Filtering Pirates

AT&T considers filtering for pirated content

This article covers AT&T's consideration of using filtering technology to filter out Pirated content within their network by working with content providers such as NBC Universal to develop such policing on a network level.
AT&T has censored live streaming content before during a webcasted concert of Pearl Jam at Lollapalooza.

"AT&T bleeped portions of the Pearl Jam song "Daughter," in which singer Eddie Vedder altered lyrics to include anti-Bush sentiments."
(Reardon, January 9, 2008 3:28 PM PST, News Blog)

These actions go not without opposition:
Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.
(Stone, January 8, 2008, 7:07 pm, bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

This could be the first major step to truly censoring the internet in the west, in similar ways that the Chinese government are proposing to filter out questionable content (pornography and political streaming video) by controlling the network which the web is ran on and owning the sites which host video content.