File Sharing Goes Social

This month's essay concerns the way the RIAA is creating environmental pressures that alter the design of file sharing networks, and how the current attacks on Kazaa et al are moving file sharing into socially bounded cells. -clay

The basic idea is that we've gone from efficient, centralized systems like Napster, to less efficient, decentralized systems like KaZaa and Gnutella, to the next generation of networking tools similar to those used for secure corporate collaboration. The Darknet perhaps? This would be the Darknet that is about private restricted file sharing networks where there is a reduced amount of content, but users are friends and family who know each other and share and recommend within that closed network, where social norms dictate the sharing protocols.

Interesting to note though is the idea that the most popular songs exist on the most harddrives, while more obscure (and interesting) works are hard to find. Small private networks will probably make this more true. So maybe a few small networks will specialize, and people may have a couple of different private networks that reflect different tastes and genres, but it may be that most networks have only the most popular stuff. The question is, will the RIAA go after these small networks? Will we have infiltrators at parties trying to get an invitation into our Waste networks? Do we become like East Berlin in the 80's, where everyone suspected everyone else as being a spy? Husbands and wives, each working for different operatives and never telling each other, maybe because one specializes in early country, and the other in hip-hop? Oh my!