| The next step will be a court order requiring the ISP to keep track of everyone on their network that is involved in file sharing
There is nothing especially distinguishing about someone who is "involved in file sharing." To find such people in the haystack of users, we must examine every incoming packet, and try to determine its content. In a peer-to-peer system like Kazaa, there is nothing especially notable about the IP address of the sender; it is simply another user, somewhere in the world. It could be anyone. The data in the packet is a chunk of a song; it's a string of seemingly random bytes. Just looking at them, it's hard to tell whether any particular packet is part of a jpg picture, an executable program, a realplayer file, a pdf document... it could be anything. It's very difficult to tell just by looking at it. What's worse, the same song could look totally different depending on who encoded it, what the sampling rate was, what the base volume level is, and so on. It would be practically impossible to tell whether a steam of packets coming into my machine from yours was a "file sharing" involving a copyrighted work, or you sending me a Powerpoint presentation for use at a sales meeting. They look about the same -- a long string of random bytes. So what is it, exactly, that such a court order demands that ISPs do? Examine every incoming packet, for every user, peek at it and poke at it, attempt to decipher its contents, and in 99.9% of the cases be looking at something that is none of their business anyway. The privacy implications of this are enormous. Like I said... what we have here is lawyers running amok. They don't understand the technology, they don't understand what's reasonable, they don't even understand what's possible. They're just making demands for other people to carry out at other people's expense. I predict a hard fall for the people doing this. Fundamentally they don't know what they're doing, and so they are doomed to lose. Had they had the slightest idea what they were playing with, they would have embraced Napster and made a deal with them when they had the chance. Everyone on the technology side warned them that if they killed Napster, they would send their problem into peer-to-peer land, and they would never get it back. Did they listen? No, they're a bunch of dumb lawyers. Now they're hosed. I have no sympathy. |
Here you have touched on the nature of the problem. What you have written above is extremely easy to say. It sounds reasonable, and it is easy to imagine a judge or a lawyer saying it, or ordering it, without having the slightest idea what they are asking for.