Ever since the early days of the ancient web/usenet, there have been arguments and disagreements†. Someone is wrong. Laziness being the mother of invention, someone created a funny checklist that starts “Your post advocates a ___ approach to … Your idea will not work.” Some of the items are generic/funny enough to apply to any subject, others are specific to the original subject (if memory serves, it was regarding EMail and spam). Will it prevent Godwin’s 1st Law? Probably not!
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting copyright violations. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Virus and Malware authors can easily use it to infect more machines
( ) Independent content creators and other legitimate uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against malware
(x) It will stop copyright violation for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from copyright holders
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many users cannot afford to lose access to the web or alienate potential employers
(x) Copyright violators don't care about the one or two machines in their botnets
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for PCs
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Widespread examples of copyright violation
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who pay for 0-day camshots of movies
(x) Dishonesty on the part of violators themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Darknets
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) TCP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Media without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending random files should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(x) I don't want the government installing software on my computer
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) You're more extreme than Big Brother
Other Old Stuff
†Obligatory XKCD:
