When we dubbed 2008 the "Year of Filters" two weeks ago, someone at the IFPI must have been reading. The worldwide music trade group has just released its 2008 report on digital music, and it opens by talking about the "sea change" that is sweeping the globe. No, it's not digital music, it's ISP filtering. According to the IFPI, "2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it become [sic] reality." If you don't smell a coordinated, worldwide campaign to prod ISPs to board the Filter Express, it's time to haul yourself to an otolaryngologist.

The campaign has been in progress for some time. Here in the US, the MPAA has been banging on the filtering drum for some time with its argument that content filtering is actually in ISPs' best interests. One the one hand, this is true (filtering can reduce peak traffic loads from P2P software), but it's an argument that fails to acknowledge just how much work ISPs have done at all levels of government to make sure that they are a "dumb pipe" to the Internet. Bills like the US DMCA granted ISPs immunity for the content that travels over their networks, but that immunity could be lost if ISPs start filtering.

The MPAA did score a huge win in 2007 as AT&T publicly committed to implementing some sort of filtering scheme across its network, but it hasn't yet managed to get most universities and colleges to do the same thing (either voluntarily or through government regulation). It has tried—in some cases using data that was inflated to three times the actual level—but so far has had limited success.

The ultimate prize would be a government mandate for filtering of the kind now facing ISPs in France. French President Nicolas Sarkozy supervised a "memorandum of understanding" between the government, ISPs, and content owners last year that achieves modest consumer gains but requires ISPs to disconnect repeat copyright infringers.

The IFPI's new report says that the "Sarkozy plan leads the way," and the group clearly intends to push for this model to be replicated elsewhere (something similar was also mentioned as a possibility in the UK's Gowers Report from 2006).

Despite 40 percent worldwide growth in digital sales, IFPI claims that the ratio of unlicensed tracks to legal downloads is still about 20 to one. These illicit downloads are said to be the cause of lower sales, though one study cited by the IFPI shows that P2P downloading didn't affect the buying habits of 64 percent of consumers and actually led 6 percent of file-swappers to buy more music. The other 30 percent did say that they purchased less music after grabbing their songs for free, but this is only a minority of P2P users.

In fact, the IFPI's own numbers show that in the US, for instance, 17.6 percent of all Internet users regularly share files. If 30 percent of those users buy less music, that means that file-swapping only leads 5.9 percent of all US Internet users to buy less music. The number is even lower if we take the US population as a whole.

Forgive us if we're skeptical here, but implementing a draconian solution like deep packet inspection of all Internet traffic in order to get a few percent of the population to buy more music doesn't sound much like progress, or even rationality.

In any event, that's not the way the IFPI sees it. Despite the growth of digital (in South Korea, online sales have even overtaken physical sales), the IFPI says that "the time for action is now," because "revolution and innovation are not going to be enough to secure a healthy future for the music industry."

Fortunately, "revolution and innovation" are actually words that can be applied to the music business now, and the IFPI report rightly cites the explosion of interesting new formats and business models for music. Apart from the well-known download services like iTunes, Amazon, and eMusic, subscription services like Napster, Rhapsody, and the Zune Pass offer unlimited music for a monthly fee. Ad-supported music from sites like Imeem and Last.fm makes it easy to explore new tunes legally, while models like Nokia's "Comes With Music" are baking the cost of a music subscription into a consumer electronics device. In addition, musicians are selling directly to fans and even allowing people to set their own prices.

So in many senses, 2008 looks like a bright year for music, but the heavy-handed emphasis on filtering as the One True Answer gives us pause. After all, once ISPs around the world have filtering technology installed and a mandate to use it, it's only a matter of time before they are asked to look for other sorts of crime and defend other sorts of industries.