Users of gnutella who share objects they have stored are not anonymous. Current peer-to-peer networks permit the server endpoints to be determined, and if a peer-client can determine the IP address and affiliation of a peer, then so can a lawyer or government agency. This means that users who share copyrighted objects face some threat of legal action. This appears to be yet another explanation for free riding.
There are some possible technological workarounds to the absence of endpoint anonymity. We could imagine anonymizing routers, overseas routers, object fragmentation, or some other means to complicate the effort required by law-enforcement to determine the original source of the copyrighted bits. For example, Freenet tries to hide the identity of the hosts storing any given object by means of a variety of heuristics, including routing the object through intermediate hosts and providing mechanisms for easy migration of objects to other hosts. Similarly, Mnemosyne [10] tries to organize object storage, such that individual hosts may not know what objects are stored on them. It is conjectured in [10] that this may amount to common-carrier status for the host. A detailed analysis of the legal or technical robustness of these systems is beyond the scope of this paper.
2.4.3 Attacks
In light of these weaknesses, attacks on gnutella-style darknets focus on their object storage and search infrastructures. Because of the prevalence of super-peers, the gnutella darknet depends on a relatively small set of powerful hosts, and these hosts are promising targets for attackers.
Darknet hosts owned by corporations are typically easily removed. Often, these hosts are set up by individual employees without the knowledge of corporate management. Generally corporations respect intellectual property laws. This together with their reluctance to become targets of lawsuits, and their centralized network of hierarchical management makes it relatively easy to remove darknet hosts in the corporate domain.
While the structures at universities are typically less hierarchical and strict than those of corporations, ultimately, similar rules apply. If the .com and .edu T1 and T3 lines were pulled from under a darknet, the usefulness of the network would suffer drastically.
This would leave DSL, ISDN, and cable-modem users as the high-bandwidth servers of objects. We believe limiting hosts to this class would present a far less effective piracy network today from the perspective of acquisition because of the relative rarity of high-bandwidth consumer connections, and hence users would abandon this darknet. However, consumer broadband is becoming more popular, so in the long run it is probable that there will be adequate consumer bandwidth to support an effective consumer darknet.
The obvious next legal escalation is to bring direct or indirect (through the affiliation) challenges against users who share large libraries of copyrighted material. This is already happening and the legal threats or actions appear to be successful [7]. This requires the collaboration of ISPs in identifying their customers, which appears to be forthcoming due to requirements that the carrier must take to avoid liability[1] and, in some cases, because of corporate ties between ISPs and content providers. Once again, free riding makes this attack strategy far more tractable.
It is hard to predict further legal escalation, but we note that the DMCA (digital millennium copyright act) is a far-reaching (although not fully tested) example of a law that is potentially quite powerful. We believe it probable that there will be a few more rounds of technical innovations to sidestep existing laws, followed by new laws, or new interpretations of old laws, in the next few years.
[1] The Church of Scientology has been aggressive in pursuing ISPs that host its copyright material on newsgroups. The suit that appeared most likely to result in a clear finding, filed against Netcom, was settled out of court. Hence it is still not clear whether an ISP has a responsibility to police the users of its network.
0 comments:
Post a Comment