So, downloaders of dubious legal standing are up in arms since their favourite
torrent seed sites
went offline yesterday.
It should be pointed out that BitTorrent is still a
great way of getting healthy, open-source CD and DVD iso images, and I heartily recommend it, as it allows you to give back in the form of upload bandwidth.
What interests me about the copyright sharing sites being shut down is the potential successor to BitTorrent (because if the BitTorrent network dies when the movie/music crowd move on, we'll all end up using whatever's next). A prime candidate is likely to be
The Freenet Project. This is a much, much more insidious technology than bittorrent;
" Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.
Communications by Freenet nodes are encrypted and are "routed-through" other nodes to make it extremely difficult to determine who is requesting the information and what its content is.
Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content. "
When will the "authorities" and the RIAA learn? - the uber-geeks are very, very smart and every time they shut a file sharing service down, a new one will pop up that is more difficult to police than the last one. Eventually they will end up with file sharing happening in a totally invisible way and in such a manner that they can't prosecute anyone or even know how much content is being downloaded.
Even more worrying is that freenet will (potentially) allow distribution of illegal content of far worse nature than copyrighted films and music, and this content could be on your hard drive as a user (although you are not responsible for it and cannot see it).
The ethical quagmire thickens, and I agree with the principle of free speech, but it seems to me that FreeNet is worse for everyone except the unscrupulous end user. I'd prefer that someone sensible sat down and worked out a happy and reasonable middle-ground, but that will never happen, so I'll probably end up using FreeNet to download Linux .iso's in 6 months and giving the scumbags somewhere else to peddle their filth online.
It's all just shit - I wish they'd been smart enough to leave BitTorrent alone.
