1. The cost is way too high for just blocking some P2P filesharing, IMO. Really, if this technology is needed to enhance revenue of record producers, they could find an affordable and efficient way to accomplish their objective on their own nickel.

2. Such an expensive infrastructure at taxpayer expense makes me feel that RIAA, et. al. are acting as a front for a massive data monitoring and gathering system, at taxpayer expense, which can destroy any semblance of privacy, and completely throttle communication at a politician’s whim. So much for “Freedom of Speech”! Under this pretense, even encryption of private messages between individuals may be interpreted as “deliberate and malicious circumvention of copy protection means” under the DMCA.

nice post. I add my own two cents on the RIAA and how it must be beaten into submission here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/riaa_tax

cheers,

dt

Ask just about any “Free market” apologist, and you learn very quickly that the only “government interventions” they don’t like are those which inconvenience them/empower their employees/keep people safe/hold them responsible for their company’s actions.

They hate safety regs, and the most hard-core of them (self-described “Libertarians” and “Objectivists” mostly, but a goodly swath of Republicans as well) explicitly defend the “right” of places like restaurants and hotels to discriminate against racial minorities.

Patents and copyright are ALL ABOUT the State dictating who is permitted to use “content” — up to and including business models and parts of the human genome.

And, lest we all forget this fact, when they’ve raped and pillaged and destroyed as much as they can possibly destroy, THEN they run to the government for multi-billion dollar bailouts.

I wonder if government subsidized the buggy-whip industry, too.

My questions were aimed more at the people who design and implement these measures than us here. I know what will happen once they implement these kind of measures all around. You got a bunch of people motivated to find any way to bypass that system. And I’m not talking about any small number either. I’m quite positive that these individuals/groups will find a way to bypass almost any Big Brother type of system, especially since they outnumber the service providers by 100 to 1 at least. As long as there is a will, there is a way.

@Dude from Finland: I read what you write but perhaps with a little more positivity in mind…because can the motivation factor get any better? The future looks bright. Then again, seeing how our politicians does not seem to grasp the conditions of the information era we might as well head into a time when Internet as we know it is no more.

Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Thomas (member of the Swedish Pirate Party)

So why didn’t Tennessee just give the money to the RIAA? Well, maybe they did. Let’s follow the money. If those monitoring software/hardware purveyors and twenty-two screen monkeys don’t have recording industry connections, I’ll be shocked.

so happy my state can protect private interests like this, and throw the public ones down the drain.