Back in 2007, NBC lawyer Rick Cotton issued a statement to the FCC demanding they force ISPs to take action against piracy for the sake of the American corn farmer. According to Cotton, piracy was becoming such a menace it was keeping people out of theaters, in turn resulting in less popcorn sold. Cotton’s logic was back on display this week as the attorney spoke in Washington at a press roundtable outlining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual property agenda. This time, Cotton equated the trading of copyrighted movies and TV shows to a “tidal wave” and “virus” while seemingly embracing ISP filters:

“The ISP community is coming to that recognition,” he said. “We need them to be authorized to take those measures. The specific techniques they use are the second part.” When asked about whether filtering web content would violate web users’ privacy, he said, “Does a virus filter violate privacy?”

With a Comcast acquisition of NBC in process, not too surprisingly consumer groups quickly slapped Cotton in a statement claiming his comments were “unconstitutional and anti-consumer,” while noting that trying to install filters that could detect fair use of a copyrighted file would be impossible. Public Knowledge also didn’t much like Cotton’s virus refernece:

“It is simply ridiculous on any number of levels to compare filtering for copyright to viruses. ISPs are technically able to tell what is a harmful virus and what is not, unlike the situation for copyright content, which may be used legally. Viruses are a danger to the ISPs network, and it is in their best interest to protect against them.”

Cotton subsequently denied to Multichannel News that he was even calling for ISP filters, and that neither Cotton nor the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center he chairs were “addressing the question of what technique specifically should be adopted” by ISPs. As most people know, filters are expensive, depend on hardware that can’t always identify content properly, raise privacy issues, and most users would find a way around them anyway.

Instead, what the entertainment industry and ISPs have hashed out in private is a model whereby P2P users are threatened with account disconnection. As has been the case for years, the entertainment industry’s intelligence gathering outfits identify users trading copyright files, then send a DMCA warning letter to the ISP, who then forwards that letter to the users. What’s changed lately is that ISPs have agreed to subsequently threaten those users with account termination, though as we’ve noted in some cases the ISPs appear to be bluffing – wanting to keep the entertainment industry off their back, but not lose paying customers.

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