Small private and secret networks protect music swappers

July 31, 2003

spacegrass used our news submit to tell us that CNN.com reports that because of the music industry's large amount of subpoenas, secret and private networks have been surfacing. These networks are open to small groups of people (20 or 30) and people's identities and actions are masked with the same technology used to protect online credit card transactions:

"You've got the right set of early adopters, people that are involved in the community who are evangelizing it," said Travis Kalanick, whose MP3 search engine Scour was sued and shut down by the music industry. "It's going to be there if and when there is a mass exodus from networks like Kazaa and Gnutella."

How secure are they?

Kalanick and others say the private networks are the future of online music swapping.

Not if the music industry can help it, said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). While he would not reveal specifics of which services would be targeted, Lamy offered a warning for private network users.

"If users think that any particular service guarantees their anonymity, they're wrong," he said. "There are ways to determine a user's identity."

But Jim Lowrey, an expert in network encryption, said it would be difficult for outsiders to break through the encryption to see who is using the private sharing services.

"You'll know they're talking, but you won't know what they're saying. It's quite impossible to crack the algorithms," said Lowrey, whose company, Endeavors Technology, is designing a file-sharing system for corporate clients.

According to the article, the rise of private networks is not only because of lawsuit threats from the music industry but also because companies like MediaDefender have begun flooding KaZaA and Gnutella with "spoofed" files, which claim to be songs but turn out to be blank or filled with anti-piracy messages.

Source: CNN.com