We have another essay from
Bennett Haselton for you to peruse.
"Last week's coverage of AT&T's newly announced "anti-piracy
initiative"
mostly downplayed the key part of AT&T's proposal,
which is filtering what their end users can access in the first place, not
finding pirates
or suing them after the fact.
Friday's Associated Press article, which was
reprinted
on many news sites
with headlines like "AT&T to Help Hollywood Track Down Internet Pirates"
and "AT&T to ID Offshore Web Pirates",
actually said only that "the effort is primarily aimed at pirates who set
up operations in other countries" --
and since you can't really "aim" at pirates in Russia and China with
anything except missiles, the
statement suggests not identifying pirates or tracking them down, but
pre-emptively blocking people
from connecting to their servers. Only the Red Herring nailed it
with their article title,
"AT&T
to Block Pirated Content"." Follow the magical URL to read the rest of Bennett's words on the matter.
