You have to hand it to AT&T. When they have a good technology, they try to leverage it. Whether using their sophisticated gear to spy on Americans on behalf of the National Security Agency, or to spy on Americans on behalf of big Hollywood studios and record companies, AT&T is there. As the Los Angeles Times reported, AT&T is starting to develop "anti-piracy" technology in conjunction with the studios and record companies.
If only they could use that vast technological empire for good instead of for... well, never mind. Won't happen. Moreover, whatever computing power AT&T has to intercept and monitor all those calls won't be enough for it to do an effective job of watching the backs of the big movie and recording companies.
In the ideal world of the producers of content, everything copyrighted would have some sort of digital marker, so that if that marker popped up, the bad little bits could be tagged and some poor miscreant carried away to the lock-up. That alone will be a monstrous job, considering all the traffic that AT&T carries.
Even if AT&T's super-spying software, NSA version or something new, picks up copyrighted material, and then automatically generate a notice about a perceived illegality, the possibility exists that the use of the transmitted material is perfectly legal. Simply because a use of copyrighted material is "unauthorized" does not make its use illegal. There are limitations to copyright law, known as fair use, that do not require the copyright owner's permission before use of a work. Many of the users of YouTube who have posted short clips of main-stream media's works have done so using their fair use rights, for reasons of criticism, comment, education, and news reporting.
Those might be mere details to such a monitoring organization that can track the billions of bits that flow over its network each day, but to real people making perfectly good use of a song or video clip, the trouble and disruption AT&T will cause could be immense. Will it go after two people sharing a song? Will an online film discussion group looking at a clip of a movie be tagged for a raid by the content cops, even if the clip was never meant for public viewing because the film clip is copyrighted?
At the heart of AT&T's new scheme is the misbegotten notion that its interests are becoming more closely aligned with Hollywood, and so the company decided to help Hollywood protect its content. Specifically, AT&T met with Viacom and other studios, and Viacom was quoted in the story praising AT&T's efforts. This is the same Viacom that filed the $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google and YouTube, and the same Viacom that backed down when confronted over a lawsuit when the studio told YouTube to remove a parody of the Colbert Report.
All of these threats and orders to remove content and take-down notices are a very messy business. Try an online search for words like "mistaken," "takedown," "notices" and the like and you see the lines are not clearly drawn. Mistakes have been made and will be made.
(If a Web site like YouTube wants to develop better means of responding to complaints about its site, that's a different story. They are upholding their responsibility under the law to take down copyrighted material after a complaint. Even then, though, the software will only be able to tag what's copyrighted -- not what's allowed.)
AT&T has yet to realize that it should be more concerned about its customers and their needs than about Hollywood and its demands. Customers should be in control of they use the network, not the company providing the "series of tubes." When former AT&T Chairman Ed Whitacre made his famous threats about how companies like Google and Yahoo! wouldn't use his network "for free," he forgot that it wasn't Google and Yahoo! pulling down the content. It was his customers, who pay the company every month for the privilege.
It's easy for AT&T to be the bully in this instance because our national broadband market is such a disgrace. Customers displeased with AT&T's operations have little choice of a competitor. In an ideal world in which there was more customer choice, perhaps AT&T would stop fighting against a free and non-discriminatory Internet and instead focus on providing the services that customers want.
But in our current environment, in which we in the U.S. pay more money for less Internet speed than do consumers in many other parts of the world, and in which there is so little competition, there's not a happy Hollywood ending in sight.