Cory Doctorow: A net right robocop will never work (Guardian UK)

Cory has published another good piece here:  Cory Doctorow: A net right robocop will never work | Technology | Guardian Unlimited.  Some of my favorite snippets:

"To prevent infringement from taking place on YouTube, Viacom has proposed a ban on all "private" videos that are invisible to its copyright enforcement hunter-killer bots. Broadly speaking, they're right: if it's possible to use a "privacy" flag to avoid copyright takedowns, then pirates will use privacy flags - so for this system to work, privacy must be eliminated.

Is any of this plausible? The best technologies for automatically identifying, say, a song from an arbitrary hunk of music (like MusicBrainz) are far from perfect, and they're working in "non-adversarial" circumstances, where the person using the music wants it to be identified.

Once the person producing the music (or video, which is thousands of times more complex) takes active steps to impede automated identification, you're talking about the kind of computer science problem that hasn't even shown promising research approaches yet -- let alone actual, field-ready, tested technology. Remaking the internet to invade privacy and silence our conversations is a crummy idea, but even worse is the fact that it won't actually stop or even slow infringement. But for so long as there are technology companies with magic beans to sell - and desperate, ageing entertainment execs willing to buy them - we'll have to keep fighting..."

Couldn't have said it better myself: time for those snake-oil vendors to be excommunicated, and for fake solutions to be discarded. It's not about CONTROLLING this new media ecosystem - it's about turning un-control into new revenue streams.

Read my new book yet?  Seen the Technology versus Copyright Future Talks video yet?