NearToTheSky's ramblings

World War III is upon us

The first line of the wikipedia article on World War claims that A world war is a war affecting the majority of the world's most powerful and populous nations. World wars span several continents, and last for multiple years.
This is arguably the case of the current "war" between a large amount of the people and the entertainment industry, along with some other copyright holders. It has been going on for years and is starting to spread to most countries in the world. Also, the outcome of this conflict is one that can significantly affect how the future will be.

The story is simple. Digital content, by it's very nature, can be replicated easily and for a negligible cost. Mostly since everyone and their dog have a computer nowadays and the tendency is not about to revert itself. In addition, the Internet makes it easy for any computer in the world to transmit information to any other computer in the world. These two facts combined together make it trivial for two or more people to share digital content, starting with one person owning one copy of the content and ending with each person having an indistinguishable copy of said content. This is not what internet enable us to do. This is the only thing internet does, sending copies of digital content to people.

Enters the notion of copyright. In short, whenever someone creates a piece of work, they are (for a relatively long period of time) the only one allowed to make copies or take any profit from the given work. The exact details of how it is implemented is different from country to country (and from my understanding, not all countries have copyright protection laws) but the basic idea is the same. Now, this is well and good for any piece of work that is purely "analog" or "real world" because making a copy is difficult and requires some initial investment. Moreover, making a coppy of such a piece of work will result in it being different from the original. The objective in such cases is often to make good enough copies to sell them on as if they were originals, getting money for the copies instead of the original producer. In this scheme, both the buyer who believe he got an original and the copyright holder, who didn't get the money payed for the copy, get fooled. In that case, copyright laws make perfect sense.

It all becomes more tricky when applied to digital content. Since digital content is so easy to copy and send around, it is very likely that everyone using internet has done at least one copyright infringement without even being conscious of it. I won't get into giving exemples here, because then comes the whole discussion of how bad a particular infringement is. The point is, it's easy to do. Comparing to what I said above, the case of sending a piece of digital content over the internet is practically free for both the sender and the receiver and the receiver is not fooled, because he expects to be getting a copy, but it doesn't matter because the copy is identical.
The argument generally is about whether the copyright holder is fooled or not. In any case, the receiver of the copy hasn't spent any money and is not less able to buy a copy of the work produced by the copyright holder. Some consider this to be a lost sale, some do not. Actual implications are the subject of contradictory statistics and there are flamewars... erm debates about whether getting "illegal" copies of digital work is right or wrong.

Those aspects can be discussed indefinitely, but there are at least a few facts that are certain: first of all, there is probably at least 10% of the population of many countries who admits using the internet to exchange copyrighted work to which they do not hold copyright. This also include some of the artists, who are supposedly the ones hurt by this kind of behaviour. The entertainment industry is very keen on ruining the life of people who do such activities by either getting them imprisonned, getting them to pay fines that they couldn't cover in their lifetime or removing their access to the internet (which is increasingly becoming a necessity in the current world). No country can afford having 10% of its population severaly punished, so it seems like discussing the background of the question instead of shouting and threatening each other would be useful.

At this point, the entertainment industry is set to purely and simply shut down all file sharing (apparently legal or not) and obtaining succeses here and there in court. On the other side, the people sharing file claim that the Internet cannot be stopped and that the battle of the entertainment industry is futile. But is it? Can someone with enough power actually gain control over the whole internet? This is actually an important question for the future of communication. If the entertainment industry lose today, it may be someone else tomorrow that may attempt to get control over the giant network. From a technical point of view, it is a question that deserves to be considered and not shoved aside, saying that the Internet is immortal.

The truth is: the Internet nowadays requires ISPs. One ISP doesn't matter much, but all the ISPs in a country form a weak point of Internet for that country and the same goes for the world. The entertainment industry seems to have understood that as it has started to move against ISPs and try to get them bend to their will. They don't need to win against every ISP out there either. One win in a country means that they potentially can control all ISPs in that country.
At that point, people with technological knowledge will say: "No problem, we will just encrypt everything". Well... not so fast. It will quickly be clear that file sharing is done over encrypted channels and can't be controlled at all, so the next step is to prevent people to share data altogether. This is actually fairly easy as it only requires to let only a list of "trusted" people receive incoming connections, and this for every ISP in the world. If some ISPs/countries refused to agree and participate, they could simply be blacklisted by the others and practically cut off the Internet. For the non technical people out there: when transmitting data over the internet, there is one person's computer who start by sending a message to another person's computer's saying "Hey, I want to do business with you". If all goes well, the receiving computer will reply "ok, what do you want?" and they can work it out from there. This happens when exchanging files also. If you let that first message only be received by the computers of well known companies out there, you'll only be able to exchange data with them. This would, for example force anyone who wants to set up a website to register for having that ability open to them and they would probably have to approve having their content censored for anything illegal. This would be pretty bad for freedom of speech, but it is technically possible. Another consequence is that all multiplayer online games would have to use a central server (and only that). This may be an issue for some technologies, but it can probably be worked around. In general, the only companies that would be affected badly are those using P2P for their business.

This may have sounded pessimistic, but I think it is a genuine concern. It's maybe not likely to happen, but it's certainly not impossible. If such a terrible thing should happen though, would there be any way around it? There is only one thing that could be done which is, rebuilding the Internet without this weak point that are the ISPs. Making it without those few central points that can be controlled... And this is sort of P2P at the hardware level. Basically, people dragging cables (or using WiFi) to connect their computer to their closest neighbours, everywhere. Turning the network into a mesh without any choking point. That way, one could exchange data with someone at the other end of the country simply by hopping from neighbour to neighbour. This however poses several large issues. The first one is the practical issue of joining people separated by oceans or mountains. The existing infrastructure is controlled by ISPs and setting up a new one would be exttremely costful and would constitute a choking point regardless. There is little that can be achieved agaisnt that, but let's claim that it isn't fundamentally needed.
The next, more annoying issue is that making data travel by small hops to cover large distance will make it take much greater amounts of time, making the network having a very high latency. This cannot be solved either and would probably require to make different protocols from those used nowadays to accomodate the delays and the number of hops. If this is used as a complement to the traditional Internet, only for sharing files, those issues would most likely be ok to live with.

It is possible to draw this idea further, but the general conclusion is that it is actually possible to make file sharing very difficult but making it impossible will never happen. I do not doubt there are many other ways than the one I just described, but in general, people seem to always find better tools to communicate and to share information and it has been like that since forever. It is doubtful that any effort put into thwarting that tendency will be able to put a stop to it.
This is just a glimpse of what can be said on this topic, so I will probably write more about it in the future.