SAN JOSE, Calif. - Just as Prohibition drove drinkers
underground in the roaring '20s, the music industry's crackdown is pushing
many song swappers away from the open Internet and into what amount to
cyberspace speakeasies.
These high-tech Cotton Clubs usually require users to be
trusted or at least know someone inside. The files being traded, instead of
out in the open, are encrypted - the 21st century equivalent of hiding bathtub
gin under a fake floorboard.
Internet file-sharers are operating much like any society
that falls under attack. And the very technologies they are using as shields
have long been employed by legitimate businesses to protect their data from
prying eyes and hackers.
"The software that users are moving toward, it has
characteristics that businesses need - which is a high degree of privacy, a
high degree of security and the ability to handle large files," said Clay
Shirky, a professor of interactive telecommunications at New York University.
Three years after the Recording Industry Association of
America's lawyers succeeded in shutting down the Napster file-trading service,
the music industry's jihad against unauthorized digital music distribution is
reaping an unintended consequence: better, easier-to-use software for
exchanging data securely - and even anonymously - on the Internet.
"Thanks to the RIAA, ease of use surrounding encryption
technologies, which was never a big deal befobe, is a big deal now," Shirky
said.
The decentralized peer-to-peer technology that enables a
computer user to share his or her music collection with strangers remains an
unbottled genie - and is now likely to evolve so ever more traffic becomes
invisible not just to the entertainment industry's copyright cops but also to
repressive governments, inquisitive employers and snooping relatives.
On the file-swapping front, current favorites Kazaa,
Morpheus and iMesh are more decentralized and harder to sue than Napster. They
are breeding more sophisticated stepchildren just as the RIAA goes after the
swappers themselves with lawsuits filed against 260 alleged file sharers.
An upcoming release of the file-sharing program Blubster,
for instance, not only makes users more difficult to identify. It also
seamlessly encrypts files before they are transferred and decrypts them for
the end user.
Another program, called Waste, can be used to set up an
encrypted instant-messaging and content-sharing network of up to 50 users.
Unlike traditional instant-messaging programs, Waste messages don't pass
through a central server.
Waste was pulled by America Online shortly after its
release by the company's Nullsoft division, but is still circulating online.
Neither AOL nor Nullsoft programmer Justin Frankel returned calls seeking
comment. (Nullsoft also released Gnutella - on which many of Napster's
successors are based. AOL quickly yanked that program, too, but the damage was
done.)
Copyright crackdowns like those staged by the RIAA, the
Motion Picture Association of America and the Business Software Alliance have
succeeded on at least one front: Because higher security and anonymity tend to
make software more difficult to use, fewer people are likely to be engaged in
casual copying.
"To some degree, the effort has always been one of
pushing down the piracy problem, forcing it down to the hardcore pirate," said
Bob Kruger, the BSA's vice president for enforcement.
Matt Oppenheim, the RIAA's senior vice president for
business and legal affairs, said it's still possible to undermine pirates -
even those operating anonymously. In fact, four university students sued last
April were using allegedly more-secure swapping software.
So the race is on to improve and simplify advanced
security technologies. Beyond programs like Blubster and Waste, there are
projects like Freenet, which has been around since 1999. Downloaded nearly 2
million times, it can not only trade files but also exchange information and
spread censored news to places like China.
Like other programs, it's difficult for the programmers
to know exactly how it's being used, but there are clues.
"Our Web site is censored by Chinese government," said
Freenet leader Ian Clarke. "I suspect we must have had some effect to justify
that."
Though Clarke is well known for his
information-needs-to-be-free philosophy, he's also trying to cash in on
Freenet's architecture.
Last year, he founded Cematics and the company has since
released a prototype of Locutus, which allows users to search corporate
networks for information distributed across a wide range of computers.
"Just as Napster or Kazaa allow 12-year-old kids to
shares media files over the Internet, Locutus allows corporations to share
documents within their organization," Clarke said. "It's kind of like Google
for people's hard disks, but with added security. You can define who has
permission to find what kind of files."
The shift toward integrating encryption and anonymity
tools answer the prayers of privacy advocates who have been warning Internet
users for years about the potential problems of using the open network without
such protection.
"The recording industry lawsuits may in fact change the
ecological pressures on the software developers to encourage more anonymity. I
think that's a good outcome of this," said Cory Doctorow, outreach coordinator
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "What it won't do is legalize what 60
million people are up to and it won't ... pay any artists."
The Freenet Project is online at freenetproject.org.
