking files for such watermarks or fingerprints wouldn’t be a violation of the common carrier principle, and therefore AT&T wouldn’t be exposed to liability? That may be what they have in mind.
For more on this issue, be sure to check out the debate that the New York Times has been running between Tim Wu and NBC lawyer Rick Cotton — which includes a proposal to redefine the concept of “fair use” — as well as an interesting post on Torrentfreak by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, who argues that piracy is often a sign of an inefficient market. The New York Times piece in which Cicconi floated the filtering idea also has about 400 comments, many of which are worth reading.