Now the users of this system liked to print out these files to put on their office/bedroom walls. The centre management decided – in their “wisdom” that this was a waste of money and so they removed the picture files from the system.
Unfortunately for them a few people had made copies of these files – and promptly shared them with their friends – so the printing of pictures continued – but now of course much (at that time scarce) disk space was now being used to store multiple copies of these files.
So the managers set about deleting these files from the users’ disk allocations (at considerable cost in time and effort).

Of course the users quickly realised that this was happening and so they encrypted their files – and dressed them up to look like numerical data files.

The printing of pictures continued.

The waste of storage space increased.

AND – now valuable (at the time) processing resources were being used.

Over the past 30 years I have watched with amusement as the same merry dance repeats again and again –

the moral of the tale:

1. You can’t stop technically savvy people from doing what they want to with technology

2. Every effort you make to do so will ultimately just cause you further loss.

When will they ever learn….

When will ISPs just relize there is nothing they can do. Would a phone company of cut your phone if you pireted stuff back in the BBS days? no.

There is no way you can reliably distinguish the legality or otherwise of all or even 85% of traffic, especially with the modest resources available to the average ISP. Dude, the NSA wouldn’t be able to do it.

Encryption, reduced data transfer rates, privacy issues, the problem of false positives, etc, etc, etc. No way you are going to solve all those serious technical and legal hurdles.

I call complete bullshit on your claim.

What you are saying is — to a lawyer — like a convicted serial killer saying “I’m cured, now I kill only once per month, not one a day”.

catch pirates is a good thing

we should have death penalty against pirates”

Riiiight. Could you possibly need MORE attention?

“…leaving legitimate traffic along.”

I don’t understand how you could be sure.

Old stupid judge.

Verizon should sue SABAM for damages, now. If I were a Verizon customer, I’d be on the phone right quick, forcing Verizon to react.