CULVER CITY, CA – According to a press release from California-based technology company Audible Magic Corp (AMC), the “first Los Angeles-area municipality to offer the public a free all-access wireless Internet system” is now filtering that access to strain out “illegal and problematic content” on their network.According to the AMC release, Culver City decided to incorporate filtering following an analysis conducted via AMC’s CopySense technology, indicating that Culver City’s open network “included some illegal trading of copyrighted music, movies and other video content, including pornographic videos and access to pornographic web sites.”
The city’s Wi-Fi system, which covers approximately 10 square blocks of the recently renovated Town Plaza, offers citizens and visitors free wireless access, both indoors and outdoors, within the covered area.
“Our campaign initially said ‘free and open Wi-Fi access to everybody,’” said John Richo, Director of IT for Culver City. “As part of the incentive plan to bring pedestrian traffic to Town Plaza, people were quick to sign up, and it was clear this was going to be a popular offering.”
It was only after the CopySense report that “we realized there were potential problems,” Richo said.
“The report reflected illegal-download use and some bandwidth was being consumed as a result of accesses to pornographic sites,” Richo said. “This activity is clearly not something tax dollars should be paying for.”
Richo continued that “this type of content defeats the purpose of the wireless hotspot,” and claimed that “CopySense has allowed our Wi-Fi network to operate smoothly by identifying and blocking certain transmitted files that represent undesirable or unlawful material.”
Culver City, sometimes referred to as the “Heart of Screenland,” is home to three major motion picture studios, so it comes as no surprise that the city’s decision to utilize AMC’s technology was met with approval from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
“We congratulate Culver City for taking the initiative to implement content filtering on their network,” said Dan Glickman, president of MPAA. “Wireless Internet access can provide the public with tremendous opportunity to make business conducted on computers even more portable. Audible Magic’s filtering solution will help safeguard system users from being subject to illegal files.”
Vance Ikezoye, CEO of AMC, said that as an increasing number of municipalities across the country are establishing wireless networks, municipal governments “need to understand the challenges they will encounter when deploying these types of networks.”
“They will want to implement measures to ensure their citizens get a positive user experience,” said Ikezoye. “Unauthorized or pornographic P2P file sharing applications can crowd out legitimate uses of the Internet and can expose the public and especially minors to unnecessary risk. Our products provide municipalities a simple and effective solution that dramatically reduces the risk of a problem involving their community.”
According to AMC, “CopySense is not blocking legitimate P2P/Internet activity.” Rather, drawing from an “existing database,” the technology specifically matches and blocks “only those transmissions that are identified as illegal or pornographic.”
AMC describes CopySense as “a proven and comprehensive solution for the filtering of unauthorized and inappropriate content transferred over the Internet.”
