After Grokster

Grokster, the popular file sharing service, shut down last week, five months after the US Supreme Court ruled against it in MGM v. Grokster.

Nearly 20,000 file-sharers have been targeted for legal action since 2003. And BBC reports the global recording industry has launched its largest wave of legal action against people suspected of sharing music files on the internet.

The latest move targeted 2,100 alleged uploaders using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks in 16 nations including the UK, France, Germany and Italy. File-sharers in Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, Singapore and Hong Kong are also facing cases for the first time.

But Inside Higher Ed reports that Grokster’s demise is not stopping or even slowing down file sharing among university students.

Dan Bruno, an English and music major at Tufts University, told Inside Higher Ed, “ever since Napster 1.0’s closure, [file sharing] networks have multiplied,” . “People will continue to make [file sharing] networks as long as there’s still an Internet.”

Bruno said that earlier peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, like Napster, were somewhat easy beasts to tame. “A protocol like BitTorrent, though, is much more decentralized,” he noted. “It’s impossible for the RIAA to shut down because there is nothing to shut down — all of the information is not contained in one place. The only thing they can do is shut down the infrastructure, such as the Web sites where people announce available BitTorrents. But even that is impractical — sites can just operate out of other countries, as The Pirate Bay has.

I highly recommend the work of Siva Vaidhyanathan for thorough and accessible overviews of the issues at stake in the battle over copyright, digital access, and peer-to-peer networking.

Siva’s The Anarachist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System presents the clash between information oligarchs and information anarchists as not a mere technology war, but a battle that will define culture.

Siva’s book Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity is available online. Click here.

I also recommed the blog Sivacracy.net

For more on the Grokster shut down see: The Chronicle of Higher Education or read on… http://chronicle.com/free/2005/11/2005111601t.htm

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Threatened by Entertainment Companies, High-Speed File-Swapping Network Closes

By BROCK READ

The popular peer-to-peer network that turned Internet2’s high-speed research infrastructure into a digital swap meet closed down Monday after months of legal attacks from record companies and movie studios.

The shutdown of the network, known as i2hub, is the latest in a string of victories for the entertainment industry in its battle against illegal file sharing. In recent months, industry officials have argued that grassroots peer-to-peer networks like i2hub have become more hospitable to campus piracy than commercial file-swapping networks like Grokster and Morpheus.

Before its demise, i2hub served students at over 200 institutions that are connected to Abilene, Internet2’s research network. The peer-to-peer hub, run on an open-source file-trading program called Direct Connect, was founded in 2004 by Wayne Chang, then a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

In April record companies and movie studios started filing lawsuits that accused students of using the network to pirate music and films. The Recording Industry Association of America has since filed suit against 635 i2hub users at 39 different institutions.

Lawmakers have also sought to put an end to i2hub. Last December two influential members of Congress sent a letter to Douglas E. Van Houweling, president of Internet2, asking him to crack down on the rogue network. The congressmen — Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, and Howard L. Berman, a Democrat from California — are the ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.

Internet2 officials responded by sending the committee a report on the steps they had taken to control illegal file sharing, according to Lauren Rotman, Internet2’s media-relations manager. Internet2 does not condone piracy, Ms. Rotman said in an e-mail interview. But campus officials, not Internet2 administrators, are “in the best position to take responsibility for network issues that occur at the campus network level, including file sharing,” she wrote.

As pressure mounted against i2hub, the network made an attempt to prove that it had legitimate applications, experimenting with features like a textbook exchange and a dating service. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. — which found that peer-to-peer networks could be held liable for acts of piracy if they “induced” the violations — further compromised i2hub’s legal standing. In September the recording industry sent cease-and-desist notices to seven peer-to-peer networks, including i2hub.

‘Remember i2hub’

The Web site of i2hub, which once pseudonymously listed student representatives at over 30 different institutions, now simply reads “R.I.P.”

Mr. Chang, the network’s founder, declined to comment on the reason for i2hub’s closure. But he said in an e-mail interview on Tuesday that i2hub was already being commemorated by its campus fans. “Students are hanging signs, painting campus boulders with ‘Remember i2hub,’ etc., across the country,” he wrote.

The i2hub closure had more of a sense of finality to it than the shutdown of Grokster, the company which was at the center of the legal imbroglio over piracy. Grokster announced last week that it would no longer distribute its peer-to-peer software, although people who had already downloaded the software continue to use it to share files. But i2hub relied on a centralized router through which all users had to sign in. Mr. Chang has now disabled that router.

In a statement on the surrenders of i2hub and Groskter, the recording-industry trade group said it was “encouraged by the response of many of the illegal peer-to-peer sites to the Supreme Court’s unanimous Grokster decision.”

But the death of i2hub is not likely to have a significant impact on the volume of campus file swapping, according to some experts. At many institutions, students already use Direct Connect to operate intracampus hubs. They can also swap files using peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent, a popular open-source program. Since BitTorrent is a program, not a network, the entertainment industry has not tried to quash the software — even though the industry has managed to shut down some Web sites that help BitTorrent users locate downloadable files.

“I basically don’t think this will change the terms of the debate very much,” said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a law professor who is co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Even if i2hub officials could argue that their service wasn’t intended as a way to breach copyright, they likely painted themselves into a corner by “so openly and notoriously publicizing themselves as a file-sharing network,” Mr. Zittrain said.

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