RIAA forced technology weed to choke it

THE RIAA HAVE PUT THEMSELVES into a corner in a technical sense, and pretty much assured their demise. No, not due to arrogance and stupidity, or stupidity and arrogance, it wasn't even greed this time, directly. The problem is a technical one, pure and simple.

If you go back to the beginnings of P2P, basically Napster as far as the general public is concerned, you has a really incredible system. It was the easiest P2P server to search, quick, accessible, and you found what you wanted with frightening regularity. The RIAA saw this and concluded that it had to die. It may not have been illegal, but that didn't stop them from being spent into the ground and badgered to death.

Rather than pointing the finger at these tactics, lets look at the tech. Napster was a centralised database, and you could query it for what you needed. It knew pretty much everything that was on the entire Napster network, and any request made would search the whole thing. It also worked only for MP3s but there were hacks, plugins, and work-arounds for that. Most people couldn't figure these things out, but they technically did exist.

Part of the reason that Napster was brought down was a technicality more or less, they had the names of the files on their servers. While I can't recall if they were actually proven to have done anything illegal, they were in a grey area, according to some.

At first, the RIAA played less evil and asked Napster to block any infringing files. With the technology of P2P being new at the time, and no tools existing to do such things, it was pretty much impossible to do that. If Led Zeppelin was found to be bannable, you could find Led Zeppelin songs until you got bored. Napster actually tried to comply, but the RIAA was not satisfied.

Napster owned the P2P market. Nothing else existed at first, and even when they came up, nothing had anything close to the offerings found on Napster. Everything was contained in this one little server, in this one little company, in this one little community. It was summarily stomped into the ground using lawyers, politicians, and other undead creatures.

No, I am not talking about the fact that I have not, and will not spend another dime on music as long as the RIAA exists, I didn't spend that much money to begin with. It is at that point that the RIAA lost any hope of putting the genie back in the bottle.

Before we get to why, lets look at what there is out there today. We have Grokster, eDonkey, GNUtella, Bit-Torrent, Kazaa, and dozens of other programs. Some are second generation, some are third, some are bigger numbers. They all do different things in different ways, but have a few common threads.

One of the biggest threads is decentralization. Napster had a central server with a single point of attack. Its downfall was mainly caused by this. From the second generation on, you had distributed servers. You could run your own server and tie them into others. Searches took longer, were less accurate and there was no guarantee you would be searching a single other machine, much less the entire network.

It was however, unstompable. For every node you took the time and money to blast out of existence, there were several thousand others springing up. Clearly, the old tactics would not work. To make matters worse, these new networks were aware of the tactics being used against them, and actively tried to nullify them.

As the network programmers were adding features, they were also adding security, both for them, and for their users. Things started out simple, like support for file types other than MP3, and quickly became more sophisticated. Military grade encryption? No problem. Licence restrictions that beat the pigopolists with the very sticks they created? Sure, pick any of five. Random user names, obfuscated IP addresses, changing ports and just about everything else you could think of has been done by now.

The real stake in the heart of the RIAA and friends came with the complete removal of servers, in a true peer to peer sense. Instead of having many little servers, you had every node doing dual purpose client and server jobs. Searches were completely decentralised, and the RIAA was finished, period.

The recent string of stinging court losses for the Greediest Monopoly on Earth in the US courts assured any chance the RIAA had was gone. Its worst nightmare was confirmed, as everyone else just knew, the services were completely legal. The Grokster decision affirmed the right of the companies to provide the services they always have, and to do so with impunity. People using it may be guilty of crimes, but the services themselves are not illegal.

The RIAA, and to a lesser degree, the MPAA and friends were faced with a hostile consumer base, a hostile software industry, and more troubling to them, an increasingly hostile justice system. When the courts start wondering about your practices, you might want to take the hint and move on to another line of attack. I don't think they will, but we can always hope they will come to their senses.

The thing that killed the RIAA was not the court system nor the technological barriers. It wasn't even that people realised that the odds of them getting sued are about that of getting hit by lightning while at a doctor's office, being read your diagnosis of AIDS and cancer, while being trampled by a herd of zebras. All at 3:41 on a Tuesday.

No, the real problem is that there is no longer anyone to kiss up to. The RIAA forced decentralisation by attacking anyone who could be seen as popping their heads up. They showed how futile suing their customers are, it barely makes headlines any more. And now they have lost the big fight in the courts.

They simply have to play nice, there is nothing else they can do. All their lynch 'em now and ask questions later policies have failed, so it is honey, not stick time. But who do you kiss up to? If you come up with an amazing way to identify and filter illegal content, who implements it?

See the problem? The network providers will tell you in very colourful language exactly where to shove it, no doubt there. Even if they didn't, what would they implement it on again? They hold none of the databases, you and I do. If they manage to coerce Kazaa into forcing the filters onto your machine somehow, there are a dozen other networks out there. If they get them all, a lot of the code is open source, I'd give it 30 minutes before a dozen new networks spring up.

In the old days, there was one provider, and one repository, one throat to strangle. It was manageable technically if it came down to a technical solution. Instead of allowing that technical solution to blossom, they went the legal route, and lost. In the intervening years, the tech went around them, and they sat still, and possibly regressed.

The problem with forced evolution is that it tends to work. The RIAA made the networks evolve technically, from a relatively incocous MP3 network to the file sharing network from hell. There is nothing you can't get anymore, and there is no one to stop it. If they came up with a tool, unlikely as that may be, there is no place to implement it.

What's next? They can go the political route with bags of cash for "goodwill contributions" and get the laws changed. They may have legs, but again, their opponents are quite savvy now, much more so than when the whole DMCA fiasco was railroaded through. More daunting is the fact that in an internet aware world, which politician would want to take file sharing away from a majority non-voting teen age to early 20s crowd? In a divided country, a block of suddenly energised people is a good thing, unless they are energised with the goal of getting you out of office.

Doesn't all this just suck for the RIAA? It does however makes me grin endlessly, mostly because it is of their own making. The line it took early on, and stuck to doggedly in the face of attempted compromise, reason and common sense are destroying it. Even its monopoly supported failed business model won't be able to sustain it for much longer. Once again, technology let the cat out of the bag. µ