AT&T Granted Patent to Block all Online Piracy

Details of a patent filed by AT&T have recently emerged for a system designed to stop online piracy in its tracks.AT&T Spying
The latest version of the patent described as "Real-time content detection in ISP transmissions" which has been filed by AT&T, proposes continuous monitoring of all data transmitted, in an effort to block any online transfer of illegal content in real time.

Various details are included in the patent as to how this is intended to work and it would seem that an online data analyser will examine the traffic at ISP network level, recording data source, destination, size, frequency of transmission, and any other information relevant to a particular transfer.

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Pattern recognition routines will examine the data heuristically for digital fingerprints or computed hash values of pre-identified content.

The patent also discuss potential actions on discovering potentially infringing content including terminating the transfer, termination of a users account, and reporting "the existence of the matching data traffic flow transmission to an interested party".

It's not clear from the documentation if the phrase "interested party" is referring to copyright holders, authorities, or both.
What this patent does make very clear though is that instead of reactive responses to individual requests from copyright holders and the authorities, AT&T is obviously considering options to proactively scan and police all Internet users' data that passes through their servers despite the associated privacy concerns.

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The drawings below give some insight into how the system works and the full patent, granted on May 29th, can be viewed online here at the US Patent Office's website.
AT&T Patent Drawing Figure 1
AT&T Patent drawing

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