There’s been several articles on sites like slashdot.org and CNN discussing attempts by companies to stop the spread of illegal downloads be it movies, music, pirated software or illegal pornography. The most recent of these was Comcast blocking BitTorrent on their cable internet network (link to story), while other providers such as Usenet services are fighting the same battle.? I think it’s only fair to divide the censorship crowd into two groups, Service Providers and Content Providers.

Service Providers are companies such as Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner, AT&T and other companies that provide internet access to users via their network. I feel that these companies are in a better legal position on censorship because they can claim that the use of specific services, such as BitTorrent, are overloading their network or violating their Terms of Service. Albeit not fair to the users that these services be blocked because some third party software vendors do use BitTorrent to distribute their applications in order to save on their bandwidth cost such as Wizards Of The Cost do with their Magic: The Gathering Online game installer. But what I think the users aren’t seeing is that even legal methods of using BitTorrent aren’t as fair as they’d seem because now Wizards of the Coast isn’t footing the bandwidth bill for distribution of their software, the Service Providers are. So as far as outright blocking of a specific protocol, Service Providers are legally within their rights.

Content Providers such as Usenet Services, Torrent Sites, File Sharing Services such as LimeWire or Morpheus on the other hand face a harder moral and legal delimma. They can’t pick and choose to censor a single area of content without opening the door for legal action from others. A perfect example is if a service decides to target and censor illegal pornography while turning a blind eye to movies, music and pirated software on their networks. It’s obvious they have the ability to stop distribution of specific content, so now what they’ve done is say indirectly that they’re OK with some illegal content on their network, just not that content which they find morally wrong.

A few months ago I canceled an account with a Usenet provider because they didn’t stop the proliferation of illegal pornography into legitimate newsgroups. So what I did as a consumer is put this Usenet provider in a tough position of censoring their content at a risk of alienating their customers and putting their business at risk or accept that albeit the content their distributing is morally wrong and in some cases illegal, that they can’t pick and choose which illegal content they’re OK with. How my provider got around this issue was their policy on the data was strictly “hands off” and allowed users to report posts that violated the terms of service and then those posts would be specifically removed.

So what’s to be done? Do we allow Service Providers to block entire protocols only because a community of users have taken to distributing illegal content with it? Can content providers still be legally immune to distributing illegal content because they’re not responsible for the data on their network?

I’m curious to hear people’s feedback on this issue.