AT&T and Other I.S.P.’s May Be Getting Ready to Filter

For the last 15 years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.

At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/

It would be pretty simple just to encrypt all BitTorrent packets, then the ISP would have no way of knowing what's inside them. I know some ISPs are trying to block or limit all file-sharing traffic, but that is also pretty easy to get around. I'm betting they are just doing this because they are under pressure from RIAA, etc, and they have to look like they are doing something, no matter how ineffective.

They already do. I have a friend who received a Cease&Desist letter from their ISP, after accidentally allowing software to be shared via BitTorrent, for about 5 minutes.

sleazier than pig slime mother fuckers.

but everyone else can use any of a hundred ways around that silly crap. Doesn't take a geek or hacker anymore to beat the gov and big business heheh

Copy protected product will not be distributed as widely as non-copy protected product.

For new listeners non-copy protected music distribution over the internet seems to have taken the place of radio and cassettes. When I was a kid we listened to the radio and traded cassettes, and if we liked the music we bought the LP. Now mp3's have taken the place of radio and cassettes, and my kids actually do buy CDs or iTunes of music they like, but they won't buy anything if they haven't listened to it first.

Most of my own music collection is on CDs that I rarely touch because all my music is on my hard drives. The rest of my music was purchased without copy protection from places like magnatune or from the artists themselves.

Anybody here paid for a desktop web browser lately?

I used to pay $35 for Opera, but that wasn't a successful business model when other good browsers were available for free. In fact I used to buy quite a bit of software -- I have dusty old boxes of the stuff in my garage -- but I don't anymore.

Now I use Open Source software for most everything, and I think it would actually be painful for me to buy software in a box from Office Depot, Best Buy, or some place like that. What if I bought software that was fundamentally irritating to me in some way? You can't return an open box. With Open Source software there are no worries about downloading it and checking it out. But if I downloaded some pirated copy of Windows XP or Microsoft Office I would be breaking the law, so I don't. Linux and Open Office do what I want them to do with no worries.