Pirates set sail to Darknet island

NY Times: Darknets: Virtual Parties With a Select Group of Invitees. I'm briefly quoted in the piece, as are Lawrence Lessig and Ian Clarke. Excerpt:

"Our intent is not to circumvent the copyright world," said Josh Felser, a co-founder of Grouper. "This is about personally generated content."

Mr. Felser and other advocates of commercial darknets think they are fulfilling consumer demand for what might best be called personal distribution, a medium whose potential content expands with every video-equipped cellphone and pocket-size digital camera bought.

"The big play for us is personal video," Mr. Felser said last month, as he toyed with a moviemaking digital camera in his office in Mill Valley, Calif. "Personal video is everywhere, and people are wanting to share video that they create." ...

The Register UK had this riposte today: Pirates set sail to Darknet island.

In the current era, one of the great expressions of friendship is sharing experiences, through snippets of video, personally recorded music and pictures. The record labels should be trying to harness this, not put an end to it.

Personally-created materials take time to be seen or listened to and this eats into the available time that the young today have to listen to copyrighted works. This is a far greater threat to content owners and a world where the power of P2P networks is used to create, index and share non-copyrighted works of high quality is only just around the corner.

One missing piece in both articles is the use of darknets as collaboration tools -- for artists, musicians and other creative individuals to share half-finished works and to trade them across the network as if they were collaborating in real time and real space.

Darknets are becoming a way of trading our media, not their media.