it is certainly true that the network operators will resist efforts from the music/entertainment industry. in fact the DMCA has already made law that the network operators are to be held harmless for transmitting copryright material posted by their users — unless they receive a request from a copyright holder asking them to obtain compliance from one (or more) of their customers
this thread wasn’t really meant to pursue the copyright enforcement aspect of this issue but rather to explore the implications to the use of encryption software,— particularly PGP{GPG}
but, since we have touched on the question I would add a couple notes,—
first, the music industry could hire some geeks to pose as kids and hang out in the chat rooms looking for messages related to places to get copies of music or video. and it would be easy to follow up on the leads obtained that way. the problem with a public sharing system being simply that it is very easy for moles to infiltrate such systems
another avenue would be to assemble a battery of hunting computers. a very powerful SUN/SPARC station can be set up for something like $5,000 and with a budget of $50mm quite a few such computers could be put to work, — each searching for LimeWire or other sharing systems — and each would be capable of checking the content of a number of P2P clients concurrently — rendering the slow speed of such clients un-important
these hunters could operate 24x7. if web crawlers can index the content of the internet these hunters can surely search for copyright music files.
it’s not really clear how the P2P client would use PGP to disguise content intended to be shared publicly and the hunter computers would obtain necessary access codes in the same way that other P2P participants worked
it is certainly the case that individual transmissions could be encrypted and sent and if these were negotiated in the various chat rooms this activity would be caught by the hired geeks in addition to essentially negating the use of the p2p concept
if I were a betting man I’d wager copyright pirates are on rather thin ice
i certainly agree that it isn’t practicle to require a digital signature on all packets, — but I think we are going to see changes in eMail real soon ( see HR 964 and 1525 )
as this concept spreads we may soon see a requirement for all web sites to have certificates with the web site operator responsible for content. all content with executable code need to have signatures as well as it is necessary to put a stop to all un-authorized programming.
fun chat
You'd lose that wager, every single time.
Let's take a very active field today, one which generates over a billion dollars a year in income. Spam filtering. On the one side, you have tens of thousands of programmers, working on stopping spam from appearing in your e-mail box, and on the other, you have less than a hundred working to fill it.
There is no larger group of people out there working actively on a singular goal. We have governments, private enterprise, individuals all working towards the common goal of eliminating unsolicited e-mail in your box. The e-mail filtering center for Yahoo and Google take up ten thousand processors, yet spam still gets through.
Now let's paint your bet - well over a hundred thousand working for many reasons - some simply to see if it can be done, others under the concept that the copyright should be violated, others for profit. On the opposing side, you have maybe sixty to eighty programmers, trying to come up with new concepts and ideas. A hundred to one longshot, or as those in the gaming industry say: easy money.
AT&T's filtering concept is that they'll not try to go after pirates, they'll simply decide what it is you're going to be permitted to see on the Internet, and lock up everything else. Moronic. You could lock up every port from being relayed, except you still end up with a series of ports that must be left open, that for viewing websites, transmitting or receiving e-mail, USENET. And all those are holes that hackers will exploit to use to further their copyright violations.
So, yeah, I'll take your bet. You'll lose.