MPAA Developing Digital Fingerprinting Technology

Danathar writes "The MPAA is looking to use digital fingerprinting technologies that in conjunction with legislation will enable and force ISPs to look for network traffic that matches the signatures. " From the article: " Once completed, Philips' technology--along with related tools from other companies--could be a powerful weapon in Hollywood's increasingly aggressive attempts to choke off the flood of films being traded online."

Comments

Re:SneakerNet the Ultimate

[fm6]

I don't think the MPAA stays up nights worrying about sneakernet distrubtion of pirated content. People already have unlimited offline storage in the form of burnable DVDs. A person who lets people plug in and copy can distribute maybe one or two movies a day to people he knows. On the Internet that same person can distribute as many movies as he can find the bandwidth for, and to anybody on the planet.

People have been using sneakernet to share electronic content since the invention of audio mag tape. The entertainment industry's never been happy about it, but they never went into panic mode until the Internet created a direct, fast one-to-one connection between millions of strangers.