I am sure this isn’t going to be a surprise to some. but as a citizen of the internet I have a duty to pass along information such as this. Looks like ISP’s are going to be filtering copyrighted content through their routers before even hits your home.
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.
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.
“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.
Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.
[From AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog]
This is just outrageous! Not that I, or anyone else, besides the government (coughNETNEUTRALITYcough) can do anything about it. I know that AT&T has filtered content before this and with other big companies onboard we might be seeing this much more widespread.
The future looks bleak my friends.
This is obscene. They can’t possibly track everything even if they tried. Of course, protecting their interests are important but not at the cost of *my* privacy.