• Ars Technica, Friday, February 8, 2008 11 AM

Forget ISP filtering. Cary Sherman, head of the Recording Industry Association of America, says that copyright protection filters should be pre-installed on Web users' PCs. Sherman said this is the only way to circumvent a data encryption war between peer-to-peer file-sharing services and network operators like AT&T.

But Ars Technica's Nate Anderson makes a good counterpoint: "Who would voluntarily install software that would continually scan incoming P2P streams for copyrighted material...or software that would watch every song you played and tried to figure out if it was legit?" Well, Sherman doesn't have an answer for that, yet. But he does have another idea: installing a filter in a customer's cable modem, which could then act in a similar manner to a network filter.

Anderson says the ideas have "about as much chance of success as my 2008 bid for the White House," unless it somehow becomes federal mandate that consumers or ISPs implement such filtering technologies. Of course, "the consumer backlash from such a plan would be like the force of a thousand supernovas."

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