It's very difficult to imagine this having the effect the MPAA and RIAA intend. Assuming the system works at all — which is to say, it correctly identifies people who are actually downloading and not middle-aged mothers and elderly people who have never heard of BitTorrent, which has historically been a challenge for them — it's likely to cause a backlash against ISPs, the creation of new services designed to hide illegal downloading, Congressional hearings, piles of lawsuits, and plenty of other fallout.

These industry groups may be insulated from the fallout because nobody thinks of themselves as buying anything directly from them, but the ISPs are not. I can see the ISPs dropping this cause like a hot potato once it becomes clear they will lose customers because of it, not least because it's not their fight to begin with.

Then, when CD sales continue to plummet anyway (I don't actually know how much of an effect piracy has had on movie sales), the RIAA will conclude that those thievin' kids must be finding some other way to steal their products. Which will probably be true. I don't see millions of people who simply believe music is not something you have to pay for suddenly changing their minds.

Which is not to say I support piracy. I actually buy far more music these days than I did when it was only available on CD, despite the many options for finding it online, legal and otherwise. But until they accept piracy as a fact of life and start creating reasons for people to want to buy things from them, instead of doing whatever they can get away with in a Quixotic, nihilistic quest to burn down the Internet if they can't get their way, I don't see things getting much better for them.