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Clay Shirky: RIAA Succeeds Where Cypherpunks Fail
scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption: 'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.'"
from the article:
to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.
This may or may not be an exaggeration, I have no idea, but Shirky makes a good point. When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
At this time, it seems that the RIAA is winning, and we are moving inexorably towards a world where large corporations control what people do with there computers. However, because there is so little popular respect at the moment for copyright law, it follows that eventually those laws will change.
Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that many laws will be completely rewritten to better accommodate the changes that the internet has brought upon society. Many of these changes will be for the better, and the end result will almost certainly be a more free and open society. Unfortunately, democracies are slow to act, so there will be years more of legal confusions and abuses of power before things finally straighten out.
Let's make a difference
Encryption is good, as long as the people using it are good. When people use encryption to hurt other people, it becomes a serious liability.
Well, DUH, it's a tool, nothing more.
You can say the same about cars, knives, guns and just about anything else.
The RIAA has blunders at least twice. First it shutdown Napster 'way late (because it wasn't easy), now it is harassing KaZaa users with even less success. The next incarnation will be even tougher. They ought to be putting their energies into a paradigm shift like iPod. Or maybe even running their business competantly, with decent A&R budgets and better terms for musicians and customers since their distribution monopoly has faded.
Encryption, like all technology, is amoral.
Good and evil come from people. This is ultimatly where most legislation fails at stopping evil. You legislate away the technology that evil uses in the hopes of stopping it. However, evil rarely follows laws. So the laws are draconian to compensate for evil not following thems. The end result is that good does not benifit from said technology while evil thumbs thier nose at good.
Encryption will be used for evil, regardless. If you do not outlaw it then the playing field will be level.
Not really. There's been several explosions of various file/disk encryption products. Your handheld device isn't a Somebody(Something?) until it's got at least a dozen "encrypted" personal information storage widgets for it.
The problem is that encryption is 90% snake oil. Usually it's written by someone who thinks they know encrpytion- and encryption isn't, to coin the phrase, like a hand grenade; close doesn't count. Zimmerman is famous for his saying that "anyone who claims to have unbreakable encryption doesn't"(apologies for paraphrasing).
Encryption also does little when physical security can't be controlled; Dallas Semi had the right idea with their iButtons, which brought reasonably secure key storage to the masses(if opened, for example, it erased itself) but it's gone pretty much nowhere; you just don't see them in widespread use(unlike, say, a proximity card or magswipe). I suspect even USB keys now vastly outnumber iButton devices.
All the encryption in the world won't do you any good if you can't store the keys securely...and these days, all it takes is a janitor with a CDROM with linux that 'phones home' and sends back choice tidbits...or an ipod.....or a USB hard drive..or a USB memory key...or a blank CDR, since so many machines come with CD burners now...
Please help metamoderate.
This is not the problem!!!!
The problem is not people intercepting your mp3s - the problem is sharing an mp3 with a guy working for the RIAA or in my case the CRIA and they get your IP and then they go to your ISP in an attempt to get you booted off the net, exactly as happened to me.
For instance - on Sourceforge there is a sooperencypted IRC project for safe sharing.
Useless.
All the RIAA spies have to do is go on the net, get that software, join the queue for mp3s then rat you out exactly as specified above.
What we NEED is a way to share files in such a manner as the receiver has no idea what your IP is.
This is not going to be easy. (And please don't mention Freenet ok?)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Or just boycott the RIAA and be a good guy and support cheap music, not downloading music you don't own. Or learn how to make your own music.
Well, you do (for one), or at least you would if you thought things through.
Almost no one whom you'd consider to be "Evil" considers themselves to be evil. And they would likely tag some people as "Evil" even if you would disagree with their assessment. And almost no one would agree with you on what is good and what is evil completely. To do that, they'd have to be you.
Which means that if the world were to function by your own self-centered definition of good and evil, you'd be all alone.
Nature itself doesn't have a concept of good or evil. Which means regardless of wether we'd each want a level playing field, it's ultimately a level playing field on which we must play.
Now "society" is just one of the teams on this playing field; a big team, I'd admit, and one you're likely so familiar with as to believe that no others exist, but it's just a team nonetheless. As you point out, your society has created your society's laws and has it's own interest in seeing that people on any other team are placed at a disadvantage. After all, it has to protect those "rights" which your society holds so dearly.
Is it possible that members of some other society might have their own values, profess their own beliefs, and institute their own laws to protect the rights they hold so dear? Some of these might conflict with the values, beliefs, and laws of your society; does that make them "Evil"?
Only a troll would believe so.
Yet even at this point, we're making a judgment call saying that one kind of "society" can be more "good" than another in a way that a "non-society" could never approach. That's a widely held belief, but there's still a lot of time left on the clock. Maybe Douglas Adams was right and some day we'll decide that even the trees were a bad idea, and we should have all stayed in the oceans..."
If you continue to insist that the playing field be tipped selfishly in your favor, then you must admit that, over time, more and more people will become aligned against you in their own self interest. Each time you exclude someone by calling them (or their team/society) "Evil" you build a greater force which sees you the same way. And the stronger you hold your beliefs, the more motivate they are to hold theirs.
I could not possibly have said it better myself.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.