FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
FITUG e.V.Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft |
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http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns22812
Cyber-revolutionaries are abandoning the Web to build an anarchic, censorship-free alternative.
Kurt Kleiner reports
[...]
But even for Gnutella, legal problems are looming. It's true that the system is less centralised than Napster, but that doesn't mean there's nobody to go after. About half of all Gnutella files are provided by just 1 per cent of users, and that 1 per cent present a big, fat target to anyone who wants to start suing for copyright infringement.
See you in court
The organisation most likely to start filing lawsuits is the Recording Industry Association of America. "We have not done any enforcement against Gnutella at this point. But that's not going to last long," says Frank Creighton, director of the RIAA's anti-piracy initiative. When the RIAA decides to move, he says, it will probably target that active 1 per cent. Finding out who they are shouldn't be hard because Gnutella servents need to know one another's IP addresses to communicate. Anyone can find out which ISP hosts a particular IP address, and after that a threatening letter or writ can have the user kicked off or force the ISP to reveal a name that can be pursued through the courts.
But there is a P2P network that looks capable of evading the lawyers. Called Freenet, it's a radical system created from the ground up to be anonymous and censorship-proof.
[...]
Not everyone accepts that Freenet is as censorship-proof as Clarke thinks. Creighton reckons he can bring it down by getting the IP addresses of individual nodes, sending letters to ISPs, and taking some users to court, just as he wants to do with Gnutella.
But if Clarke turns out to be correct, Freenet will usher in a different world. No one will be able to stop you downloading free music files from the Internet. You'll be able to criticise the rich and powerful without fear of being silenced or punished. And you'll be able to read whichever spy memoir your government is trying to suppress at the moment.
By the same token, you'll be powerless to stop people from plagiarising your copyrighted work or telling lies about you. Nobody will be able to take down child pornography or stolen nuclear secrets.
Napster set out to give us free music, but it seems to have put us on the road to absolute freedom of speech. If so, the real challenge hasn't even begun.
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