Tuesday, January 29, 2008

OT: Thinking about AT&T's Copyfighting...

On my personal blog, I have some speculation on AT&T's proposal to enforce copyright on the wire, and how it can be done cheaply, efficiently, (reasonably) precisely, without deep packet inspection/wiretapping or actually deciding what material is copyrighted, robustly, against high-volume, "open world" piracy (eg, pirated DVDs through BitTorrent which are widely available).

The observation is that a short term "notice and takedown" structure could be deployed which could target P2P piracy, should AT&T wish to cooperate with the content providers.

I don't necessarily think its a good thing, but I believe that should AT&T want to, they have significant incentives to do so, and the technological means at their disposal.

More here