Of course, any regulations ISP’s use will be automated, which requires precising definitions by way of scripts and suchlike, so filesharing clients will be tailored to undercut the limits by 1kbps and bingo, eyepatches for everyone.
I suppose I could pontificate on the weaknesses of fighting techies with technology, especially when possessed of such singular guile as the hacker community, who will probably attack this kind of thing both on principle, but mostly because it creates interesting problems to solve. I’m not going to do that though. I’ve spammed this forum enough lately.
Heh, you wanna hear something really funny? Learn Spanish and read this.
Apparently, not only these guys ever heard of the right to privacy but nobody mentioned them how much data travels trough the net each single day and what monitoring it piece by piece would represent. In short: They wanted to pass a law to monitor and archive every single piece of data that travels trough Argentina (Internet, cell-phones, whatever) for, please hear this one carefully, the next TEN YEARS. It surprisingly passed trough our chaotic congress but it was never put to work. I’m not asking these guys to become computer experts but I wonder if they even know how many uses internet sees on our country alone.
Nulani: I agree with some of the other /.ers that the motives of the RIAA on this are more strategically sinister. They’re building up a portfolio of “good faith” [sic] efforts to get ISPs “in line” before they ram through legislation to force it, upon which speculation my comments were based. They can say “well, we tried to be nice, but they wouldn’t listen and they’re hurting our business.”
Seph: They’re probably going to monitor it by way of bandwith usage, which is easy to monitor <i>en masse</i>, and makes sense becaus the primary users of large chunks of bandwidth are those who are downloading media constantly. Secondly, it would be easy to put in their Terms of Service agreements (which so few of us read, right?) a clause that states that statistics related to your use of the Service are fair game.
But in whatever case, it won’t work. Just another interesting development.
I didn’t include this in my post because I forgot most can’t read it: The purpose of this was to monitor communications between possible IRL criminals (Kidnappers mostly), there isn’t even a real law against internet piracy here. This means READING each freaking thing or a least passing them trough a word-search.
Yes it would. Doing so would result in crap like when City of Heroes “pussified” the Fifth Column because the game was about to be released in Germany. Game companies would have to design their games around an eventual American release where bandwidth would be a commodity, thus forcing them to add code to their clients to compensate and still provide content, thus causing their clients to be more hackable, thus leading to the stagnation of all massmogs above the level of MUDs.
As a person who normally shies away from slashdot, I was pretty thoroughly amused. A lot of good responses to this one. I especially liked this early post:
I think we should also draft up a “Music Quality Standards” sheet and push them to sign and elminate all of the bad music they’re pushing through. If they want to try and police a medium that doesn’t belong to them, let’s police their medium back!