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100% Cotton - September 25, 2008

Lots of "wassup?" "why now?" speculation about the appears of Arts+Labs, the new "advocacy group" unveiled in New York this week involving NBC Uni, Viacom, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, AT&T and the Songwriters Guild of America. Saul Hansell at the New York Times thinks it might have something to do with filtering, given the group's endorsement of giving network operators "the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers,"(not a bad guess).

Wired sees a link to the FCC's anti-throttling ruling against Comcast. "The creation of the lobbying group came almost two months after the Federal Communications Commission issued an open invitation to ISPs to filter for unauthorized copyright material. The Aug. 1 invite was buried in the text of the FCC's stinging rebuke of Comcast for throttling BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic," David Kravets writes on the Threat Level blog.

The origins of the group are no mystery, though. Neither is its agenda.

The charter members of Arts+Labs are pretty much the same crew NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton rounded up at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January to start beating the drum in time for filtering. From our story of Jan. 10:

Over sandwiches on the show floor with reporters, NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton insisted that currently available technology can effectively keep unauthorized copyrighted content from being redistributed on UGC platforms.

“You have technology in the market today that is viable, commercially reasonable and accepted by leading UGC operators with trivial, trivial levels of false-positives,” Cotton said. “Microsoft has been using filtering for over a year on Soapbox and they’ve had very, very few cases of false positives. We’ve been providing our content to YouTube for their filtering system and we haven’t seen any problems.”
[...]
The debate over is likely to grow keener as Internet backbone providers like AT&T look to go beyond merely filtering of unauthorized content from specific applications like YouTube, to preventing it from traversing the Internet at all.

“Too many people have tended to view piracy as just a problem for copyright owners, but it affects our company and our customers, too,” AT&T senior VP for legal and external affairs Jim Cicconi said at the briefing with Cotton. “It’s a burden to our network—by and large it’s uncompensated traffic—it burdens our others customers because it slows down the network. It’s really a burden to the whole Internet ecosystem.”

As for why now, check out this interview with Cotton on CNet. Cotton, who was instrumental in crafting NBC's policies regarding the use of footage from the Summer Olympics, thinks the network has found the secret to containing the unauthorized redistribution of content over the Web.

From CNet:

The company is seeing unprecedented success at removing unauthorized videos posted to the Web and cited last month's Olympic Games and the recent SNL skit with actress Tina Fey as proof. More than 99 percent of all the Internet video views of the Olympic Games in Beijing were watched on NBC.com or NBCOlympics.com as opposed to on the likes of YouTube or Dailymotion, according to Rick Cotton, NBC's general counsel.
[...]
According to Cotton, at the forefront of NBC's success at fighting piracy is technology. Many in the tech community had told NBC that trying to block digital content from being swapped online was a waste of time, he said.
[...]
The ability of YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh, and Microsoft's Soapbox to track unauthorized clips and automatically remove them is the game changer, according to Cotton.

NBC believes it has the secret sauce. Now it wants to share the recipe with everyone--and force them to use it if necessary.

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