The passage I was quoting is just a work of speculative fiction. As of today, DMCA soft of protects the ISP’s but who knows what kind of laws are we going to have tomorrow?

Every day I read about some new proposed law intended to “stop the piracy” or “protect children online” or both. Better yet, they tend to sneak these things into some of those “must pass” federal spending bills. So I think it is reasonable to assume that one day ISP’s and hosting providers might be expected to premptively filter and censor their content to avoid lawsuits.

The DMCA grants them all immunity from copyright infringement claims so long as they meet certain criteria and work to take infringing material down when they get notice. It was a major win for both hosts and the RIAA, just not the rest of us.

Still though, no filtering is required or going on. Otherwise, I’d probably have a lot fewer incidents of plagiarism to worry about.