The european data retention directive attempts to make ISP’s keep such data. Every ISP to date has been fighting that directive – the money can be recovered from increasing the customer billing, but the legally mandated security requirements in order to guarantee safety of the data repository is indeed a nightmare.

However, they DO love using it as a means to cement their own international leverage versus the west. Guess which nation will be surpassing the US in number of patents, licenses, and copyrighted works within a decade? The same way that nation did when it came to the export market? And guess which nation is currently happily going along with the US “Intellectual Property” plans which will see them owners of a similar monopoly on global IP rights fairly soon?

You guessed it. China will happily ignore the filesharers. They’ll be using that big hammer in order to shut companies like Intel and Dell out of the asian markets.

People that use them are the scourge of p2p and should be ashamed of themselves. p2p is about sharing, not grabbing what you can with no intention of sharing.