Future Pocket P2P - Discreet Data Sharing?

zilym writes "Think about a class of portable devices that include storage space, wireless networking (ala 802.11b), and user loadable Software. For these devices, why not implement a protocol for adhoc, wireless data sharing (Pocket P2P)? This is what I'm imagining... Lots of people carry around Pocket P2P devices hidden in their car, backpack, purse, pocket, handglider, whatever. Normally these devices stay half dormant, listening to see if another Pocket P2P device is in range. When one or more Pocket P2P's get within range of each other, they automatically trade their data store with each other." This is a keen glance at the future with enormous consequences -- unless copyright law is drastically extended, a clever hardware hack a decade from now could be the Model A to Napster's Model T. Are we living in the ten-year bubble before the collapse of entertainment media copy prevention?

"IMHO this vehicle for data sharing would be very discreet, anonymous, and unstoppable. Your ISP would not be involved, so they can't block your traffic. In a sufficiently crowded area of people, it would be difficult to pick out someone transmitting data and nearly impossible to locate person(s) storing a copy of said data. Pocket P2P transfers would be local and spontaneous in nature, so an organization trying to stamp it out would essentially need enforcement spying everywhere, equipped with RF detection and triangulation tools.

The devices for doing this already exist, albeit in slightly suboptimal forms (laptops, palmtops, and PDAs). However, it should not be impossible for enterprising engineers to eventually build more specialized devices toward this goal."

Technological predictions are fun and easy. Ethernet NICs cost $100 ten years ago and $10 now; 802.11b cards cost about $100 now and might cost $10 in 2012. So by then, will some entrepreneur be able to build an MP3 storage/playback device with wireless capability for $50 or $60? Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."

The hard part is legal predictions. Right now the entertainment industry is trying hard to reduce the power of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, and thereby expand their own power. And they've made their key weapons things like the DMCA and the doctrine of "contributory copyright infringement" -- going after not music's fans, but the corporations that enable music sharing. The corporations that provide your access become the bottleneck that the copyright holders can control.

But suppose someone released a Walkman-sized, cheap MP3 player that had a wireless network card used to download (legitimately acquired) MP3s from your computer? It's not Napsteresque; it's like Apple's doohickey, except it connects wirelessly. That's all.

And then suppose it turned out that a simple command given from that computer could trivially put your player into a promiscuous, music-sharing mode?

The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.

(Your problem becomes spam -- come home from the park with ad jingles disguised as Jimmy Buffett... better to trade at parties with people who are friends of friends...)

This would surely stretch "fair use" to the breaking point -- but the question becomes, what part of the chain would the copyright holders be able to attack?

Comments

Couple of thoughts

[PhotoGuy]

This reminds me of the system (in Japan, think?) where people carry little wireless devices saying what they like in a partner, and they help spot folks which are good matches. Kinda silly, but interesting nonetheless.

On the distributed P2P system, where stuff is traded as people walk by, it seems like this is a pretty simple system to thwart. Police officers could simply carry a unit themselves, and when they see a system offering up copyrighted or pirated content, they just confiscate the gear. Pretty simple. I don't think you'll ever see it take off because of this (among other reasons).

-me

Re:Couple of thoughts

[PhotoGuy]

The police can't really do that. Well, at least here in America anyway. They can't just stop people on the street, searching each and every one of them to see if one might possibly have this offending device in a pocket or backpack.

Huh? If they have probable cause, they can search you. If they see drugs through your car window, they can search your car.

And I'm pretty sure publicly emitting radio waves with pirated music and software is pretty clear-cut probably cause for a search. The fact you can't see the radio waves without a device, doesn't matter. They use other electronic devices to measure and determine illegal activity on a regular basis (radar).

And no, they wouldn't need fancy equipment to "triangulate" as another poster suggested, or have to search a dozen people. Triangulation is used for more wide-area stuff (cell phone towers). If you're close enough for IEEE 802.2 communication, I'd think a simple directional signal finder would suffice. I'm not an engineer (nor a cop, nor a lawyer :-), and maybe an engineer with more RF experience than I can comment, but I think spotting an IEEE 802.2 card in an area with the radius of a few hundred meters would be a simple weekend project. (Directional antennae, filter circuitry for the 2.4ghz range, and a signal strength meter.)

Now, I'm not saying the cops would actually bother to do this. However, if it became as popular as the walkman, I bet industry would make sure they do start enforcing it, and it wouldn't be that hard to do.

Now if the network were closed and encrypted, they wouldn't know the content. But that kind of defeats the purpose of this public-oriented system. If the public can sign up, so can enforcement.

The whole thing just strikes me as akin to an electronic equivalent of selling pirated video tapes or CD's on the street corner. Definitely illegal.

North American society seems far more permissive of things done in the privacy of one's own home. Illegal things done visibly (even if only electronically-visible) in public, is far more risky, I'd say.

