LONDON While media companies step up their legal crackdown on Internet song-swappers, separate teams of software developers from the Middle East to Madrid toil away on a foiling technology: an anonymous file-sharing network.
“Our users are requesting more and more privacy. They are more than disgusted with the threat of lawsuits,” said Pablo Soto, chief programmer and co-founder of Madrid-based Optisoft.
Optisoft runs Blubster and Piolet, music-only file-sharing networks. They run on Optisoft’s proprietary MP2P peer-to-peer platform.
Music trade group the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued 11 of MP2P’s 10 million users for putting their music collection online for others to download. The new upgrade, which goes into effect shortly, should shield MP2P users from future lawsuits, Soto said.
“I do not think it will stop the RIAA from suing our users. But if any of our users has the balls to go to court, I don’t see any way on the planet for the RIAA to win,” Soto said.
The RIAA, however, recommends taking any claims of anonymity with a grain of salt. “More often than not, these are marketing ploys rather than a genuine technological capability,” an RIAA spokesman said.
The quest for anonymous file sharing
Relaunching later this month, MP2P will offer users the closest thing yet to anonymously sharing music files with others computer users, he said.
Others, including Palestine-based EarthStation 5 and Filetopia, make similar claims.
Most technical experts say absolute anonymous file-sharing is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. But the young technicians are undaunted.
If they can’t completely disguise a user sharing his Outkast tracks with others, they say they can make it exceedingly difficult for outsiders to trace.
The stakes are high. Since January, the music trade group RIAA has sued more than 2,000 Americans for copyright infringement for sharing their music collection with others over Internet peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and WinMX.
Hundreds more face legal action in Europe and Canada announcing similar lawsuits. Media companies have employed firms to scour file-sharing networks to find the biggest uploaders.
Camouflaged files
The 24-year-old Soto said his new file-sharing network offers two layers of camouflage. Each user is assigned multiple Internet protocol (IP) addresses to mask precisely who is trading what file at any one time.
And, the files zipping around the network are disguised to look entirely generic to the outside observer. “With the files, you get a user ID and some data, but that data looks bogus,” Soto said.
The multiple IP addresses, he explained, are pulled from other users on the network at the same time, thus distorting the activities of individual file sharers to the outside observer.
There is a serious flaw, Soto admits. Light users, who at the moment are not being targeted in the lawsuits, could be rounded up alongside other MP2P users who share hundreds or thousands of music tracks through the network.
But, he reckons, it makes it four times more difficult for a copyright holder to trace the activities of file-sharers.
EarthStation 5, which carries the slogan “Resistance is futile, only the Anonymous will Survive”, uses third-party proxies’ computers in an attempt to throw copyright lawyers off the trail.
And, Filetopia has developed encryption tools to protect the identity of its users and their actions. Encryption is used by companies and the military, among others, to mask the content of data files to outside eyes.
The results of their combined work are far from foolproof, technology observers point out. “In theory, you can never have a completely anonymous network. But you can make it really, really difficult to trace,” said Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan.
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- Rise in anonymous file-sharing in response to RIAA threats
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