Prior to the mid 1990s, copying was organized around groups of friends and acquaintances. The copied objects were music on cassette tapes and computer programs. The rendering devices were widely-available tape players and the computers of the time – see Fig. 1. Content injection was trivial, since most objects were either not copy protected or, if they were equipped with copy protection mechanisms, the mechanisms were easily defeated. The distribution network was a “sneaker net” of floppy disks and tapes (storage), which were handed in person between members of a group or were sent by postal mail. The bandwidth of this network – albeit small by today’s standards – was sufficient for the objects of the time. The main limitation of the sneaker net with its mechanical transport layer was latency. It could take days or weeks to obtain a copy of an object. Another serious limitation of these networks was the lack of a sophisticated search engine.
There were limited attempts to prosecute individuals who were trying to sell copyrighted objects they had obtained from the darknet (commercial piracy). However, the darknet as a whole was never under significant legal threat. Reasons may have included its limited commercial impact and the protection from legal surveillance afforded by sharing amongst friends.
The sizes of object libraries available on such networks are strongly influenced by the interconnections between the networks. For example, schoolchildren may copy content from their “family network” to their “school network” and thereby increase the size of the darknet object library available to each. Such networks have been studied extensively and are classified as “interconnected small-worlds networks.” [24] There are several popular examples of the characteristics of such systems. For example, most people have a social group of a few score of people. Each of these people has a group of friends that partly overlap with their friends’ friends, and also introduces more people. It is estimated that, on average, each person is connected to every other person in the world by a chain of about six people from which arises the term “six degrees of separation”.
These findings are remarkably broadly applicable (e.g. [20,3]). The chains are on average so short because certain super-peers have many links. In our example, some people are gregarious and have lots of friends from different social or geographical circles..
We suspect that these findings have implications for sharing on darknets, and we will return to this point when we discuss the darknets of the future later in this paper.
The small-worlds darknet continues to exist. However, a number of technological advances have given rise to new forms of the darknet that have superseded the small-worlds for some object types (e.g. audio).
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