[Infowarrior] - NBC wants more ISPs to spy on users

[Richard Forno]

NBC wants more ISPs to spy on users, reform Safe Harbor

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070618-nbc-wants-more-isps-to-spy-on-
users-reform-safe-harbor.html

By Ken Fisher | Published: June 18, 2007 - 12:14PM CT

Last week NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton argued that law
enforcement resources are "misaligned." Cotton says it's wrong to focus on
real property theft and potentially deadly crimes when cops could be out
enforcing intellectual property laws.

Cotton wasn't finished. He filed a response on behalf of NBC Universal to
the FCC's call for comments last week on the broadband industry and Net
Neutrality which says, in effect, that Net Neutrality is a waste of time.
The FCC should be focusing on... you guessed it, piracy!

Cotton had harsh words for the government's lack of involvement in shutting
down P2P and BitTorrent file sharing. "It is inconceivable that the U.S.
government would stand by mutely and permit any other legitimate U.S.
business to be hijacked in this fashion," he wrote. "Would the government
permit Federal Express or UPS to knowingly operate delivery services in
which 60-70% of the payload consisted of contraband, such as illegal drugs
or stolen goods?"

Cotton also argues that the entire Net Neutrality debate is essentially the
result of unfettered piracy online, as he cites a study which claims that
two-thirds of traffic online stems from piracy. Remove the pirates, and the
congestion disappears, he suggests.

Cotton then argued that the DMCA, whose Safe Harbor provisions make sites
like YouTube possible and also protects ISPs from piracy which occurs on
their networks, is ill-equipped to handle today's P2P threat. Service
providers apply the minimum amount of effort to meet the DMCA standard, and
sometimes even jeopardize that by failing to enforce their own user
agreements, he argued.

The only solution, in Cotton's view, is to make ISPs take action against
piracy on their networks, using any legal means necessary. "The Commission
should make unmistakably clear, as part of its regulations governing
broadband industry practices, that broadband service providers have an
obligation to use readily available means to prevent the use of their
broadband capacity to transfer pirated content," he wrote. Such efforts
could include better takedown notification practices as well as "using
increasingly sophisticated bandwidth management tools."

While Cotton didn't name AT&T in his filing, this kind of approach is
exactly what AT&T is planning to implement at the behest of the nation's
major entertainment trade groups, including the MPAA and the RIAA. Many
people consider this to be synonymous with spying, and still others object
to the notion that ISPs need to become copyright enforcement cops for the
entertainment industry. One thing is certain: there is no "anti-piracy"
switch that can be flipped. Technological means will snare innocent users
and cross into very questionable privacy grounds.

Cotton is completely correct when he asserts that Congress didn't really
know what they were getting into when they penned the DMCA. However, few in
1998 could have imagined that Congress would someday be asked to mandate
that ISPs actively filter their network traffic for copyrighted material,
yet this is precisely what Cotton seems to believe Congress should have
done.

However, we need to look no further than US colleges and universities to see
why this approach can be a big headache. College IT administrators already
see themselves as starting a costly "arms race" with pirates who are always
one step ahead of their technological tracking means.

The entire filing is available as PDF.