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10.05.07
Should ISPs Work With The MPAA?
 By
Dan Morrill
The MPAA is courting ISPs as a way to help them narrow down and identify people on their networks who are engaged in Illegal P2P.
This is not the P2P that allows blizzard to update their WOW clients, or using Bittorrent to grab a new Linux distro, or other legitimate P2P applications like Joost, Veoh and others.
Rather the focus is on the illegal kind, the copyrighted material that traverses the P2P networks on a daily basis.
ISPs already do some limited filtering of protocols, and network monitoring. The best example being the shaping of network traffic reported by Torrent Freak, Streamaroo and CNet all have reported how Comcast is shaping and dropping services from folks who download too much.
The idea that ISPs already do shaping and protocol monitoring to a limited extent, it should be noted though that only some ISPs do this, not all, and this kind of monitoring sets the stage for the question of what should be the policing powers invested in the ISP system. ISPs have the ability to do better policing powers and they have an excellent opportunity to monitor exactly what each person on their network is doing at any given time, legal or illegal.
However, at this point ISPs do not have a full mandate to police their networks other than making the onramp to the internet the same for everyone, with limited policing powers that the ISPs have currently and what is proposed for the future.
ISPs are not mandated to monitor customers to see where they are going by any federal or state mandate. While some ISPs use systems that can inject ISP based advertising over web site advertising, there are ways of interfering with the content that users see. There are also ways of intercepting user requested content and storing that information for all protocols.
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It makes sense for the MPAA to develop a closer relationship with the ISPs, but might not be in the customer's best interest. For now though, customers are still somewhat protected under privacy laws except in the case of government monitoring and surveillance. There are still no federal regulations on how long logs must be kept, nor what those logs should contain. The key to working with ISP logs and Anti-piracy, or even cyber crime is to keep the logs long enough with enough detail that the person can be identified, and work out a pattern of what they are accessing on the internet.
The MPAA is not law enforcement, and law enforcement is generally overworked to such a point that every case of peer to peer use is not going to be efficient in working out the legitimate against the non-legitimate. Even ISP staff, and ISP owners have to scrape by on very thin margins, so upping more staff to take care of any logging analysis requirements from the MPAA or Law enforcement means that the ISPs are going to have to raise costs.
This will be very unpopular with people who use the ISPs, rising costs in a world of commodity bandwidth means people will go somewhere else. The idea of ISP hopping is nothing new, and monitoring is generally going to be viewed as very unpopular. Most people will not purchase bandwidth from an ISP that they know is monitoring them.
The other problem is going to be putting together records from multiple ISPs, say bouncing from a Muni-Wi-Fi network, to a Starbucks hotspot, to a home network, to some open Wi-Fi system, all in an effort to get the files. The MPAA would literally have to have access to the entire global internet via the ISPs that they currently do not have access to.
The only people who have access like this is at the federal level. It would be unwise to give the MPAA via anyone that kind of information, it will not just be used for Anti-P2P, it will be repackaged, sold, and used as marketing material, much like the recent Media Defender hack has shown.
That is too much information in the hands of any commercial firm, regardless of the "need to stop piracy" is going to be bad for consumers, legitimate and those not doing legitimate things on the internet. ISPs should only work with legitimate law enforcement, under court order, and under the normal rules of evidence gathering.
Comments
About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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