To thwart peer-to-peer pirates, the Recording Industry Association of America is wielding the clunky but mighty club of the federal court system.
The RIAA recently
won a court order forcing Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user suspected of copyright infringement and now says that soon it will
sue hundreds of alleged P2P infringers.
Ian Clarke and the merry band of programmers who are creating Freenet are taking a different approach: They're betting that technology, not the law, holds the key to the future. They believe that Freenet, a radically decentralized network of file-sharing nodes tied together with strong encryption, will make it possible to share any kind of file with impunity--and offer superior anonymity in the process.
It might even work. Freenet may not be one of the most popular file-sharing networks right now, but its creators have carefully designed it to be as difficult as possible to censor or monitor. That has implications beyond copyright law. If successful, Freenet could make laws against publishing material such as libelous statements, trade secrets or military intelligence either irrelevant or, at least, unenforceable.
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