I think the technological possibilities of this type of system are very exciting, but pirating music and software isn't likely to be the best use of it. (Swapping restaurant reviews for the area, and other city-information type of thing would be very cool.)

-me

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right - until you go for your first 'walk in the park' and come back to find your device full of spam, bestiality porn, and suffering it's 43rd DoS attack of the day.

Keep a door/port/service open and the standard assholes will try to fuck you up. This is no different.

This is the same argument that makes the me laugh at the bluetooth proponents...."Imagine walking down the street --- pass a pizza parlor and *bing* you get a pizza coupon on your bluetooh device." Ugh. So in this vision of the future every fucking retailer out there that spends $50 on a card will be allowed to spam me incessantly as long as i'm withing their broadcast footprint?

I'd rather put a bullet in my head now...... it'll be less painful.

j

What part of the chain..

[SteveX]

They would attack the manufacturers of the hardware. Make possession of a promiscuous mp3 player an offense the same way possession of a radar detector or certain types of radios is an offense in some places. Go after the supply chain.

The govt is probably gearing up now for the War on Piracy. :)

-Steve

You're Forgetting Something

[istartedi]

Are we living in the 10 year bubble before copy protection breaks down (or something to that effect).

If you can log onto the free P2P network anytime you want, so can the FBI. That, and a little signal triangulation is all they need for a conviction.

Nice idea, but a hard problem

[legLess]

I love this idea. Really, I love it. But there are some real problems:

First, making and selling these devices will be very hard. Not technologically, but legally and socially. I bet most of the tech work could be done in 6 months and the device could be on the market.

But this isn't Linux - development and sales of these devices will have to be centralized rather than distributed. This means a large corporation. The devices have to be very popular for Metcalfe's Law to make them useful, so they'll have to be marketed. In other words, there'll be one large company for the Feds or RIAA to target and/or intimidate.

Second, this is the farthest thing from unstoppable. How hard would it be for the Feds to setup a listening station in Central Park and flat-out arrest everyone carrying on of these? Just because they're in your pocket doesn't mean they're hidden - they'd have to announce themselves to as much of the world as possible to be of any use. Shit, the RIAA could setup a hidden station in Central Park to perform a DOS (or format) on each one as it wanders by.

Technological solutions are notoriously hard to apply to social problems, and copyright is a social problem. No magical P2P device will sound the death-knell for copyright. It's going to take a sea-change in the way people relate to and value information.

Everything can be controlled

[Eloquence]

It's nice to fantasize about a world where all existing barriers to content distribution are broken. But as long as the law is practically controlled by large corporations, these fantasies will remain just that: fantasies. In the given example case, it would be simple to impose restrictions on the manufacturers of such devices not to include distribution mechanisms without built-in DRM. (Black market is not an issue here since these devices are only relevant when you reach a certain critical mass, as some manufacturers such as Cybiko have already learned.)

Furthermore, this kind of thinking is still rather primitive: "The content industry controls everything, but ha!, we, the great hackers & crackers, will break everything they come up with, and then we will distribute it for free! But if they ask nicely, we will still send the artists a check, or something." What is currently happening in the software industry -- the slow substitution of proprietary software with copylefted software developed collaboratively by volunteers and supported by sympathetic individuals and corporations -- must repeat in all other areas of information production. If that is the case, we can use all the existing infrastructure to distribute the content in question, be it Bluetooth or be it UMTS, without any limitations. Or has anyone ever sent you a nasty letter for downloading a Linux kernel?

So we need to develop revenue and marketing models that can compete with the existing oligarchy. And in order to take the laws into our own hands, we need to reform (or rather, reinvent) democracy itself. The tools that are needed to accomplish these goals are essentially similar and closely related:

• Rating mechanisms that allow people to find high-quality content, as well as reputation mechanisms, that make it possible to select ratings according to the people who have expressed them. This makes traditional mass marketing obsolete if widely deployed. Think Slashdot (or rather Kuro5hin) effect, but on a p2p network.
• Easy and secure user-to-user payment standards. Don't think "micropayments" (the basic micropayment idea is to have incredibly tiny payments running transparently in the background all the time), think mini-payments that are clearly associated with specific transactions. Support a website, request a feature for an open-source-product, support an especially good artist, support the production of a movie or book by a renowned creator Street Performer Protocol style etc. etc. -- but much easier and more wide-spread than possible with Paypal. Probably best implemented with prepaid digital coins.
• Distributed, secure voting systems. Currently even open source projects have not yet agreed on such a standard. Optimally, the voting process should be combined with the information gathering process, so that people who vote will also be able to discuss and rate comments on the same page.

These are all key technologies, all implemented in software, that are much more important than any file-sharing solution alone. For all of them, user interfaces are of utmost importance: One click too many, one second too much latency and people will not use them. Nevertheless, little progress has been made to wide deployment of these technologies. These technologies will not only make it possible to make money with any kind of content, they will also allow more direct participation of people in the lawmaking process -- if only on the level of newly formed political parties at first.

