You'd lose that wager, every single time.
Let's take a very active field today, one which generates over a billion dollars a year in income. Spam filtering. On the one side, you have tens of thousands of programmers, working on stopping spam from appearing in your e-mail box, and on the other, you have less than a hundred working to fill it.
There is no larger group of people out there working actively on a singular goal. We have governments, private enterprise, individuals all working towards the common goal of eliminating unsolicited e-mail in your box. The e-mail filtering center for Yahoo and Google take up ten thousand processors, yet spam still gets through.
Now let's paint your bet - well over a hundred thousand working for many reasons - some simply to see if it can be done, others under the concept that the copyright should be violated, others for profit. On the opposing side, you have maybe sixty to eighty programmers, trying to come up with new concepts and ideas. A hundred to one longshot, or as those in the gaming industry say: easy money.
AT&T's filtering concept is that they'll not try to go after pirates, they'll simply decide what it is you're going to be permitted to see on the Internet, and lock up everything else. Moronic. You could lock up every port from being relayed, except you still end up with a series of ports that must be left open, that for viewing websites, transmitting or receiving e-mail, USENET. And all those are holes that hackers will exploit to use to further their copyright violations.
So, yeah, I'll take your bet. You'll lose.
as far as sniffing packets goes as a means of chasing music pirates, yep: i agree: that wouldn’t be the way to go
that is why when they start yappin up the wrong tree like that I wonder what they really after. we are always alert for scheems to suppress freedom of speech online and i kinda chaffed a bit when i read about AT&T packet sniffing plans
ya can’t sniff encrypted packets, ya gotta decrypt ‘em and that would require ADKs for everyone using encryption
and that would essentially wreck encryption
now as far as going after music pirates is concerned those guys are toast. they advertise too much. when ya running a legitimate business advertising is good. but if ya running something shady ya gotta check to see who yer customers are otherwise ya get moles in and then ya land in the can
sharing music or video over a p2p net does not qualify under “private, non-commercial use”. and that’s gonna be the end of that mess