While I disagree with Judge Patel's PI in the Napster case, there is a
valuable lesson in this result that should be of interest to Cypherpunks.
Several lessons, actually:
1. Systems that rely on cooperation from the law are fundamentally broken
and will be compromised.
2. Systems with a single point of failure, such as a centralized network
information database or any other kind of head are less resilient in the
face of attack.
3. Almost a corollary to 2., attacks by predators, legal or otherwise,
exert an evolutionary pressure on system architecture. While Napster will
likely either be put out of business or change their delivery model so
significantly to have little in common with their present offering, all
this means to the larger population is that the Gnutella, Freenet, and
similar strains with better DNA will spread faster.
The end result of the legal evolutionary pressures on Napster and similar
distributed file sharing systems will simply be that the systems that
ultimately survive and multiply will be those that are more worthy of
surviving due to their resilience to attack, distributed nature, and
better anonymity features.
So in the long run, the predators currently at work are actually helping
us to deploy better systems faster. I can live with that. (Which is not to
say that the predators should not be resisted).
-- Lucky Green <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP encrypted email preferred.
