File Sharing Cannot Be Stopped

When the major labels first discovered what file sharing really meant to their business, they panicked. They had no control over this new arena and they saw their music being traded for free all over the Internet. Their first reaction was to release articles and press to convince people that they were taking money from starving artists. Disney even created a cartoon episode trying to show kids that file sharing was wrong. Finally the RIAA just began suing random file traders, in the hopes that it would make people stop sharing music, or at least slow the tide. None of these ideas have worked nor will they ever work. Few people will give up the benefits of file sharing.

Although the law says that a person should pay for every song that they get, the copyright laws that govern ownership of music became unenforceable once music left the physical medium and turned into digital bits of ones and zeros. You don’t need a special law to say that people can’t steal a physical CD because the laws against stealing any item cover it. But when you turn the music into a file then copy that file to give to someone else, the law becomes murkier. This is why there have been special laws created lately to make these activities specifically illegal.

But even if it’s illegal, there is no longer a central "water main" that can be shut off to stem this flow of music. With Napster, the record industry was able to sue the company that had all of the centralized servers that matched people up to trade files. Although they shut Napster down, the latest file sharing programs no longer have any central servers. Instead, they are a distributed network. The US courts have a churn of lawsuits on this topic, where the software writers themselves are being sued. But even if it becomes illegal to create such programs in the US, anyone in the world can create these programs. That means that, legally, all the RIAA can really do is to sue each individual file trader. In the end, legislators can pass as many laws as they want. There are just too many people all on these networks. Furthermore, file traders are all over the world, something that no local law in any country handles well. Since a successful national campaign has failed so far, a successful worldwide campaign seems to be impossible.

Not only is the law completely impotent to stop file sharing, no technological barrier to file sharing can succeed. There are two aphorisms about the Internet that have proven to be true, again and again. They are: "The Internet considers censorship as damage, and routes around it." And "Information wants to be free". We're not going to leave these as aphorisms. We're going to prove them in the following paragraphs.

The major labels would like the technology of the Internet itself to stop file trading, but the Internet is a "stupid network" without central control. The internet was created to do one simple thing: route data. It doesn't care about what the data is, where it's coming from, or where it’s heading. This is a very important core of the Internet, and it's not talked about often enough as being its largest benefit. The same internet that lets you buy a book also lets you share music, or video. It allows you to make a telephone call, or send an email. The intelligence of the network is in the computers at each end of a connection, and even the ones running the core of the network has little control over what data goes over the connections.

Although it may seem to be bold to claim that no technological barrier can succeed against file sharing, cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier noted the following points in his bestselling computer security book Secrets and Lies: First, that most every computer security technique in the past has been broken by determined and smart people. Second, if one smart person breaks a computer security technique, and shares what they’ve found, everyone on the Internet can then break it as well:

“The Internet is also a perfect medium for propagating successful attack tools. Only the first attacker has to be skilled; everyone else can use his software. After the initial attacker posts it to an archive--conveniently located in some backward country--anyone can download and use it. And once the tool is released, it can be impossible to control.”

Secrets and Lies, Bruce Schneier. P. 22

That means that to break any of these techniques, only one smart person needs to break it, and tell others how he or she succeeded. There are so many people in the world that enjoy breaking these techniques that it’s highly unlikely that any security technique will survive for long. After enough failures, the music industry is going to realize that paying for these techniques to lock up their released CDs is a waste of money.

And there have already been a lot of failures. One technique that stopped the digital encoding of music (or ripping) was foiled using a permanent marker or electrical tape to cover over one ring on a CD. Another was foiled by simply pressing the shift key while loading the CD (on Windows PCs). Developing these schemes is an expensive process, according to the recording industry. With each failure they are starting to realize that this is a dead end.

There’s another technique that they have tried to use called "watermarking" which threads some information through the CD so that the copyright owners can identify who copied the music to the network, and to indicate who owns the music. Professor Edward Felten, who is an expert on computer security and digital signal processing, did a study with a group of other researchers on these techniques. Their conclusion is that each one could be subverted. Since only one person needs to be able to crack these techniques for everyone to take advantage of it, watermarking can always be defeated. This research appeared in the year 2000, and it hasn’t been talked about much since then, probably because of Professor Felten’s conclusions. His technical paper ends with this key paragraph:

“Do we believe we can defeat any audio protection scheme? Certainly, the technical details of any scheme will become known publicly through reverse engineering. Using the techniques we have presented here, we believe no public watermark-based scheme intended to thwart copying will succeed. Other techniques may or may not be strong against attacks. For example, the encryption used to protect consumer DVDs was easily defeated. Ultimately, if it is possible for a consumer to hear or see protected content, then it will be technically possible for the consumer to copy that content.”

Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge, Scott A. Craver, John R McGregor, Min Wu, Bede Liu,Adam Stubblefield, Ben Swartzlander, Dan S. Wallach,Drew Dean, and Edward W. Felten

While any of the technologies that the major labels have implemented may make it a bit harder to perform file sharing, none of them are impossible hurdles. Because so many people work to circumvent these barriers and because it only takes one person in the entire world to be successful at breaking it, the music industry’s attempts at stopping file sharing will not succeed.

Next: Digital Rights Management (DRM)