Darknet: Darknets JD Lasica has written an excellent new book titled, “Darknet, Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.” Today JD points out some of the small darknets that have been poping up to take the place of our beloved flagrant sharing of past at places like Napster. JD profiles Grouper, Imeem, Waste, Freenet and Groove Networks. These are tools that can be used by private file sharing clubs that would hope to fly under the radar of the RIAA and MPAA.
More and more of this type of underground file sharing will go on as the RIAA continues to persecute their customers.
Of course, still in my own mind, these darknets pale in impact or comparison to what can be accomplished with plain old sneaker net. As 250 gig, 400 gig, and even 500 gig external hard drives become cheaper and cheaper, it is increasingly easy for good close friends to share (or should I say help provide offsite backups) for very large digital libraries. The key is to keep everything in .mp3 format and avoid those pesky DRM’d files.
The question is how long will it be before the RIAA proposes making it illegal to send hard drives full of digital files in the mail or to carry a hard drive full of digital files with you on an airplane?