At the Tech Policy Summit in Los Angeles, MPAA CTO Jim Williams called on ISPs to install filters in their pipes, arguing that it was in their own best interest. Furthermore, Williams said that ISPs ought to start filtering content not just to please the movie studios, but for their own bottom lines. Filtering will "unclog the Internet," Williams said, and eliminate "a bunch of freeriders that are hogging bandwidth."

Williams' comments came in the wake of comments from Verizon CTO Richard Lynch, who admitted that the ISP does use a blacklist to stop access to child porn sites. Williams seized on that point. If Verizon truly isn't willing to police the Internet, why will it blacklist certain sites? Copyright concerns and child porn aren't quite on the same level, but Verizon's willingness to control access to certain kinds of content predictably leads others with content concerns to demand a similar sort of treatment.

We know this issue is on the minds of copyright owners (see our lengthy chat with NBC Universal's Rick Cotton, for instance), but Williams' remarks illustrate just how high a priority ISP filtering is to the movie business. When asked how he would rewrite the DMCA if he could go back in time and do so, Williams had no hesitation: he would "like to see some sort of encouragement to ISPs to do something about mass, indiscriminate reproduction of copyrighted works."

Williams stressed that he's not against P2P. The studios love P2P as a technology because of what it could mean for them: a cost-effective method of selling high-def content to consumers without the need to pay for huge bandwidth bills and server farms. But he does argue that "much of the Internet is being clogged up with stolen goods" and "you find that almost all P2P traffic goes away if you turn on copyright filters."

A cat-and-mouse game

After his talk, I asked Williams about issues involved in filtering P2P content, especially with encrypted content. He noted that it was still possible, though because the data is encrypted, the filtering software needs to do extra work (such as joining a BitTorrent swarm in order to gain access to the encryption keys) rather than being able to peer directly at the traffic passing over the wire. Williams did admit, though, that it was a "cat-and-mouse" game, one that might spawn a P2P arms race but that could still put a dent in piracy, especially of the casual kind.

For a hint of how this might play out, we need only consider Canada, where several of the major ISPs throttle P2P traffic. Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's president, told me that his company has ways to bypass such restrictions but that it's a constant game of tweaking. As BitTorrent makes changes, the ISPs respond, leading BitTorrent to make more changes. We've also seen Vuze in the US adopt encryption of its legitimate P2P downloads in part as a way of avoiding Comcast's upload throttling. Widespread ISP filtering would certainly lead to similar see-saw battles.

Verizon wants no part of such battles, as Lynch reiterated that the ISP remains committed to an open Internet. In addition to throwing open Verizon Wireless' data network to more devices and applications, Lynch stressed yesterday that Verizon has no interest in being a content "policeman."

Education and personal responsibility

Jim Davis, the CIO of UCLA, said that based on what was happening on his campus, the best approach seemed to be a combination of education, personal responsibility, and action against repeat offenders. The school takes its mission to educate its students seriously and it wants to create ethical adults who act out of their own sense of what's right. To that end, UCLA educates incoming students about what is and is not appropriate but has no interest in technological filters running somewhere in its network. It also targets repeat offenders with increasing sanctions.

YouTube's chief counsel, Zahavah Levine, also stressed the need for digital media education. While YouTube does employ audio and video filtering systems, these can flag copyrighted content but can't help educate users about proper behavior. This leads to "a lot of nasty e-mails from users" when content is taken down, she said. Some users think that because they bought a CD or DVD, they have the right to upload parts of it to YouTube; others think that the footage they took on a cell phone camera at a concert is theirs to do with as they please and that they can upload band performances.

Good ideas, all of them, but calls for "education" are unlikely to be enough for content owners, who see a clear and present danger. Education, whatever its merits, takes time.