AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.
But critics say the company is going to be fighting a losing battle and angering its own customers, and it should focus instead on developing incentives for users to pay for all the content they want.
I have the Cox service. I have received multiple warnigs about pirated content, downloads totaling greater than 40Gb in less than 30 days. I only asked in both cases for any form of proof. They have no records proving that I ‘owned’ any IP address as it is dynamic and not static. They also have no proof of the volume of data I downloaded.
I also pointed out that the Ts&Cs I signed many years ago made no mention of pirated content nor data volumes.
I have been asking for a teleconference or email exchange with their “Serurity Office” for months. So long in fact that outlook send weekly emails from me repeating my request! Yea, data volumes and pirated content are security issues at Cox…..
I’ll be looking to switch service as soon as I notice my torrents slowing down. When the ISP’s are also the content providers I can only imagine the limitations on accessing non-ISP created content will increase.
Podesta: The content weenies got laughed out of court in Canada. This guy’s out of Vancouver: No registration of any sort needed.
http://isohunt.com/
Comcast user here… Wow, I have never run into the service caps or received a nastygram. I must download 50+gig a month. I have a vpn and 2-5 remote access clients, and 4-16 video streams (security cameras) running at any given time.
I must be at or near the top tier of users. Maybe it is uploads that trigger nastygrams?
34–Comcast user here. When I discovered bittorrent, I had my puter running 24/7 and was around 400GB in one month. They cut me off and reconnected after 3 days with the warning to “use less.”
I think caps are fair—just tell us what they are so we can comply. I stay below 50GB per month now, but I’m nervous. Like politicians, I think they simply don’t want to let us now whats going on as they think they have more flexibility (ie, totally positive advertising campaigns) in secrecy.
The amount of downloads allowed certainly would be a key consideration in selecting a service==where there is a choice, if it where known?
#35,
wow, had no idea you could reach that much:)
Yeah, I agree they should tell you what the limit is.
#35,36
No, that is not proper… If there are no limits in your user agreement (and as far as I know Comcast doesn’t have it), no one should even complain if you use 100% of the promissed bandwith 24/7. That is what you are paying for! And, there should never be such limits. If provider promisses some bandwidth, they should have backend able to support it.
Now to the actual danger of AT&T action: some interpretations of their statement conclude that AT&T will scan any content passing through their lines, even if it both originates and ends outside of their customer base. Danger of breaking down the Internet as it is. One by blocked content; more importantly by slowing down traffic (if they are scanning it, some delay is inevitable). Due to AT&T size, almost anything on the Internet will cross their servers in some way (just try traceroute to various locations from where ever you are…). Perfect exmple why any “traffic shaping” on the ‘net should be outlawed.
Why does it have to slow down if they are scanning? Why not do the tasks concurrently, or the scanning later?
37–I’ve never read my users agreement. If I recall, I bought Comcast as it advertised download SPEED not amount. They still give me the speed so I’m getting what I personally bargained for.
Whats funny is I asked if I could upgrade to an account with more download allowance and they said “yes” but wouldn’t tell me how much it would be.
Why are marketing VP’s paid so much?
It evolved from the general purpose UUCP architecture of that same name.