New P2P technologies are more effectively shielding the identities and net addresses of their users, according to a John Borland story at news.com. This is not surprising given that the past generation of P2P systems did essentially nothing to hide their users’ addresses. Agents of the RIAA exploited that lack of protection to identify people uploading copyrighted music, leading to the wave of lawsuits against P2P users.
Given the lawsuits, and the relative ease with which P2P technologies can be redesigned to shield users’ addresses, it’s not surprising to see such redesigns. If anything, the surprise is that this didn’t happen sooner.
It will take some time for address-shielding technology to be adopted, but eventually it will be. And this will be bad news for copyright owners, because it will thwart their current identify-and-sue tactic, which seems to be having some effect.
Copyright owners’ best hope in the short run is that users will have trouble telling the effective shielding technologies from the bogus ones, and so will come to doubt that any of the shields work.
BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa is already trying to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the shields; he says in the article that his company will still be able to defeat the all of the shields. He is wrong, in the sense that BayTSP-proof shields are certainly possible and probably already exist; but it’s easy to see how his claim advances his company’s interests.
The adoption of address shields is just the latest step in the ongoing co-evolution of P2P systems and media business models.
