By Declan McCullagh of News.com
July 7, 2003, 7:00 AM PT
To thwart peer-to-peer pirates, the Recording Industry Association of America is wielding the clunky but mighty club of the federal court system.
The RIAA recently won a court order forcing Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user suspected of copyright infringement and now says that soon it will sue hundreds of alleged P2P infringers.
Ian Clarke and the merry band of programmers who are creating Freenet are taking a different approach: They’re betting that technology, not the law, holds the key to the future. They believe that Freenet, a radically decentralized network of file-sharing nodes tied together with strong encryption, will make it possible to share any kind of file with impunity–and offer superior anonymity in the process.
It might even work. Freenet may not be one of the most popular file-sharing networks right now, but its creators have carefully designed it to be as difficult as possible to censor or monitor. That has implications beyond copyright law. If successful, Freenet could make laws against publishing material such as libelous statements, trade secrets or military intelligence either irrelevant or, at least, unenforceable.
So, is it legal and moral to create and use Freenet? That’s a complicated question, but I’d say that the draconian police tactics required to prevent people from running Freenet nodes–measures such as constant Internet surveillance and the banning of encryption without backdoors for law enforcement–mean the costs of an outright ban would outweigh the benefits.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never come close to answering that question. But last week, a federal appeals court ruling in the case against Aimster (another P2P network), suggested that a file-swapping network that cloaks its users’ activities might run afoul of copyright law precisely because it is designed to conceal illegal acts.
I asked Clarke, Freenet’s inventor, and Matt Oppenheim, RIAA’s senior vice president of business and legal affairs, if they would be interested in engaging in an e-mail debate on Freenet and the race between law and technology. I’m delighted to say that both of them agreed.
The actual debate and the rest of the article can be found at the Source
