Big ISP’s and Content Providers Discuss Network Copyright Filtering

Its on Drudge and CNET and a few other places today, and the Net Neutrality Zealots are popping aneurysms over the possibility that technology might be developed to prohibit the illegal transfer of copyrighted materials over the Internet.

From the Times here:

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

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.

Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.

Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, who has led the company’s fights against companies like YouTube for the last three years, clearly doesn’t have much tolerance for that line of thinking.

“The volume of peer-to-peer traffic online, dominated by copyrighted materials, is overwhelming. That clearly should not be an acceptable, continuing status,” he said. “The question is how we collectively collaborate to address this.”

The technology to detect this type of information already exists in the form of high speed IDSes or content filters at proxy gateways. However, most devices like that are supposed to be geared toward protecting the network from malicious activity such as viruses, worms or malware. And most ISP’s do some sort of filtering along these lines already, so if you have a debilitating fear that someone is looking at your digital packets, you should go ahead and disconnect from the Internet now. News flash: Its already happening.

The problem at this point is that there are no databases of digital fingerprints of copyrighted works, or if they exist, they are proprietary and reside at places such as YouTube who have copyright filtering in place. Without such a comprehensive database it is impossible to detect and take any action on the copyrighted material in an automated fashion. Oh sure, the ISP can manually intercept the transmissions and see the copyrighted material, but its time and labor intensive.

What the industry should do is collaborate and create a comprehensive database of copyrighted material signatures and digital fingerprints and pay broadband companies to place “Copyright Detection Systems” on the network. Those engines report violations directly to the copyright holders, and the copyright holders can take whatever action in a civil manner that they deem necessary, such as lawsuits or reporting criminal activity.

They certainly shouldn’t interrupt dataflows.  And home users should get comfortable with using more encryption.