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The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival
By JOHN MARKOFF
While
American courts struggle over the recording industry's challenge to digital
music swapping, Ian Clarke, a 23-year-old Irish programmer, is moving on to the
next battleground. He is finishing a program that he says will make it
impossible to control the traffic in any kind of digital information -- whether
it is music, video, text or software.
His
program, known as Freenet, is intended to make it possible to acquire or
exchange such material anonymously while frustrating any attempt to remove the
information from the Internet or determine its source.
Mr.
Clarke and his group of programmers have deliberately set themselves on a
collision course with the world's copyright laws. They express the hope that
the clash over copyright enforcement in cyberspace will produce a world in
which all information is freely shared. In any case, the new programs could
change the basic terms of the discussion about intellectual property.
The
swapping of music files over the Internet, through services like Napster and
MP3.com, has already raised the hackles and mobilized the lawyers of the
recording industry and some musicians, who say the practice amounts to piracy.
They hope either to halt the services or to collect royalties on the digital
works being swapped.
But
programs now emerging make it possible to find and acquire files without
reference to a central database, and thus provide no single target for
aggrieved copyright holders. And methods being developed to protect such works
-- like scrambling the data and requiring a key to decode it -- may wind up
being trumped by similar encryption that covers the tracks of those doing the
swapping.
"If
this whole thing catches on," Mr. Clarke said, "I think that people
will look back in 20 to 40 years and look at the idea that you can own
information in the same way as gold or real estate in the same way we look at
witch burning today."
The
groups and companies pursuing the new distribution technologies -- programs
that in effect create vast digital libraries spread across potentially hundreds
of thousands of large and small computers -- do not necessarily share Mr.
Clarke's ideological viewpoint. They range from iMesh, an Israeli-American
start-up company that aspires to become an international commercial digital
distribution system, to several small groups of free-software developers intent
on building new systems for the sharing of any kind of digital information.
Some
contend that if their software lends itself to copyright infringement, it is
the user's responsibility, not theirs. Mr. Clarke, putting into practice a view
expressed by many in the free-software movement, takes the more extreme
position that copyright protection is simply obsolete in the Internet era.
A test
version of his Freenet program -- written in England and now distributed free
to many countries around the world -- was posted on the World Wide Web in
March.
Mr.
Clarke, who lives in London and works for a small electronic commerce company,
said last week in a telephone interview that there had been more than 15,000
downloads of the early versions of his product, indicating that hundreds or
perhaps thousands of network servers on the World Wide Web are already running
the program. Any file that any user wants to offer to others can be made
available through the system. So far, that includes software programs, video
pornography and a copy of George Orwell's "1984."
Mr.
Clarke said he was confident that corporations trying to develop complex
technologies to encrypt information or otherwise halt the free sharing of
computer data would ultimately fail. "I have two words for these
companies: give up," he said. "There is no way they are going to stop
these technologies. They are trying to plug holes in a dam that is about to
burst."
That
attitude, plus the fact that millions of users have come to rely on easy access
to digital information via the Internet, suggests that the issue may quickly
outstrip the current debate over copyright infringement between the recording
industry association and a variety of Internet music distributors.
"I
have no shortage of gray hairs from worrying about these programs," said
Talal G. Shamoon, a Silicon Valley executive who heads a working group of the
Secure Digital Music Initiative, a technology and entertainment industry working
group.
Some
legal experts believe that the intellectual property laws are being used in an
effort to grapple with technologies they were never intended to address.
"Copyright
law is not the right tool in the case of many of the new technologies,"
said Pamela Samuelson, a digital technology and copyright expert at the law
school of the University of California at Berkeley. "The question will
quickly become whether other governments have reasons to try to regulate these
new systems or whether the U.S. government has the ability to regulate
them."
Indeed,
law enforcement officials are only beginning to wrestle with the implications
of new technologies that will permit the anonymous, instant, global
distribution of information of any kind. "We're obviously looking at all
of these," said Christopher Painter, deputy chief of the Justice
Department's computer crime and intellectual property section. "It makes
our job more difficult and makes it harder to find the people who are
perpetrating crimes."
Freenet,
which Mr. Clarke conceived while he was an undergraduate at the University of
Edinburgh, is intended to function without any centralized control point.
"Freenet is a near-perfect anarchy," he said.
Another
Internet digital distribution program, Gnutella, created by software developers
at the Nullsoft subsidiary of America Online, has the same distributed approach
employed by Freenet, meaning that there is no central directory of what
information the system contains.
Unlike
Napster, which is limited to digital music files, Gnutella makes it possible to
distribute video, software and text documents as well.
America
Online declared Gnutella an "unauthorized freelance project" in
March, just hours after it was made available on the Internet. But since its
developers made its code freely available, independent programmers have
continued to refine Gnutella even though the project was officially canceled.
Many
computer industry executives contend that if the recording industry's suit
against Napster succeeds, it will simply lead digital-music enthusiasts to use
alternatives, like Gnutella and Freenet, which are even less open to copyright
enforcement.
"So
are all the musicians and record companies going to continue their suits
against Napster?" a Gnutella user who identified himself as Panicst8 wrote
in a recent network posting. "It seems kind of pointless, or have they
just not figured out yet that Gnutella is about 10,000 times more effective at
locating what you want?"
Freenet
goes several steps beyond Gnutella in an effort to protect the anonymity of
those who publish or copy information electronically. It encrypts each file and
scrambles the key -- actually a long number -- needed to find the file within
the system.
And
Freenet incorporates a digital "immune system" that responds to any
effort to determine the location of a piece of information by spreading the
information elsewhere in the network.
Freenet
relies on a system of volunteers who run the program on network computers, or
servers, Mr. Clarke said, and it will even be difficult for the operators of
individual parts of the network to determine which computer holds any
particular file.
For the
moment, at least, copyright holders can take comfort from the fact that Freenet
is more efficient at obscuring the source of information than at helping users
find it. Mr. Clarke has not yet built a search capability into the system, so
users must find other ways to let one another know how to retrieve files.
And
technologists like Mr. Shamoon say systems like Freenet present a challenge,
but not an insurmountable one. In addition to his industry role with the Secure
Digital Music Initiative, Mr. Shamoon is senior vice president for media at the
InterTrust Technologies Corporation, a Silicon Valley company that builds
systems for protecting intellectual property.
He cites
the possibility of the transmission of viruses and other harmful programs as
being one of the obvious risks inherent in electronic communities where no
basis for trust inherently exists.
"From
a trust standpoint, the current generation of tools such as Gnutella and
Freenet are a nightmare for the same reason that badly constructed social
communities are a nightmare," Mr. Shamoon said.
The
recording industry will survive, he argues, if it is able to offer its users
new things of value.
"There
are a lot of dangers here," he said. "But as a society, we're very
adept at adapting to compensate for these things."
Mr.
Clarke, it seems, would not disagree. Citing past innovations from the
photocopier to magnetic tape, he writes on his Web site, "Artists and
publishers all adapted to those new technologies and learned how to use them
and profit from them; they will adapt to Freenet as well."
May 10,
2000