Darknets, copyright and trading our own stuff

From today's San Jose Mercury News: The new threat to Hollywood: Darknets.

Fresh from its victory in the Supreme Court Grokster case, Hollywood faces a new Internet threat -- the rise of ``darknets,'' or private, encrypted networks that allow the anonymous exchange of music, movies and other digital files. ...

Darknets are nothing new. Even before Napster popularized Internet file-sharing in the late 1990s, people traded files through Internet relay chat channels and early electronic bulletin boards of the Usenet, which predated the World Wide Web.

The recent court rulings prompted the creators of file-swapping networks to go back underground.

``In that sense, it's a continuation of what the Internet has always been about,'' said J.D. Lasica, author of `Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. ``You can today trade files over e-mail or over Instant Messenger or any number of ways. Short of re-architecting the entire Internet, there's no way the authorities are ever going to stop this completely.''

I devote a chapter in Darknet to Ian Clarke and his Freenet project -- Ian is the centerpiece of this new wave of articles about darknets. But it doesn't make sense to me to tout this as a copyright-circumvention technology in any circumstance.

Developers will -- and should -- build legal, safe, secure, private darknets. It's not about trading Hollywood's stuff. It's about trading our own.