Globeandmail.com, Wednesday, January 9, 2002

File-swapping revisited

By JACK KAPICA

Globe and Mail Update

BREAKING NEWS

The war over free music is getting interesting.

When the Recording Industry of America and the five big record labels succeeded in shutting down the MP3 file-trading service Napster last summer, many pundits (Cyberia included) argued that the war was generally over and free rock and roll was here to stay. And when the RIAA, this time with the Motion Picture Association of America, launched a suit on Oct. 3 against the peer-to-peer networks that sprang up after Napster, Internet anarchists triumphantly dismissed the suit as a futile gesture.

Peer-to-peer file-swapping is impossible to shut down, they said, because there's no central server, and without a central server there's no owner to be sued. So such services as Audio Galaxy, Grokster, Bearshare, Limewire and Morpheus were beyond a lawyer's reach.

Not so, says sociologist Michael Mehta in a scholarly paper in an upcoming issue of the

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology.

Not only is the record industry in a very good position to shut down the Gnutella and Kazaa networks, the two major peer-to-peer nets, the RIAA may actually be helped by pornographers.

Pornographers?

Prof. Mehta, a sociologist at the University of Saskatchewan specializing in cyberspace

behaviour, came to that conclusion in a study (co-written with Don Best and Nancy Poon) of the way pornography is being swapped on-line by those same file-sharing services.

While Napster limited itself to music, clients of the Gnutella and Kazaa networks swap other kinds of files too: Images, films, multimedia, software programs and music files all go whizzing about cyberspace without so much as a by-your-leave to their creators. And their not-very-well-kept dirty secret is that they offer an excellent way for people to swap

pornography.

The volume of porn can be measured. A Web site called the Gnutellameter lists the top key word searches, and finds 32 adult-content words among the top 100, and five of them in the top 10 (#3 porn, #5 teen, #7 lolita, #8 rape, #9 anal).

The other five in the top 10 are copyright material #1 divx (a DVD copy-protection

decryption algorithm) #4 proprietary video compression formats (including divx), #2 Windows XP, #6 Harry Potter, #10 enterprise (meaning videos of the TV show).

This convergence, Prof. Mehta argues in Peer-to-Peer Sharing on the Internet: An Analysis of How Gnutella Networks Are Used to Distribute Pornographic Material, contains the seeds of the system's own destruction. Pornographers, he writes, have historically been shy about launching lawsuits claiming copyright infringement, but would be much bolder if they could tag along with heavyweight lawyers from the recording industry, lending their considerable financial resources to the recording industry's fight.

One of the first to offer help could be someone like Suze Randall, a California photographer and producer of glossy Web-based porn, most of it the kind that stops just short of what would be generally considered obscene or illegal. Appalled by the way collections of her picture CDs were being passed around Usenet newsgroups, Ms. Randall's lawyers tried in 2000 to get major Usenet servers to block the newsgroups posting her work. She succeeded with a good number of them, but there are so many news servers and so many news groups where swappers could migrate (there are now more than 75,000 newsgroups on Usenet), that she eventually held back.

But numbers, contrary to what one would expect with peer-to-peer networks, would not be as big a problem as they are in Usenet. That is so, Prof. Mehta says, because a surprisingly small number of users are what he calls "top-sharing peers."

He cites a study reporting that nearly 70 per cent of Gnutella users share no files, and

nearly 50 per cent of all files searched for come from the top 1 per cent of sharing hosts.

Most of the peer-to-peer programs have options allowing people to become free riders those who will happily download, but not make their files available to others on the net. In Kazaa network client Morpheus, for example, there are two ways one to opt out: One can "disable sharing of files with other Morpheus members" or decline to "function as a Supernode," meaning one of the fast computers with a broadband connection that is used to propagate file inventories. Gnutella applications such as Bearshare can be configured to connect to a minimum and maximum number of hosts.

Most users perhaps out of a heightened sense of privacy, or out of fear of viruses, or out

of shame have opted out.

Which leaves few users to carry the load. And the fewer there are, the easier it is to stop

them.

The kind of traffic they generate is easy enough to measure and identify, and a stiff

lawyer's letter to the user's ISP could result in a threat to yank the user's account. And if

the ISP could not be swayed with arguments about intellectual copyright of music, then charging the ISP as a conduit for smut would be a more persuasive tactic.

A threat like that, delivered against a casual user or small ISP without access to

heavyweight corporate legal help, would shut people down pretty quickly.

"Either the network will fall apart or top-sharing peers will stop sharing out of fear of

prosecution," Prof. Mehta says. "And some ISPs, such as universities, will respond very

quickly."

Prof. Mehta's argument sounds very convincing, and it is tempting to agree with it, except

for the fact it is based on current technologies. The Internet has a way of slipping around

barriers it was designed to do just that and in the future programs could be written that

will make file-swapping more subpoena-proof.

Still, Dr. Mehta sees his scenario as inevitable.

"I'm counting on it," he says.

E-mail Jack Kapica at jkapica@globeandmail.com