All this online sharing has to stop | Technology | guardian.co.uk

As usual, right-on-the-money stuff from The Guardian: All this online sharing has to stop | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

I love this example:

"Next up are motor mechanics. I know - you're wondering how people swap cars over the internet? Tch! Don't be so literal. What we're talking about is people swapping information, the very lifeblood of the motor mechanic. Because remember, these are people whose income depends on being the only ones in a locality who have the time and knowledge to fix cars. Newsgroups - those discussion forums that pre-date pretty much everything that happened after 1999 - are the prime offenders. Take this example of someone brazenly offering a fix for broken central locking in a Vauxhall Zafira. Shameless! Any ISP should be embarrassed to even let it pass over its modems: quite simply, it's taking the food from someone's mouth...."

And the conclusion:

"So before the IFPI gets ISPs to start inspecting the packets passing through their routers for music, they'd better sort it out first so that ISPs can see and stop it when someone is copying newspaper articles, or pornographic content, or reading suspiciously helpful newsgroups, or sending a needlepoint pattern that they might not have invented, or downloading a ROM sequence for a now-outdated console. Then we'll be ready to listen to the music industry.
Alternatively, of course, we could try to adapt to the world as it is, rather than dreaming of what it used to be. But hell, where are the headlines in that?"

Good stuff. Read about Music Like Water.