World to MPAA: Mind Your Own Beezwax
MPAA to world: Stop sharing files. World to MPAA: Not everything is about you.
Within hours of the announcement that the MPAA will be launching a legal battle against BitTorrent and eDonkey, several intrepid programmers have proven that you can't stop file sharing with a lawsuit by writing P2P clients with just a few lines of code.
“Today’s actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and operate computer servers and Web sites that, by design, allow people to infringe copyrighted motion pictures,” said John Malcolm, head of the Motion Picture Association of America’s antipiracy unit.
Going after individuals who share copywritten material is one thing, but going after someone simply because they can share files is quite another.
I oppose these attempts to regulate free speech. Any medium that can be used to have a conversation can be used to break the law. Just because until now the broadcast mediums were extremely tightly controlled by the mega corporations and wouldn't break copyright (they stood more to gain for upholding it) doesn't mean the mechanisms of free speech should be tightly controlled too.
Here are a handful of P2P applications that will be extremely hard to regulate. Their extremely small size makes them easy to incorporate into other applications.
The world's smallest P2P app, written in 15 lines of Python code.
A response to Tiny P2P, MoleStar is a non-trivial filesharing application in 9 lines of Perl, using no protocol library more sophisticated than TCP.
Peer to peer client in six lines with Ruby
I think you know what to expect by now.
And just in case you think the RIAA and MPAA may be listening in on your instant messaging conversatinos, Off-the-Record Messaging. It not only provides basic encryption services, it gives you plausible deniability after the fact.
If you're afraid of accidentally downloading an illegal file from BitTorrent, well... here's Legal Torrents.
The grandfather of encrypted, decentralized P2P applications, written by an (now ex) AOL employee, Waste lets you chat & share files with a trusted group of peers.
- Studios launch campaign against BitTorrent (guardian.co.uk)
- Hollywood Wants BitTorrent Dead (wired.com)
- Hollywood sues file-sharing servers (msnbc.msn.com)
- P2P In 15 Lines of Code (slashdot.org)
- P2P Battle Reaches FTC (wired.com)
- Plausible Deniability From Rockstar Cryptographers (slashdot.org)
- Followig up on Torrent Shutdowns (slashdot.org)
page first created on Thursday, December 16, 2004
© Mark Wieczorek