David Holtzman is on top form again warning of the perils of DRM.

"Wake up consumers and smell the DRMs before it's too late. The big media companies and their toadies are very clearly broadcasting their intentions and it's our own fault if they get away with it. Yesterday, Dan Glickman, the head of the MPAA, discussed the vicious idea of ISP filtering. The idea behind this concept is that the Internet Service Providers would have to use software to spot and expunge copyrighted material that is passing through their network. In other words, the company that you pay for your email and web access would watch everything that you send across the network and if it thought something infringed, remove it before you saw it coming in or sent it going out. And charge you for it. And slow down your bandwidth because of it.

What a good deal for consumers.

Of course, there're plenty of ways around this anyway, such as encrypting streams, hiding the pictures or video inside larger files, etc. So what will the ISPs be made to do then--ban encryption for their customers? This isn't as far-fetched as it might sound, I expect that the day is coming when use of personal encryption will be a crime.

Whenever draconian measures such as this are imposed on the public in an attempt to shore up a dilapidated and depressed institutional structure, it is a social inequity and more importantly, it never works."