“While American courts struggle over the recording industry’s
challenge to digital music swapping, Ian Clarke, a 23-year-old
Irish programmer, is moving on to the next battleground. He is
finishing a program that he says will make it impossible to control
the traffic in any kind of digital information — whether it is
music, video, text or software.”
“His program, known as Freenet, is intended to make it
possible to acquire or exchange such material anonymously while
frustrating any attempt to remove the information from the Internet
or determine its source….“
“Mr. Clarke said he was confident that corporations trying to
develop complex technologies to encrypt information or otherwise
halt the free sharing of computer data would ultimately fail. “I
have two words for these companies: give up,” he said. “There is no
way they are going to stop these technologies. They are trying to
plug holes in a dam that is about to burst.”
“That attitude, plus the fact that millions of users have come
to rely on easy access to digital information via the Internet,
suggests that the issue may quickly outstrip the current debate
over copyright infringement between the recording industry
association and a variety of Internet music distributors.”