James Delahunty
4 Aug 2005 19:42
On Wednesday a group of developers announced that new software for filesharing will be available by the end of the year, but this software has an advantage over most other P2P software. The claim is that this P2P software will provide it's users with real anonymity. Called a "Darknet", this new system offers users anonymity while sharing information on a decentralised system. While offering anonymity, making copyright infringement safer is not the aim of this group.
Since P2P file sharing networks became popular, large amounts of copyrighted material has been shared amongst the users of the networks, much to the anger of the copyright holders. Many (including the recording and movie industries) have taken legal action; the recording industry accounting for more than 14,000 suits worldwide so far since the first lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2003.
The tactics used to find people who are sharing copyrighted material seems foolproof; everyone has an IP address. This IP address is required for file transfers to take place. That means, anyone who is downloading from someone on a P2P network, can very easily find the IP address of that person (and also, it is easy to find IP addresses of people who have potentially got copyrighted music in their "shared folders" by making a simple search of a P2P network).
New P2P projects offer "anonymity" by never having the uploader or downloader directly connected to each other. Software like Mute uses file routing instead, which means that if you are connected to the network, you act as a "proxy" for other users transferring files to each other and they act as proxies for you too. Also to defeat the problem with searching, the network assigns everyone a "virtual address" which is what you will receive while making searches instead of IP addresses.
This is obviously a problem for those who are fighting piracy on P2P networks; if many networks could come along like this one and be successful, then it could be a real problem. The Supreme Court Grokster ruling stated that owners and operators of P2P services could be held accountable for copyright infringement by users in some cases (such as networks that advertise and promote it's use for piracy). Freenet however, doesn't advertise this network as a safe haven for piracy but does take the side of privacy over copyright enforcement.
Ian Clarke, head of the Freenet project said that having freedom in communications and following copyrights is not possible, as the two are "mutually exclusive". However, if this new service is half as success as they seem to hope it is, you can be sure it will be met with fast and hard opposition. Test versions of the software exists but the group said it is neither "user-friendly nor secure at this point."
Source:
Betanews