Will AT&T Be Reading Your Mail?

According to the New York Times AT&T is considering scanning your emails and internet transmissions for inappropriate content. Ostensibly for the purpose of curtailing illegal downloading, I have a difficult time believing it will stop there. Once the system is in place, I see this bagman for the RIAA and MPAA moving up the ladder to hitman, with its first contract being Net Neutrality. Strangely, some companies believe a free and open Internet is not necessarily the best vehicle for a fleecing of biblical proportions.

While such a proposal is obviously horribly bad for consumers, it may not be all that great for ATT&T shareholders either. According to Slate.com, Title 17 of the United States Code, Section 512, insulates AT&T from liability for copyright infringement, but only so long as AT&T does not "select" the material it chooses to transmit. Moving itself outside of this rather broad "safe harbor" could expose AT&T to hundreds of millions of dollars in potential liability.

In classic doublespeak, AT&T asserts the goal of the program would be to make "more content available to more people in more ways going forward." Strange. Sounds a lot like the utterly ridiculous pay-more-get-less palaver so prevalent in the Net Neutrality debate. Don't worry though, according to James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T, the ISP behemoth is apparently committed to "figure out a friendly way to do it." With friends like that ...

Brett Trout

ATT RIAA MPAA

MPAA PWNED

Origins of the Word
Sorry. My kid gets to say "pwned" all the time (usually when I take up the controller against him on Madden) and it just looks like so much fun. According to Slashdot, Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett has just slapped the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) upside the head with the DMCA, making the term pwned singularly apropos.

Such Noble Intentions
The MPAA, intent on bring Hell's wrath down upon unwary university students, developed a program which monitors university computers. The program ostensibly tracks students illegally downloading movies. According to the Washington Post, however, the software apparently does a lot of other nasty stuff as well, not the least of which is opening up university computers to anyone on the Internet.

You Were Serious About That?
Intent on suing everyone using its copyrighted material without payment, the MPAA created its new University Toolkit. The irony is that the MPAA created this new software using other people's copyrighted material without paying for it. Since the software code used was under GNU GPL license, the MPAA had a right to use the software without paying for it, but only if the MPAA let everyone know what changes it made to the software.

How Many Lumps Do You Want?
Apparently, the MPAA's license enforcement against poor college student division is so busy that it conscripted all personnel from its license compliance division (word on the street is that the remnants of the license compliance division will soon be merged in to the Do-what-we-say-not-what-we-do division). Software developer Matthew Garrett, upset over the MPAA's flagrant copyright infringement, sent a Take Down Notice to the MPAA'a internet service provider, which resulted in the University Toolkit link being removed from the MPAA website.

Too bad the link got shut down; I would have loved to have heard the MPAA arguments as to why it does not have to abide by the copyright laws it wants to sue everyone else over.

Brett Trout

MPAA Ubuntu RIAA Linux Matthew Garrett