I was riding home on the train as I do every weekday from the city and came across something I thought interesting. A leaked document from the federal government reveals customs are planning to search everyone's iPods, media players, CD collections, and notebooks for pirated music/videos in any form.
If the process of going through customs wasn't long enough already, they are now going to search through our 'virtual' worlds to catch illegal music and videos. But, one thing that has me stumped? How will they know that it is illegal?
Digital rights management (DRM) has been thrown out the window and thus making your legal music collection look just like an illegal collection. I do believe that the law needs to catch up with modern-technology but this will just cause chaos at the customs.
In Europe, Virgin Media is already collecting statistics/data from Internet users who are illegally downloading music through their Internet Service Provider (ISP) and writing to them to warn them about their actions. Australia will probably catch up to these standards soon, and so will America.
