Thomas Mennecke's interview with AT&T's Jim Cicconi, Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs (yikes!), A.K.A. "The guy who brought up the 'filtering the internet' mess at CES," is too full of enlightening peeks the mind of AT&T for me to simple pluck a single, authoritative quote. So here's a couple, sans context. In short, the AT&T position seems to be We want to filter the internet to please the content cartels, but we don't want to have any legal culpability for doing so.
“We’re not taking on a legal enforcement role,” Jim Cicconi, told Slyck.com. “We’ve been clear. We don’t feel we have a legal responsibility. We’re not doing that in a legal sense. We do recognize it’s a real problem. There are property rights involved with copyrighted content. Simply saying there’s no legal responsibility doesn’t mean we have no responsibility. We also have responsibility to our customers. [A lot] of pirated material is used to transfer viruses, malware, and things of that nature.”Not it! Not it!
There are a lot of people defending copyrighted sharing, but how many would say it’s legal and right? Cooler heads need to come together and discuss whether the internet is a zone where there are no morals or standards of content.”1. This isn't about defending the violation of copyright—it's about a government-subsidized utility snooping; 2. It is not the role of a corporation to enforce morality.
“Defending the internet doesn’t mean defending all conduct that occurs on the internet. Do we want the internet to be a civil place…or the wild west where you need to protect yourself. We have a lot of bad content [on the network]. Should we find ways to find and stop it? It’s an identical question to other illegal content.”Wild West seems to be working just fine, Jim. Unless you're saying that once AT&T starts filtering the backbone traffic we won't have to use virus scanners anymore. And if we do get a virus, we can sue AT&T for not filtering them out properly?
AT&T, P2P Filtering, and the Consumer [Slyck.com]
