[ NNSquad ] Re: Speculation, how AT&T can implement "copyright filtering" without wiretapping/dpi...

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

As I understand it, this list was formed in reaction to Comcast being 
caught red-handed ... engaging in responsible network management. If 
it's meant to be a piracy rights forum, I was mislead.

It's important, I think, for us to distinguish legitimate and 
illegitimate forms of traffic control, as well as to identify the 
innocent victims of over-zealous enforcement of copyrights and all that.

Large-scale piracy is a problem that cries out for a technical solution. 
The problem is too blatant to ignore and we all bear the costs of it. If 
half of residential broadband's capacity is devoted to stolen material, 
cleaning up these networks makes more available to the rest of us at 
lower cost. It can only help, as long as it's done right.

The EFF argued with me at NN2008 that pirates would resort to crypto and 
all that to avoid detection, but that bird doesn't fly. In order to 
collude with someone you don't know to pirate MS Office, you need a 
rendezvous system of some kind, If that system is heavily cloaked to 
avoid detection it will be ineffective. The movement of piracy toward 
cloaked systems actually serves the aims of the content owners even 
better than immediate blocking or post-hoc prosecution. They want this 
sort of thing not to happen at all, naturally, but are willing to accept 
that a certain amount is unavoidable.

The level of piracy we have today with Mininova, The Pirate's Bay and 
their kin is so blatant we can't really expect the content owners to do 
nothing about it.

RB

Edward Almasy wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2008, at 4:32 AM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> > There is a risk of unfair shut-offs, but it's very, very small and 
> > can be dealt with after the fact in some reasonable way.
>
> I would suggest that the very existence of NNSquad belies this 
> argument.  It's likely that few if any on this list are spammers, 
> however most here have been directly affected in one fashion or 
> another by anti-spammer measures, and I would suspect many of us are 
> here in part because of the prospect of similar unfair measures being 
> introduced.
>
> Ed