[NANOG] Charter Communications going to sniff traffic for advertising?

Wed May 14 22:40:42 UTC 2008

I think that a TV station cannot just digitally insert an ad into copyrighted material, as it would be considered a derivative work. .. they have approval and pay to do that. 

I wonder what the legal implications for a web page would be, I would almost assume they would be the same. 

-Patrick 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Deepak Jain" <deepak at ai.net> 
To: "Jake Matthews" <jmatthews at cia.com> 
Cc: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 3:30:42 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles 
Subject: Re: [NANOG] Charter Communications going to sniff traffic for advertising? 

> http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20461817-HSI-Charter-to-monitor-surfing-insert-its-own-targeted-ads 
> 

This is definitely taking the position that its "their" pipe and not the 
*Internet*. I can only imagine the issues that will get wrangled around 
in the courts over this. (ahem, Google, ahem). 

This is not fundamentally different than a TV station digitally 
inserting their own ads on the stadium instead of whatever is there you 
might see in person. This *seems* like a problem because most people 
only have 1 connectivity provider at a time and often few options around it. 

Regulation could address this, a differentiated service could address 
this, but this smacks of paying for a service to then get additional ads 
sent to you. (like everytime you dialed a number into your Skype for 
Pizza Delivery, they sent you to their paid-Pizza Delivery provider 
instead). 

Depending on how invasive (or effective) this gets, it has wild 
common-carrier implications. 

Deepak Jain 
AiNET 

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