Swapping will Continue says MS

"Record industry attempts to stop the swapping of pop music on online networks such as Kazaa will never work.

So says a research paper prepared by computer scientists working for software giant Microsoft...The researchers point out that the growth of consumer broadband and cheap data storage will mean the numbers of people willing to swap is growing and will soon outstrip attempts to shut them down."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2502399.stm

The original document is here:
http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc

I've covered the "dark net" before which was extra to the "deep web". Funny though, music isn't the only thing traded on these networks. Peerfear has the original article. In the same vein there's discussion on how P2P not only can provide a good archival medium but also providing distribution more cheaply.

I went all goose bumpy when I read this:
"Like other networks, the darknet can be modeled as a directed graph with labeled edges. The graph has one vertex for each user/host. For any pair of vertices (u,v), there is a directed edge from u to v if objects can be copied from u to v. The edge labels can be used to model relevant information about the physical network and may include information such as bandwidth, delay, availability, etc. The vertices are characterized by their object library, object requests made to other vertices, and object requests satisfied."

Yes, they are aware of software:
"We believe that binding software to a host is a more tractable problem than protecting passive content, as the former only requires tamper resistance, while the latter also requires the ability to hide and manage secrets. However, we observe that all software copy-protection systems deployed thus far have bee broken. The definitions of BOBE-strong and BOBE-weak apply similarly to software. Furthermore, software is as much subject to the dynamics of the darknet as passive content."

I think the most interesting part was on digital watermarking:
"There are several reasons why it appears unlikely that such systems will ever become an effective anti-piracy technology. From a commercial point of view, building a watermark detector into a device renders it strictly less useful for consumers than a competing product that does not....Even if watermarking systems were mandated, this approach is likely to fail due to a variety of technical inadequacies. The first inadequacy concerns the robustness of the embedding layer. We are not aware of systems for which simple data transformations cannot strip the mark or make it unreadable."

The other reason they say that watermarking will fail is because once the private keys are broken (like with DVDs) then the keys or the unencrypted data can be distributed.

You could use marketing spin like DVD players with "Macrovision - Protecting your data" on the sides. Although, it probably has to be a real feature not something where you pay more and can use less. All record and software companies have to do is create a commercial "dark net" that would provide faster distribution, cheaper per megabyte downloading and more easily searchable content.

How is it going to be stopped? When I watch a movie, will some of MyLifeBits be owned?