But public interest groups are wary.
"The risk AT&T faces is fighting the last war by spending money and energy plugging an old hole in the wall when new ones are breaking out," said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The San Francisco digital-rights organization has sued AT&T, alleging it illegally released customers' phone data to the federal government.
Technology is putting unlimited copying power in the hands of consumers, Von Lohmann said, so the answer to piracy can't be trying to stop them from making copies.
"The answer should be to figure out how to turn them into paying customers," he said.
AT&T's decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.
"AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry," she said. "The good news for AT&T is that there's so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?"
Verizon Communications Inc., which has fiercely guarded the privacy of its customers, has refused so far to offer a network anti-piracy tool. It defeated in court the recording industry's demands to reveal names of those allegedly involved in downloading pirated songs.
In mid-March, executives at Viacom and the Motion Picture Assn. of America separately approached Cicconi with the idea of a partnership. Content providers have long looked for a network solution to piracy, but no operator had been willing to join with them.
Efforts to date have focused on filtering and other technologies at the end of uploads and downloads of pirated material, but those have largely failed.
The Recording Industry Assn. of America has engendered a barrage of criticism for its efforts at suing people who download copyrighted songs illegally and who trade in bootleg music CDs.
"They've tried the whack-a-mole approach, and I don't think they're winning," Cicconi said.
james.granelli@latimes.com
