Song
swappers flock to invitation-only Internet
SAN JOSE, California (AP) – 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 before, is a big deal now,” Shirky said.
An unbottled genie
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. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company
of CNN.)
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.
Encryption and anonymity
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 cannot 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 LLC 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.”
