This may be one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time.

Cary Sherman of the RIAA…[is]…trying to convince other industries to step up and help the entertainment industry as well. His latest, as pointed out by Broadband Reports, is that one possibility would be for anti-spyware/anti-malware applications to also watch for the transfer of unauthorized copyright material. Sherman suggests that this would be one way to get around the question of people simply encrypting traffic to avoid ISP filters.

The original TechDirt piece does a fine job of explaining how it is not the job of others to break their products to help prop up a broken business model, and I wholeheartedly concur. As a general rule, if your business model needs people beyond your influence to change what they’re doing in a manner that’s not in their own best interest, then you’re the one with the broken model.

Fortunately, I think that the risk of this actually happening is close enough to zero that I can just laugh at the absurdity of it all and maybe have some fun batting it around like a cat with a toy mouse.

I mean, how much better example could you provide of how not to solve a problem? Ignoring the fundamentally shifting business landscape for music (micro-targeting, the Internet breaking the radio+record company cartel, etc.) and instead trying to screw up the new distribution mechanisms is just silly.

All that tying an evil-and-unnecessary thing to an irritating-but-necessary thing (if you run Windows) does is reduce the effectiveness of the irritating-but-necessary thing, since you now create a strong disincentive for some of the the most at-risk people (in this case, downloaders) to use the product.