Cory Doctorow on the deal between ISPs and the music industry to spy on and interfere with music sharers:

This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is.

This paragraph is my favorite:

Will this stop kids from trading infringing files? Kids are time-rich and cash-poor and have an infinite supply of ingenuity and impecuniousness to apply to the job of getting music for free. Last year, my freshman university students in Los Angeles regaled me with stories of “hard-drive parties” where everyone would gather with guitars, beers and whopping great hard drives that cost less than either the guitars or the beers. While the students jammed, sang and danced, they simply synchronised their drives using whatever laptops were lying around, transferring hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of music while composing and recording songs of their own.