{"id":2127,"date":"2008-01-17T11:22:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T16:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/17\/att-wants-to-read-your-mail\/"},"modified":"2008-01-17T11:22:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-17T16:22:00","slug":"att-wants-to-read-your-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/01\/17\/att-wants-to-read-your-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"AT&T wants to read your mail"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> by law professor Tim Wu (who I would like to nominate as the new Larry Lessig) and also this<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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<\/strong> filter things for copyright infringement, etc. Once they do, all bets are off.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

For more on this issue, be sure to check out the debate that the New York Times has been running<\/a> 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<\/em>, who argues that<\/a> 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<\/a>, many of which are worth reading.<\/p>\n

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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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “AT&T wants to read your mail”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}