RIAA boss: Move copyright filtering to users' PCs

Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 07 February 2008
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Sherman's a sharp guy, and he's fully aware that filtering will prompt an encryption arms race that is going to be impossible to win... unless users somehow install the filtering software on their home PCs or equipment.

This means moving the filter out of the network and onto the edges (local machines), since it's at the edges that decryption and playback occurs.

Sherman knows it's a tough sell. "Why would somebody put that on their machine?" he asked rhetorically. "They wouldn't likely want to do that."

The only way to make it work is to mandate the filters or have ISPs mandate that users install them to get on the Internet. The consumer backlash from such a plan would be like the force of a thousand supernovas, and it's hard to visualize this happening.

Nobody would install it. The industry might talk MS into it, but this won't work on an open source OS like Linux (in fact, it would be a good PR). Even if for some reason the ISPs would be able to force users to install the filter, the protocol can be reverse-engineered to create fake filter applications that basically do nothing but pretend to be a valid filter if checked. To avoid that, filtering would have to be protected by law and that sounds a bit off (for now).