The RIAA Succeeds Where the CypherPunks Failed

[Steve Schear]

At 12:39 PM 12/17/2003, Patrick Chkoreff on the dgcchat at lists wrote:
>Well, Clay Shirky has done it again, writing a very insightful article
>on the current digital scene, this time on the unintended but
>beneficial consequences of RIAA's crackdown on file sharing.
>
>Here is one particularly telling excerpt:
>
>>Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users
>>have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a
>>first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a > felon.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/riaa_encryption.html

I'm not sure if Clay ever hung out on the cypherpunks list.  None of this 
comes as a surprise.  Most knew early on that widespread adoption of crypto 
would require a killer app and that cypherpunks were not delivering these 
apps because one could not predict what they would be.  They would surely 
not be PGP and other encrypted email nor digital cash unless and until 
there was a small but lucrative market that could be addressed by such 
technology or a large market with broad citizen support.  That file sharing 
could be it was also recognized a long time ago on the cypherpunks list.

One interesting aspect of the current arms war being fought between 
consumers determined to ignore copyright, their technological helpers in 
the development community and the RIAA/MPAA is a possible resurgence of 
interest in non-file sharing P2P architectures.  By this I mean schemes 
where the information is distributed among sharing participants in a 
fashion where each holds only a portion of the desired file in a form not 
identifiable as such by individual users.

Freenet and MNet (previously Mojo Nation) both use such an approach.  They 
create an Internet RAID drive cluster across the storage participants have 
offered to the sharing system.  Individual users are not associated with 
offering individual files, they simply have offered storage for data the 
content of which they know not.  User downloads from such systems are, of 
course, organized as individually identifiable files, but these are 
separately stored and not exposed outside their PCs.  "NetRAID" P2P 
approaches have suffered from complexity and stability problems which 
greatly affected their popularity, but there is reason to believe that such 
shortcomings may soon be a thing of the past.

Another aspect of this is what it portends for the future.  If, as Clay 
suggests, the current situation is like Prohibition from citizen 
perspective can we expect a similar repeal of government surveillance?  If 
not, what will happen as large numbers of citizens adopt P2P systems that 
not only flaunt copyright law but communications more dear to those in power?

steve


"For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law 
of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open 
secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely 
connected with this." -- Albert Einstein, "My First Impression of the 
U.S.A.", 1921  

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