Cyberspace Programmers Confront Copyright Laws
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 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."