'Steal This File Sharing Book'

The title of Steal This File Sharing Book: What They Won’t Tell Your About File Sharing, by Wallace Wang (No Starch Press), may make it sound as if you’re thumbing through a blueprint on how to take down the entertainment industry and their allies at the Justice Department, but what we really have here is the definitive look at the file sharing movement.

Wang’s right: You won’t find this kind of information about the ins and outs of the P2P networks in the traditional press. Music, movie, video games, software, porn -- it's all here, ready to snag with a few mouse clicks.

The author pokes and prods his way through the shadowy corners of the Darknet, exposing the realms where millions of people come together to trade files and engage in other furtive activities that threaten the republic’s foundations. Or not.

Most of us know about the Kazaas and eDonkeys of the world. Wang takes us deeper, showing how to conduct more effective searches for the files we crave. Level by level, we descend through the rungs of P2P, from file sharing software like Shareaza, Deepnet Explorer and Songcrawler to Usenet, Internet Relay Chat, and Manolito, “a treasure trove for finding rare and bootleg music that you probably won’t find anywhere else.”

Anonymity and hiding your identity are covered, natch, for the readers who want to do more than just read about these services. Wang offers tips on data protection, how to stop spyware and pop-up ads, and how to securely delete files. There’s even a section on building your own private encrypted network, or darknet.

In a 270-page book, I spotted only a couple of places where the author stumbles, such as when he describes how consumers can simply copy a commercial VHS tape or DVD from one machine to another, when Macrovision has prevented this for years.

Unlike Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, which openly advocated counterculture legal hijinks a generation ago, Wang is no bomb-thrower, offering a fairly down-the-middle discourse on the legalities of all this rather than advocating a mass P2P assault on the door of the entertainment industries’ Bastille.

While a few chapters briefly touch on the causes and ethics of illegal file sharing, Steal This File Sharing Book is less interested in the whys or whos than with the how-to’s. For anyone who seriously dabbles in digital media, has a stake in the file sharing wars or is simply interested in how today’s generation of kids has found new ways of sticking it to The Man, Wang’s book is a must-read.

J.D. Lasica reviewed books, among many other things, as an editor at the Sacramento Bee from 1985 to 1997.