RIAA the New Big Brother?

Check out Clay Shirky's latest: The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

It may be time to dust off that old issue of Wired, because the RIAA is succeeding where 10 years of hectoring by the Cypherpunks failed. When shutting down Napster turned out to have all the containing effects of stomping on a tube of toothpaste, the RIAA switched to suing users directly. This strategy has worked much better than shutting down Napster did, convincing many users to stop using public file sharing systems, and to delete MP3s from their hard drives. However, to sue users, they had to serve a subpoena, and to do that, they had to get their identities from the user's internet service providers.

Identifying those users has had a second effect, and that's to create a real-world version of the scenario that drove the invention of user-controlled encryption in the first place. Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key encryption, the trategy that underlies most of today's cryptographic products, saw the problem as a version of "Who will guard the guardians?"

In any system where a user's identity is in the hands of a third party, that third party cannot be trusted. No matter who the third party is, there will be at least hypothetical situations where the user does not want his or her identity revealed, but the third party chooses or is forced to disclose it anyway....

In other words, the third parties are our ISPs, and with the DMCA subpoena problem, our identity is vulnerable to the likes of the RIAA or anyone else who grunts "copyright infringement," no matter how stupid or not true.

The RIAA's successful extraction of user identity from internet service providers makes it vividly clear that the veil of privacy enjoyed by the average internet user is diaphanous at best, and that the obstacles to piercing that veil are much much lower than for, say, allowing the police to search your home or read your (physical) mail. Diffie's hypothetical problem is today's reality. As a result, after years of apathy, his proposed solution is being adopted as well.

Which brings us to the Darknet, which we've written about quite a bit before. So now we all have Waste accounts and trade secretly, and the resulting loosely bundled groups of people, using encryption.

Frankly, I believe that sharing copyrighted materials amongst *real* friends (you know, like taping a TV show and lending it to a friend) is legal fair use, and so small networks of friends that know each other, and recommend stuff, share it, falls into this category for me. That is not to say that sharing copyrighted works with all 60 million of your best pals on KaZaa is right, as I think that IS copyright infringement.

Posted by Mary Hodder at December 17, 2003 09:50 AM