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AT&T and Anti Piracy Measures

By Robert | January 9, 2008

AT&T is again in the news and again linked to types of interferences in user’s Internet activity. This time we are talking about piracy. It is a very big problem for music companies and movie studios and we are dealing with different copyright infringement suits filed daily. Even the big companies are affected. Google was even accused of helping pirates to distribute copyrighted material and Viacom filed an amazing $1 billion dollars lawsuit against the company because of distributing video clips that were not authorized via YouTube. At the moment it does seem like the company is trying to stop piracy on their streaming movie web site but it can not be as accurate as expected by producing companies.

Now we are seeing an announcement by AT&T and their wish to take it even further than YouTube is when talking about anti piracy moves. They want to put in such measures at the level of the Internet Service Provider. The company is considering utilizing technology manufactured by Vobile that will prevent users of their network to distribute and even view different copyrighted material illegally.

Also, this new system could force customers to watch only works from studios in a determined way and this means the studios would get income from that. On the other hand we are dealing with a problem here because this could mean an invasion of privacy for customers. AT&T is walking a very thin line and we might see users changing ISP because of the aggressiveness with which they handle anti piracy and peer to peer traffic. On the other hand the company claims that they do not want to invade privacy but aim towards cutting down network traffic. The problem is that users are not seeing it this way. If someone feels their privacy is invaded they will surely get rid of the contract with AT&T and switch to a different provider.

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