SAN FRANCISCO, July 31 - Briefly buoyed by their Supreme Court victory on file sharing, Hollywood and the recording industry are on the verge of confronting more technically sophisticated opponents.
Ian Clarke seeks a way to preserve anonymity on the Internet.
At a computer security conference in Las Vegas on Thursday, an Irish software designer described a new version of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that he says will make it easier to share digital information anonymously and make detection by corporations and governments far more difficult.
Others have described similar efforts to build a so-called darknet that aims to shield the identities of those sharing information. The issue is complicated by the fact that the small group of technologists designing the new systems say their goal is to create tools to circumvent censorship and political repression - not to abet copyright violation.
Such a stand is certain to test the impact of the Supreme Court ruling in June against Grokster and StreamCast Networks, publishers of peer-to-peer file-sharing software, a number of legal specialists and industry executives said. The court ruled unanimously that the publishers could be held liable for the copyright infringement that their software enabled in the sharing of pirated movies and music.
The Irish programmer, Ian Clarke, is a 28-year-old free-speech advocate who five years ago introduced a software system called Freenet that was intended to make it impossible for governments and corporations to restrict the flow of any kind of digital information. The system initially used a secure approach to routing between users and employed encryption to protect the information from eavesdroppers who were not part of the network.
Unlike today's open peer-to-peer networks, the new systems like Mr. Clarke's use software code to connect individuals who trust one another. He said he would begin distributing the new version of his program within a few months, making it possible for groups of users to establish secured networks - available only to them and those they choose to include - through which any kind of digital information can be exchanged.
Though he says his aim is political - helping dissidents in countries where computer traffic is monitored by the government, for example - Mr. Clarke is open about his disdain for copyright laws, asserting that his technology would produce a world in which all information is freely shared.
Mr. Clarke lives in Edinburgh and is employed by a music recommendation site, www.indy.tv. While Freenet attracted wide attention as a potentially disruptive force when he introduced it in 2000, it proved more difficult to use than file-sharing programs like Grokster and Napster, and did not achieve the impact that he envisioned.
Now, however, Mr. Clarke is taking a fresh approach, stating that his goal is to protect political opponents of repressive regimes.
"The classic use for Freenet would be for a group of political dissidents in China, or even in the United States," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. But he acknowledged that the software would also surely be used to circumvent copyright restrictions, adding, "It's an inevitable consequence of our design."
Industry executives acknowledge that even with their Supreme Court victory, peer-to-peer technology will continue to be a factor in illicit online trading.
"Everyone understands that P-to-P technology is, and will remain, an important part of the online landscape," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America. "But the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the Grokster case will help ensure that business models won't be based on the active encouragement of infringement on P-to-P or other networks."
Initiatives like Freenet are certain to complicate industry and government efforts to restrict the digital sharing of proprietary data.
To join a darknet, a potential user must be trusted by one of the existing members. Thus such networks grow as part of a "web of trust," and are far more restricted than open systems.
In June, Ross Anderson, a prominent computer-security researcher who was a pioneer in developing early peer-to-peer networks, published a technical paper detailing how it was possible to resist industry attempts to disable such networks.
He also published a second paper trying to anticipate the market reaction to curbs on file sharing like the Grokster ruling. The paper, "The Economics of Censorship Resistance," predicts the emergence of closed networks like the new Freenet, as well as "fan clubs" focused on specific digital content, which would be more difficult for the industry to combat.
Mr. Anderson, who traces peer-to-peer networks back to an ad hoc networking system called Usenet pioneered over telephone lines in 1979, said his research group was collaborating with computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a next-generation peer-to-peer network, to be unveiled in a few months. Like Freenet, it is designed to be impervious to censorship and to permit secure communications in potentially hostile environments.
He said that his own early development work in peer-to-peer networks, known as the Eternity Service, had been inspired by a legal battle between the Church of Scientology and Penet, an Internet operation based in Finland that was known as an anonymous remailer.
In that case, an Internet user was using the remailer to post church documents anonymously on online bulletin boards.
"I had not the slightest idea back in 1996 that music would be an application," he said. "I was motivated by the Penet case and by the fear that some of the freedom we'd got from Gutenberg's invention of cheap printing might be lost."
Legal skirmishes over anonymous peer-to-peer networks have already taken place in both Europe and Asia.
In Japan last year, Isamu Kaneko, the developer of a file-sharing program called WinNY, was arrested after two users of the program were charged with sharing copyrighted material through the system. The Kaneko case is pending.
After Mr. Kaneko's arrest, development of the system was continued under the name Share by an anonymous programmer, according to information posted on the Web.
Share uses encryption to hide the identities of users and the material that is being exchanged, in the manner of the new Freenet that Mr. Clarke described.
On a separate front, the recording industry has sued users of Blubster, a peer-to-peer network designed by Pablo Soto, a Spanish programmer, who built privacy features into his system.
Currently Freenet is being developed by a group of five or six volunteer programmers and a single full-time employee who is paid by donations that Mr. Clarke has obtained.
He said that despite concerns that tools such as Freenet might be used by clandestine organizations intent on political violence, Mr. Clarke said he believed that the benefits of such anonymous means of communications outweighed potential harm.
"I think things like terrorism are the result of the absence of communication," he said.
He acknowledged that his system would not be infallible, bu neither would it be as transparent as popular peer-to-peer systems like Grokster and Gnutella.
Open file-sharing networks like Gnutella can be joined simply by obtaining a software program. The program connects a user to the file-sharing network and allows the user to publish content.
Computer researchers say that the term "anonymous peer-to-peer," when applied to darknets, is actually a misnomer, because the networks must exist in the open Internet and thus must have identifiable addresses where they can be contacted by other nodes of the network.
As the legal consequences for file sharing become clearer, there will be a proliferation of systems with features similar to Freenet, according to a range of industry specialists. In Silicon Valley, start-up companies like Imeem and Grouper are already making it possible to create groups to share digital information.
"Darknets are going to be with us," said J. D. Lasica, author of "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). "Serious file traders have been gravitating toward them. There is just this culture of freedom that people feel they're entitled to, and they don't want anyone looking over their shoulders."
