The entertainment industry's open-ended war against online piracy -- both real and imagined -- has spawned its share of unintended consequences. But perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, and arguably the most troubling for groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, involves the race to create a new breed of tougher, more secure peer-to-peer networks.
If you believe the industry's press releases, its recent string of legal victories against the likes of BearShare and Kazaa represented major victories against P2P-based music and movie piracy. The reality, of course, is very different: These networks have been obsolete for years now, having given way to a third wave of even more decentralized P2P technologies -- including, of course, BitTorrent.
Is Hollywood prepared to launch yet another wave of litigation in order to bring BitTorrent to heel, one user at a time if necessary? You can bet on it. The problem is that once again, the entertainment industry is a step behind the state of the art in P2P technology -- and the next wave of peer-to-peer technology could leave the industry pounding in vain against a virtual brick wall.
Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer wrote earlier this week about one of the new approaches to P2P that could soon give the RIAA fits: The darknet:
Last December, I wrote about a team that was constructing a plugin for Firefox called AllPeers. Claiming that their product would be "The best thing to happen to Firefox... since Firefox," the AllPeers plugin promised to make file sharing between friends easy and efficient. At the same time, supporters of the service proclaimed that it would protect its users from lawsuits from the RIAA and MPAA due to its darknet architecture.
Now, after many months of development, AllPeers is finally ready to unveil its technology to the world. The application is scheduled to be released later today, albeit in beta form. According to the AllPeers CEO and project leader, Cedric Maloux, the plugin represents more than 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript code.
AllPeers, Reimer says, is still based on the BitTorrent protocol; what makes it unique is the fact that is applies a decentralized client-server infrastructure with a network of trusted users. While it is certainly possible that infiltrators will find their way onto such networks in order to gather evidence of copyright violations -- a process that is already slow, tedious, and error-prone -- AllPeers promises to make such efforts immensely more difficult. Indeed, it may even raise questions about the legality of "trespassing" upon such closed networks, especially since doing so will almost certainly involve joining them under false pretenses.
AllPeers, like other efforts to build a snoop-proof BitTorrent P2P platform, is still very much a work in progress; people who view this technology as a license to steal are about as dim as they are dishonest. Even so, these technologies promise to add still more cost, complexity, and risk to the entertainment industry's increasingly ugly legal war against its own customers. That must be an appalling prospect for an industry that finds itself declaring "victory" against the same enemies, again and again, with nothing to show for their gains except a massive legal bill and a public-relations disaster that will take years to overcome.
