AT&T could soon be sinking to new lows — tracking and reporting its “frequent offenders” er, AT&T customers, of suspected piracy — according to an article in the LA Times:

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

On a case by case basis with court order this behavior from a company one does business with wouldn’t be so bad. You have to follow the law and it isn’t right to steal music. While those who download movies and music they haven’t purchased will try to argue that downloading music or movies isn’t stealing, it is, but that doesn’t make what AT&T is doing right — and they are the first major company to admit they will be doing this type of surveillance according to the LA Times article.

I still believe that DRM is more appealing than piracy. Why isn’t AT&T working on a better DRM system as opposed to an advanced tattle tale model? The problems with tracking all your customers activity and ratting them out to the RIAA and MPAA without any sort of legal mandate are staggering: AT&T is playing judge, jury and executioner. Why pit your company and customers against each other?

Only a company with bad DNA could do something like this to their entire customer base. Don’t do this, AT&T. Again, I fully support AT&T and any other company by court order tracking select customers suspicious of breaking the law, but I will never support any company doing this to all their customers.

Go get ‘em Dave:

They should do things to reward customers for being smart enough to have chosen AT&T as their Internet service provider. Instead, they would make their customers the stupidest people on the planet, choosing the only ISP that will send you to jail to create a new business model for them. Instead of competing to provide great service at the lowest possible price, they want to drive their customers to financial ruin, for having made the mistake of choosing AT&T.

There is a reason AT&T is on my Do Not Do Business With list and it’s anti-customer behavior like this that remind me to keep them there. I’ve told the story before, so you’ll be spared reading it again unless you click through, but coming from this completely rehabbed former AT&T customer they’re a company I’ll run not walk to get away away from. It’s actually a bit of a challenge not accidentally doing business with them because they are in a lot of places doing a lot of different things.

In fact on Tuesday when we were looking at the different prepaid wireless plans a plan from Cingular was in the running at one point — until we realized that Cingular was now owned by AT&T.

Just remove the ampersand and the name is correct: ATNT. Self-destruction began a long time ago.

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