In a very smooth move, the ISP’s of Japan have agreed to monitor the usage of their users and ban them for sharing illegal files. If your looking for the raw news, you can see here from Mashable, Techmeme, and for some odd reason, this 630 comment post on Techcrunch. They all link back to the original article which was posted on Torrentfreak. It seems that organizations like the RIAA have been able to really make some ground in the past few months. They have been able to successfully get a legal victory against Rapidshare in Germany, and block access to the Pirate Bay in the Netherlands. There have been other major wins for them as of recent, and it seems like the tide might be turning. Or so the IP companies think.

What they have yet to understand is that the Internet has made it close to impossible to keep information locked up. DRM systems like Play for Sure and the Itunes system dont stand a chance against a distributed effort by nerds and hackers everywhere. Its like standing in the middle of the ocean trying to push back the water around you. That is why business models from the pre-internet days don’t work during the internet age. Dont worry RIAA and MPAA, your not the only ones in this boat. Governments all over the world are finding out just how impossible it is to keep information from their citizens. Block a site, and watch as your people use proxy websites to get there anyways. Here’s looking at you Pakistan.

Now there is something to be said for regulating the “tubes.” Problems such as pornography, phishing sites, and online casinos should be heavily regulated, better yet outright blocked. I am not of those that believe that all information, even harmful, should be free to be seen or unseen in the attention marketplace. Some things are simply harmful, in and of themselves. But the problem is that our current technology has not reached the point where we can open up to the distruptive but block the harmful. Sites such as Youtube and others are disruptive technologies that fundementally change the power structure in a given country. Gone are the days when Joe Politician can get what he wants people to hear on the 6 o clock news. Thus, technology such as Peer to Peer file sharing and issues such as Digital Fingerprinting are receiving so much negative press. Technology will always be changing, always evolving. Old technologies and methods will fall by the wayside, along with related industries and business methods. Until the RIAA and like organizations can understand this, they too will find themselves on the dusty shoulder of the road.