Mathew Ingram notes the stupidity behind calls to have ISPs monitor the net for copyrighted works:

There are a couple of obvious problems with this idea. For one thing, it isn’t likely to stop serious downloaders at all. As Stan Schroeder suggests in his post at Mashable, there are any number of ways around the filters that ISPs might use to detect such illegal activity -- including anonymous proxies, steganography and so on. Would all of those things become illegal as well? And how many illegal files would you have to share before you got the warning from your provider -- one, 10, a thousand?

Simple encryption would stop this kind of filtering. This is the kind of "arms race" that the copyright holders can't win, and should not engage in. If they want to continue to be able to sell their wares, they need to make it easy and inexpensive to do so. You can't beat Torrents with legislation, but you should be able to build a better experience. Maybe if they spent some time pondering the iTunes interface they would learn something...

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