Comment Re:And I hereby request (Score 4, Insightful) 218
No, the ISPs are the people who build and maintain the roads on which murderers travel to their victims' houses. Or maybe they're the people who sell cooking knives. Or maybe they're the people who provide alcohol to unstable people who then get mad and murder someone.
Equally, you could say that the ISPs are like the owners of Xerox machines, which allow people to make unauthorised copies of copyrighted materials. Or maybe they're like libraries, which allow people to read copyrighted material for free.
The point, I think, is that there is no good analogy for the roles of the parties in this kind of "crime" because it's the result of a pretty much unprecedented set of circumstances related to advances in technology.