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NBC-Universal Vice President Richard Cotton says that there is no difference between ISP filtering out viruses and asking them to also filter out copyrighted content.
Content owners are now asking ISPs to do more work in stopping online piracy, either by policing its own customers and banning those suspected of downloading pirated content, or in this case, filtering out websites and downloads where suspected piracy occurs.
The problem with this approach is that, unless an expensive monitoring system is set up where websites and downloads are sorted and flagged by experienced personnel, an automated system will likely generate false positives and block legal content along with the illegal. This is why even though ISPs can be asked to block out viruses or spam emails, there is almost always an option to opt out just in case you don't trust the ISP's blocking system.
And while blocking known viruses seems like a reasonable step to make, blocking pirated content has legal complications, since it's sometimes it is not possible to identify what is legal and illegal without going through the legal system.
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Content owners are now asking ISPs to do more work in stopping online piracy, either by policing its own customers and banning those suspected of downloading pirated content, or in this case, filtering out websites and downloads where suspected piracy occurs.
The problem with this approach is that, unless an expensive monitoring system is set up where websites and downloads are sorted and flagged by experienced personnel, an automated system will likely generate false positives and block legal content along with the illegal. This is why even though ISPs can be asked to block out viruses or spam emails, there is almost always an option to opt out just in case you don't trust the ISP's blocking system.
And while blocking known viruses seems like a reasonable step to make, blocking pirated content has legal complications, since it's sometimes it is not possible to identify what is legal and illegal without going through the legal system.
More:
