Intellectual Property Law

Round 2: Time Warner Gets It Wrong, and the French Follow the Model

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Update: I should have read more carefully: Time Warner and Verizon confirmed they’re not going to block any Web sites. I’ve changed text below to reflect that.

Yesterday, I posted a quick analysis of the new policy (using the methodology I propose in a new draft paper) undertaken by Sprint, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable at the behest of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo: they’ll voluntarily block child porn. As more details emerge, though, I’m more skeptical about the plan. First, I held off assessing how narrow this filtering system would be (does it successfully block child porn, and only child porn?), since technical details are sketchy. But if the latest reports are to be believed, I’m ready to make a call: completely overbroad. Time Warner is going to eliminate all newsgroups by the end of the month. So, to block child porn, we’ll wipe out TW subscribers’ ability to talk about SCUBA diving, radio astronomy in India, or support for people with bipolar disorder? I think this is a great candidate for addition to the paper as an approach to filtering that is not narrow. This is, in fact, complete overkill.

Will Verizon and Sprint follow suit?

Full post as published by Info/Law on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).