Sidecut Reports

Now that our serious work is out of the way, here’s a quick take on the non-attributed, behind-the-scenes, from-the-hallways-or-maybe-even-the-restrooms stuff we heard at the Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder last weekend:

Where’s AT&T? Too busy filtering traffic? Too bad reps from Ma Bell weren’t on hand in Boulder, since the company’s pledge to sift through all its traffic for possible copyright violations seemed to be part of every panel discussion, whether it was part of the topic or not. Since this was a conference mainly of lawyers, the main question seemed to be whether or not AT&T was setting itself up for legal liabilities by pledging to do deep-packet inspection on all bits running across its network. (At one point we were worried that Tim Wu was going to charge the stage in his no-need-for-a-microphone back-and-forth exchange with panelist Mark Lemley. But things calmed down.)

In the end, there seemed to be no good answer (though Level 3 CEO Jim Crowe told his lunch table that his company was legally afraid to do such inspections), especially since nobody from AT&T was around. “It doesn’t really matter if they would be guilty or not,” noted one men’s room pontificator. “No court would convict them of it anyway.” Nothing like a good cynical note to close it.

(At any rate, AT&T did sponsor the Sunday-night beer-n-wine reception, where on their dime we had a tasty 90 Shilling. Thanks!)

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When I was managing editor at GigaOM last year, I used to look forward to the P2P posts from Janko Roettgers for the NewTeeVee site, because they were always interesting and offered a nuanced take not found in many other places. Today Janko scores again with a post about how BitTorrent isn’t just for blockbuster movies, a fact that may escape those who only scratch the surface of the P2P world.

Janko’s post is a bit of a reply to Tim Wu’s recent article for Slate, where the esteemed legal scholar came up empty-handed after searching popular P2P sites for Sundance-type films. Wu’s following hypothesis — that pirates are interested mainly in big-money films — is partially on, but as Janko points out it is possible to find artsy and niche material, but you have to look a bit harder. Maybe it’s the online equivalent of finding a cool record store that specializes in quirky stuff, as opposed to scanning the bins at Best Buy. Good thing we NewTeeVee fans have Janko around to peer down those dark alleys and find what others miss.