In a move that has executives from movie studios and record labels grinning from ear to ear, AT&T has announced that it will develop and deploy technology that will attempt to keep pirated content off its network. The move is spurred in part by the company’s decision to offer IPTV television service as part of its U-Verse package, AT&T senior VP James W. Cicconi told the Los Angeles Times.
The first step for AT&T is coming up with a technological solution that works: something that can effectively filter out illicit traffic while protecting its users’ privacy. That’s a tall—if not impossible—order. YouTube hasn’t managed to do it even for video yet, and that’s when customers are sending them entire files which they can scan at their leisure. Monitoring all the files sent through BitTorrent—which splits them into tiny pieces—could be even more difficult; doing it in real-time sounds both expensive and impossible.
I agree that the industry should be able to protect its interests and income but I do think it is going a bit to far in trying to control the use and ownership of audio and video content and the effect is has on their customers, namely us.