Would AT&T be liable under Zucker’s plan?

Steve Safran October 4th, 2007

If Jeff Zucker had his way and AT&T filtered its pipes for copyrighted material, AT&T might actually become liable for that content. LR commenter Amanda in the post below points us to a section of US copyright law (USC 17 Chapt. 5 § 512) that says:

(a) A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, … for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider’s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider… if - (2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider; (3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person; … (5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.

A layman’s read of that says that ISPs aren’t liable for copyright violations, as long as they don’t start messing with content. I’ll let the lawyers tell me if Amanda’s suggestion is way off base. I just thought it was an interesting point worth bringing to your attention.