Darknets, Joel Tenenbaum and Big Music
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Today sees the opening of the Sony BMG Music Entertainment v Tenenbaum trial.
In it, the RIAA, owned and operated by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian), will try to scam judge Nancy Gertner and an American jury in a civil copyright infringement case.
The RIAA claims Joel Tenenbaum shared music online without permission and that his actions, and the actions of others like him, are devastating the corporate music industry.
Files shared equal sales lost, they promise.
But they know full well they’re lying through their teeth.
The assertion has been dismissed in a number of academic and other studies, and, “Customers who download music and movies for free would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product,” wrote US judge James P. Jones, recently, denying an RIAA request for restitution on those grounds, and holding the RIAA reasoning to be “unsound.
The Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke
The Big 4 record labels, which separately and collectively control the corporate music industry, know there’s absolutely nothing they can do to stem the tide of music that’s flooding the Internet.
They also know the file sharing they cite is no more than the visible (and very small) section of a huge iceberg that began to grow, layer-by-layer, when it was discovered large music files could be reduced in size to the extent they could be passed around online, computer-to-computer, peer-to-peer, people to people.
The labels could, and should, have been tapping into this phenomenon to the benefit of shareholders and music lovers alike. Instead, they tried to crush it and, congenitally unable to admit they made a terrible tactical, marketing and business mistake, began attacking their own customers in a bid to gain control of who distributes what online, and how they do it.
Now, the image of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke comes to mind.
P2P networks and indexing are the focus. But they’re just one small element of the phenomenon of openness and sharing which comprises the fabric of the Internet.
The darknet spectrum is where the real world of online music thrives.
It should be called the Light Net.
‘Browser-based darknet’
A Forbes story says,”For those struggling with privacy on the Web, security researchers at Hewlett-Packard might have found the light at the end of tunnel.”
Then,”Two HOP insecurity experts are planning to tell the Black Hat USA 2009 security conference next week about their plans to build a browser-based darknet,” said a second in The Inquirer.
“Darknets are overt, private computer networks used for ultra-secure communications and file sharing,” it said, going on:
“Billy Hoffman, manager of HP`s web security group, and Matt Wood, senior security researcher at HP, have been using the new generation of JavaScript engines in Chrome`s V8 and Firefox`s TraceMonkey to carry out the encryption necessary to make a darknet work easily. Apparently they have developed a prototype browser-based darknet called Veiled as proof of concept. Information Week said that the pair don`t intend to release the software or make the source code available.”
In the earlier Forbes piece, “The researchers, who previewed their concept to Forbes, say their model works like a private Internet on top of the existing public one: People can share information like files and messages via the Internet medium, but without the kind of public-facing personally identifiable information that Internet protocol addresses provide.”
And, “What we’ve done is taken the idea of a darknet and moved it into the browser platform,” it has Wood, the HP Web security researcher who developed the idea over the last several months, stating. “This is really like a darknet for everyone. If you can use the Internet, you can use a darknet.”
Someone, “navigates to a Web site that serves up some JavaScript code that runs in the user’s browser,” Forbes says, going on:
“That code uses the local storage capacity built into the latest version of browsers like Google, Chrome and Internet Explorer. As a result, each user gives up some local storage that holds redundant, encrypted slices of data that together are coordinated and shared by the darknet. As a whole, the information exists so long as the darknet exists.”
Like Google, Chrome and Internet Explorer?
Then it really would be a darknet.
The tip of a massive iceberg
The file sharing cited by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music and Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney is just the tip of a massive iceberg.
And they know it.
Suing people for uploading and/or downloading from the P2P networks means absolutely nothing.
They know that too.
But the entertainment industry has to have something that’s easily identifiable by the Great Unwashed, and Joel Tenenbaum and others like him fit the bill, unfortunately for them.
Because the cartels are deliberately victimising perfectly innocent people to provide content for a public misinformation blitz, when they know perfectly well the real action is so far below the surface of the net as most people know it that they can never hope to penetrate it.
They can never halt the activity which goes on, there, every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year.
No research has ever estimated the extent to which people share with each other under the radar. But whatever the amounts may be, it’s reasonable to assume they dwarf anything even the cartels can come up with.
In April we ran DarkNets: not tomorrow, but here and now.
It featured surfer’s pictorial representation of a typical file sharing network (above), together with an outline from a p2pnet reader who prefers to remain anonymous.
In the intro, “DarkNets range from simply passing (and mailing) discs around, to WASTE, through trusted friend-to-friend bulletin boards, FreeWAN cells, Freenet-type sites, physical and WiFi sneaker nets of various kinds, hidden sites, and so on,” I said.
And nothing has changed.
Every day people around the world log on to large and small darknets and share not only corporate music and movies, but also documents and papers of various kinds, images, home-made software applications, independent movies and music.
You name it.
So targeting people such as Joel in what’s no more than a dark and dirty public relations exercise isn’t merely an obscene misapplication of the American justice system and the useless victimisation of completely innocent people, it’s a total waste of time.
People share.
They always have and they always will.
If they didn’t, we’d still be living in caves.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
unsound – `Files shared don`t equal sales lost,` judge rules, January 16, 2009
Forbes – Your Own Private Internet, June 15, 2009
The Inquirer – HP builds darknet, July 22, 2009
July, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
ShareTheWealth⢠©®
///////
| – _|
| 0 o |
| | | |
| (..) |
| ___ |
| \_ / | So… if I turn off the light
\__/ I getz darknetz?
| |
July 31st, 2009 at 9:35 pm
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Downloaders-Blues/dp/B001KGVT5I