The digirati among my readership might well read this as: Is the Mafiaa Fire browser plug-in a signpost on the road to croudsourced DNS decentralization?
While the RIAA should read : Bumbling idiots, lawmakers, and ICE fail to understand the basic nature of digital distribution, further erode control of intellectual property rights in the process.
There is a sea change underway, and it is not just starting.....time to read the writing on the wall.
Digital intellectual property rights management requires a new paradigm to understand. The old ideas about distribution will not work, traditional ideas of copyright are unenforceable, and attempts to maintain the status quo ultimately will prove to be economically nonviable.
Before I wax ad nauseum on this subject, let me first explain that I am fundamentally pro intellectual property rights, and fundamentally pro information freedom.
IP rights fuel innovation, make creativity profitable, and are a cornerstone of the technological age.
Without intellectual property rights as a valid paradigm, most of the really cool innovations since the 1950's would only exist in the smoke clouds of a hippie drum circles, “hey maaaan, wouldn't it be cool if.....”, because everyone knows that all of the really good ideas actually originate in hippie drum circles....
...And, well lets face it, without IP rights making profitable distribution possible, very few ears would have listened to Bob Marley, Cheech and Chong, the Grateful Dead, or any of the other great founts of hippie inspiration, which arguably lead directly to the invention of potato chips, cellphones, the Internet, military grade encryption, and stealth fighter aircraft.
The problem for the current IP rights paradigm is this:
1. Digital distribution makes creating infinite, exact copies costless, and distribution through croudsourced mechanisms is similarly economical.
2. Encryption is breakable, or irrelevant, when one has access to both the encoded and unencoded data streams, such as in the case with DVD's....they are encrypted, but to play them one must be able to decrypt them – so, in the end, the decryption becomes trivial, because the end user has access to both the encrypted and unencrypted stream. This makes copying a straightforward technical problem unhindered by the main benefit of encryption, namely the mathematical asymmetry of encrypting vs breaking encryption.
3. Encryption makes distribution of legitimate and illicit digital goods effectively invisible and untraceable. Strong encryption is as effective at securing communications as is gravity for keeping things from floating off into space. In either case, a herculean effort is required to defeat them in any meaningful way, and the cost of dropping an object or encrypting a data stream is nearly infinitely less then the cost of lifting the object or decrypting a stream without the key.
This stands in stark contrast to the old paradigm, in which:
1. Physical, analog distribution requires significant investments in infrastructure and transportation. Copies made from copies invariably suffer loss of quality.
2. Physically securing the product in such a way as to prevent its theft is trivial and well understood.
3. The transport of stolen, counterfeit, or unlicensed material is observable, traceable, and interceptable, and will lead to the likely apprehension and incarceration of those involved
It is easy to understand that failing to change ones basic ideas about distribution mechanisms, business models, and security measures would be disastrous in any industry facing this type of problem (opportunity) , but for some unknown reason, this extreme shortsightedness is exactly what we are seeing in Media Distribution.
These death thrashes of the Ould Guard would perhaps not be so bad, as so goes the evolution of creatures, both creatures of flesh and creatures of commerce, but the damage that is being done on the way down is what both concerns and delights me. (One small, dark corner of my heart leans to the anarchistic side)
The problem (opportunity) is this:
Industry organizations, such as the RIAA and their ilk are effective at causing policymakers, lawyers, and government agencies to do stupid things that in their net effect will be a clear detriment to their own best interests, and to the interests of all who would benefit from a functioning Intellectual Property system.
Thanks to the these shortsighted organizations, we have better mechanisms and an entire global subculture dedicated to the easy, efficient, untraceable distribution of unauthorized copies of digital goods.
It goes something like this:
In the beginning: BBS, Dump sites, FTP - Only the technically literate were involved, awkward and risky to use.
Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!!
Community response : P2P file sharing – Easy to use, low barrier to entry, more difficult to control.
Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!!
Community response : Bit-torrent – Easier to use, low barrier to entry, no centralized structure to control. Higher performance, more secure, made distribution nearly free.
Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, shut them down!!! Sue the file sharers! (except a few, like Netflix, who figured out that this would kill them if they did not find a way to compete with free distribution, which they have done quite effectively)
Community Response: Use peer blocking and encryption to make themselves difficult or impossible to track....Development of completely new anonymous networks such as Darknet, which exist one layer below the regular “interwebs” and could, if pressed to improve, become a complete alternative webshpere.....
Industry response : Defend traditional distribution, Shut down their (the file indexers and search engines) websites!!! Aha! Now we have DHS (ICE) on our side!!
Community response: Alternative, community based DNS, (Mafiaa Fire)..... effectively taking control of the webspace itself away from centralized authority.......This is the first step toward croudsourced namespace administration, without a traditional centralized authority, that can work alongside the existing infrastructure. This is a viral technology / ideology, make no mistake – If the “idiots that be” keep censoring domains, soon only people with these additional namespace protocols will be able to access the uncensored Internet, and any computer, browser, or software that does not support this will be seen as being cripple-ware.
Probable Industry Response: (insert shortsighted, ineffective measure here)
Inevitable Community Response : Decrease centralized network control, improve security and anonymity, improve distribution efficiency, etc.
The pattern here is this... Industry applies an ineffective measure, which is in turn answered by an improvement in the illicit distribution infrastructure, which as it offers more and more value and access, becomes more and more mainstream, further fueling innovation within the sector.
This is not a battle that can be won within the dominant paradigm. The fundamental mathematics underlying the problem are making the moves, and math is really difficult to argue with.
The current dangerous precedent of taking down (popular) domains via name service suspension will, if continued, result in a viable alternative namespace system which will be impossible to control. Similar attacks on this system in turn will be answered with increasingly sophisticated technical measures, which could ultimately result in an entire alternative webspace, possibly fully encrypted and inherently anonymous, which would then serve as a viable competitor to the primary webspace. This could be the death knell for even forward looking business models such as Netflix.
There will always be bright, unemployed programmers looking to make a name for themselves. This inexhaustible, free labor resource, with an extremely asymmetrical mathematical advantage on its side, will not likely be defeated by an entity without literally unlimited financial resources, except by complete network censorship and the end of the Internet as we know it....which would likely result in an entirely croudsourced physical layer......
Ideas are impossible to put back in the box. Adapt or perish.
Read more about Mafiaa Fire Here:
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