It's all nice and good to complain about the stranglehold that the content industry has on content distribution and on lawmakers. And I'm the first to support the kid who is locked up for copying an MP3 or DivX movie. But if there's not a serious counter-culture, the industry will win. There will be licenses required for cryptography. There will be DRM in every major operating system (even in Linux, in the form of binary only drivers), because otherwise hardware will simply not run. There will be laws like the SSSCA to enforce this. This will be done on an international level using organizations such as WIPO and WTO, which are fundamentally undemocratic. There will be protests and cracks, but think "war on drugs" here: You will find few people on this site who think locking drug consumers up en masse is a good idea -- yet that's exactly what's been happening for the last decades. Don't complain about your government but then naively assume that they are actually still kind of good misled guys who just need to be sent a few nice letters. Not with the money involved in this game, now and in the future.

Create counter-culture, not cracks. That's what the revolution is all about, baby.

Tracable? Yes that's part of the beauty

[sker]

I have seen a number of comments regarding how it would be easy for Law Enforcement to nab you - yes this is precisely true.

The point is that the powers that be will then be forced to go after "regular" people, which up 'til now they have not wanted to do for fear of alienating their customers to a point even greater than they do now. This plan would leave fewer intermediaries for the RIAA & co. to bully before they have to come down on their own potential sales market directly.

Additionally, when Jane Musiqlover actually becomes criminalized, that's when this "class war" will come to a head. The first time a senator's teenaged offspring get's hauled in for file-sharing in the park, we'd see some serious talk about what makes someone a criminal. At that point, I'd hope "we, the people" would finally be ready to stand up for our rights.

To use a popular paraphrasing of Gandhi:

First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.

When the RIAA actually fights their consumers directly is when they've actually lost.

I hope.

OT: Drugs + Terrorists

[invenustus]

So now, if you use drugs, you support terrorists

Oh my God, you noticed that during the Superbowl too? Let's see, the Taliban was the group in Afghanistan we destroyed for harboring and protecting terrorists, right? If I'm not mistaken, the US government sent the Taliban $73 million in January of 2001 to help destroy the Afghan heroin trade. So I propose a new slogan:

If you support the War on Drugs, might be supporting terrorism.

(And that's not to mention Colombia at all....)

I keep saying, and I'll say again.

[tcc]

Stop putting restrictions to obsolete stuff,

innovate new technologies that will want the user to migrate to your new system, NEEDING THE HARDWARE to play it back because it will bring ADDED value/features.

This is like seeing a good movie at the theatre, would you have enjoyed a ripped screener on your x inch monitor at home or did you get a good experience watching it at the theatre with the big screen the big sound and all? yes you can reproduce that at home, but at a price, a price most people pirating the movies cannot afford. Think lord of the rings for example. Did they go bankrupt? No... far from that!

It's not my job to bring new ideas and tell these companies about the future, there are people paid 10x what I am doing right now to market new ideas and so on, if they can't deliver, they aren't worth the price they are paid, and the industry deserves to die like any buisness doing wrong decisions, if tomorrow my CEO would do something stupid, the gov wouldn't jump in at 100MPH to save us, I don't see why this should be any different for anyone else...

To get back to my point, if they would innovate on new ideas that would make the experience so much better than pirating it, they wouldn't lose. They can't blame their content being more and more crappy and more of the same to pirates, that's only a lame excuse. I still see movies making tons of money, big success, and I still go to the theatre when there's good stuff out.

HDTV is starting to appear mainstream (took a while) see? copy that to a DIVX file, its going to be huge and cumberstone to move around at a decent quality and no loss in resolution, copy it to a VHS or SVHS? you lose the initial quality, this is just an example.

Put new technologies with good content, I'm sure people will gladly pay for it. The fact that a lot of movies are being pirated and it's "hurting sales' is simply because they suck too much to go see in the theatre in the first place.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that EVERY protection scheme got broken, it pisses me off to see that the profit I am paying big corporation goes in barriers instead of innovating to bring me, the customer, a better experience for every $ invested.

They are at the service of the customers (customer by definition: someone that PAID to get a good), not the other way around, some people there seems to forget that very basic rule.

Oh come on.

[markaa]

Think "Sony Walkman that trades music with whatever other devices are around."

Now that's just stealing. I'm all for fair use with music that I buy, but this is absurd.

The device need not connect to the internet (perhaps it can't) -- it talks to whatever other devices are around. "I like Jimmy Buffett, anyone got any Jimmy Buffett? I'll trade it for some Wayne Newton." A short-range hardware Gnutella. Set some parameters, go for a walk in a public park, come home with some new music. Pass it along.

Still stealing! You can't transfer ownership of the music you've bought without tranferring the CD itself.

Why are so many people obsessed with stealing music?

-Mark