ATT Partners With Hollywood on Piracy Initiative
Jun 13, 2007
The Los Angeles Times (free sub required) and Red Herring reported yesterday that AT&T is partnering with Hollywood film studios and record labels to develop and deploy anti-piracy technology on its network, becoming the first major telecom carrier to do so. According to the LA Times, AT&T's senior executive vice president James Cicconi "said that once a technology was chosen, the company would look at privacy and other legal issues."
That hasn't stopped critics of the plan, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, from speaking out against the idea. Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn, quoted in the LA Times, says, "AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry." That same sentiment was the subject of this post on Techcrunch, where readers are already debating the initiative (check out the comments section for some of the reactions).
To hear more from both James Cicconi and Gigi Sohn, check out our free podcasts from Tech Policy Summit earlier this year. You can hear Mr. Cicconi face off with Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, and Gigi Sohn talk about digital rights management in a roundtable hosted by BusinessWeek's Steve Wildstrom.
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