Culver City, California was the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public a free all-access Wi-Fi network. They're also the first to ban all porn and p2p from that network, according to an announcement made yesterday. The city says they've added Audible Magic's CopySense Network Appliance to filter illegal and "problematic content" from their network.

The push to clean the network of all the naughty bits came from the MPAA in part, as three major movie studios call Culver City home. Dan Glickman, president of MPAA, praised the move.

"We congratulate Culver City for taking the initiative to implement content filtering on their network. 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."

According to John Richo, Director of Information Technology for Culver City, the city was concerned with taxpayer dollars funding such activity. "This type of content defeats the purpose of the wireless hotspot," says Richo.

Once installed, the Audible Magic Copysense device, developed in part by a group of ex-Yamaha audio engineers, digs through all network traffic looking for legit audio or video fingerprints in an effort to weed out copyrighted files based on a master database. The device can also throttle back p2p bandwidth, or prevent p2p altogether.

The only problem is, last we checked, the hardware is easily bested by encryption and some flavors of basic compression. The latest Bit Torrent clients, such as Azureus, have incorporated encryption to help get around the traffic shaping being done my a number of cable ISPs.