> I also never allowed anyone else to obtain copies
New York Times, May 10, 2000
THE CONCEPT OF COPYRIGHT - FIGHTS FOR INTERNET SURVIVAL
By JOHN MARKOFF
While American courts struggle over the recording industry's challenge to
digital music swapping, Ian Clarke, a 23-year-old Irish programmer, is
moving on to the next battleground. He is finishing a program that he says
will make it impossible to control the traffic in any kind of digital
information -- whether it is music, video, text or software.
His program, known as Freenet, is intended to make it possible to acquire
or exchange such material anonymously while frustrating any attempt to
remove the information from the Internet or determine its source.
Mr. Clarke and his group of programmers have deliberately set themselves
on a collision course with the world's copyright laws. They express the
hope that the clash over copyright enforcement in cyberspace will produce a
world in which all information is freely shared. In any case, the new
programs could change the basic terms of the discussion about intellectual
property.
/.../
"If this whole thing catches on," Mr. Clarke said, "I think that people
will look back in 20 to 40 years and look at the idea that you can own
information in the same way as gold or real estate in the same way we look
at witch burning today."
/.../
A test version of his Freenet program -- written in England and now
distributed free to many countries around the world -- was posted on the
World Wide Web in March.
/.../
Freenet, which Mr. Clarke conceived while he was an undergraduate at the
University of Edinburgh, is intended to function without any centralized
control point. "Freenet is a near-perfect anarchy," he said.
/.../
- > Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
