NBC U Calls for Net Piracy Crackdown

Media Giant to FCC: Forget Net Neutrality

By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 6/15/2007 5:02:00 PM

NBC Universal said Friday that the U.S. government must crack down on Internet copyright infringement by ordering broadband-access providers to help stem the tide of pirated content.

“The [Federal Communications Commission] should make unmistakably clear, as part of its regulations governing broadband-industry practices, that broadband-service providers have an obligation to use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband capacity to transfer pirated content, especially when such use represents huge percentages of their capacity and reduces the quality of service to other subscribers,” NBC U said, protesting what it described as rampant content piracy by no more than 5% of users.

NBC U’s comment came in the opening round of FCC comments designed to inform the agency on whether cable, phone and other providers of high-speed-Internet access use their gatekeeper status in ways that would justify adoption of so-called net-neutrality regulation.

Instead of focusing on net neutrality and its “polarizing rhetoric,” NBC U said the FCC should its leverage to punish the hijacking of intellectual property.

“It is inconceivable that the U.S. government would stand by mutely and permit any other legitimate U.S. business to be hijacked in this fashion. Would the government permit Federal Express or UPS to knowingly operate delivery services in which 60%-70% of the payload consisted of contraband, such as illegal drugs or stolen goods? The answer is no, and it should be no different for the Internet,” NBC U said.

The FCC could, NBC U added, require cable broadband providers to forward “notices to customers who have been identified as infringers” or use “increasingly sophisticated bandwidth-management tools as and when they come online.”

In the FCC filing, NBC U said that in 2005, Internet movie piracy alone led to a $20.5 billion reduction in total annual output by the affected industries, including $6.1 billion in “direct losses” by the motion-picture studios.

“A failure by the [FCC] to mandate the deployment of such measures is bad public policy -- bad for legitimate businesses, bad for the networks that comprise the Internet and bad for law-abiding consumers who are being deprived of the Internet access they have paid for,” the media giant added.