[p2p-research] Never Mind the Policy: Can Filtering Technology Stop p2p?

[Kevin Carson]

On 9/4/09, Tomas Rawlings <tom at fluffylogic.net> wrote:
> Source:
> http://blog.catbot.org/content/never-mind-policy-can-filtering-technology-stop-p2p

>  * 100% Effective – One key thing about internet ecology is that it is very,
> very easy for users to change p2p software. Users can also communicate
> virally, so can pass information on about holes in any system rapidly. The
> exploitation of the loop-holes will also be viral. This means a 99.9%
> effective system upon implementation will rapidly become a 0% one.
>  * Psychic – The other issues is that once a flag goes up, there will be
> many, many people trying many many methods to by-pass the system. This will
> be continuous and will consist of lines of attack from new directions. The
> system implemented need to anticipate and head-off these attacks to stay
> in-the-game.

Another point never considered by those who think copyright lockdown
can be achieved by a technical fix:  sharing by "sneakernet."
People can burn copies of any CD they own and give physical copies to
their friends for the cost of a blank CD.  It's far more feasible and
less risky than the kind of photocopier samizdat that circulated in
the old USSR, and could easily play a role under corporate proprietary
information lockdown directly analogous to what samizdat played under
communist information lockdown.

Back in the pre-Internet days, the record companies complained of
people duplicating casettes for their friends--and they were
completely impotent to do anything about it.  We can do the same thing
today with CDs, with incomparably superior levels of fidelity, just as
easily.  How do those filth plan to stop that?

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html