MPAA Boss Makes Case for ISP Content Filtering

creaton writes "At the annual UBS Global & Media Communications Conference yesterday, MPAA boss Dan Glickman banged on the copyright filtering drum during a 45-minute speech. Glickman called piracy the MPAA's #1 issue and told the audience that it cost the studios $6 billion annually. His solution: technology, especially in the form of ISP filtering. 'The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected ... and I think that's a great opportunity.' AT&T has already said it plans to filter content, but others may be more reluctant to go along, notes Ars Technica: 'ISPs that are concerned with being, well, ISPs aren't likely to see many benefits from installing some sort of industrial-strength packet-sniffing and filtering solution at the core of their network. It costs money, customers won't like the idea, and the potential for backlash remains high.'"

Re:Hey guys! Great Idea here...!

[AndersOSU]

Good God, how many more years will the myth that ISPs are common carriers persist?

They're not, and they don't want to be.

Re:Neat

[caffeinemessiah]

No one has told this guy about encryption yet?

This is why the recent BitTorrent lawsuit against Comcast is so important...once they realize that they can't look inside encrypted packets, they're just going to block all p2p traffic. But even that is going to be hard, because at the encrypted UDP packet level, what really distinguishes a BT packet from, say, a Skype packet which is also encrypted by default? Screw encryption, what differentiates a DRM-free MP3 flying in from iTunes or Amazon from one coming through a modified BT protocol which uses port 80 and fake http headers?

In short, this is the dumbest idea and any implementation will be necessarily half-assed and is going to affect people.

Studios' problem

[adrianbaugh]

Notwithstanding all the technical problems (which themselves are probably insuperable), Dan Glickman misses the point. He says copyright infringement costs the studios $6bn per year. But he wants the ISPs to fix the problem. I can't think of a suitably wacky analogy for the moment, but this is fundamentally not the ISPs' problem (and installing filtering would likely annoy much of their customer base). So what possible motivation do they have to spend money to fix it? (I don't see the studios offering to buy any of the necessary kit for the ISPs even though it's indubitably more in their interest to implement filtering than it is the ISPs' interest.

Re:Neat

[Fatal67]

Won't happen, at least, not in real time.

Current technology can tell whether or not it is P2P traffic, regardless of the port it uses. They can also tell if it is p2p regardless of whether it's encrypted. An encrypted p2p packet looks just like an encrypted p2p packet.

If the goal is to block p2p outright, then that is easily achievable.

If the goal is to just block copyrighted material that is illegal being transferred, it's not going to happen, today. They cannot break the encryption and run the fingerprint algorithm in real time. Not today, not publicly.

There is a way though. There is a company out there that makes a P2P cache, so to speak. It's a hardware device that sits on the network, as close as possible to the customer. All p2p traffic is directed to this device. When a new file is requested, it downloads it and maintains the copy there. The customers connections speed up and the ISP has a cleaner network.

The problem at the moment is, with the vast majority of the content available on P2P being illegal content, the ISP becomes a knowing party to the redistribution of copyrighted material. Of course, if there was a way to scan that content and remove all illegal content, then everyone wins, except the people wanting to download stuff they do not have the rights to.

I am sure there will be arguments about 'false positives' and 'copyrights shouldn't exist to begin with' and 'carrier class' and all of the usual things. But if this type of solution were to be implemented, would it be a bad thing? And why?

Re:Neat

[entropiccanuck]

As comments in that thread point out, if you don't inspect(and therefore don't know) the traffic on your open Wi-Fi then you don't have to report anything. However, should you inspect and find something obscene (however it's defined) then you have to report it.
It's a silly law, but not the 1984 nightmare some are making it out to be.