Quoted from:
The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution
Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman… Microsoft Corporation
People have always copied things… even in the absence of network connectivity, the opportunity for low-cost, large-scale file sharing exists… any content protection system will leak popular or interesting content into the darknet… This is in contrast to the protection of military, industrial, or personal secrets… the darknet has a small number of technological and infrastructure requirements… We see no technical impediments to the darknet becoming increasingly efficient…
each person is connected to every other person in the world by a chain of about six people from which arises the term “six degrees of separation”… consumer broadband is becoming more popular, so in the long run it is probable that there will be adequate consumer bandwidth to support an effective consumer darknet…
Gnutella and Kazaa are under threat because of… lack of endpoint anonymity…global database is the only infrastructure component of the darknet that can be disabled…
relatively small darknets arranged around social groups will approach the aggregate libraries that are provided by the global darknets of today. Since the legal exposure of such sharing is quite limited, we believe that sharing amongst socially oriented groups will increase unabated… small-worlds darknets can be extremely efficient for popular titles…
Even if watermarking systems were mandated, this approach is likely to fail due to a variety of technical inadequacies… if it turns out that the deterrence of fingerprinting is small (i.e. everyone shares their media regardless of the presence of marks), there is probably no reasonable legal response…
Conclusions
There seem to be no technical impediments to darknet-based peer-to-peer file sharing technologies growing in convenience, aggregate bandwidth and efficiency. The legal future of darknet-technologies is less certain, but we believe that, at least for some classes of user, and possibly for the population at large, efficient darknets will exist…
In the presence of an infinitely efficient darknet – which allows instantaneous transmission of objects to all interested users – even sophisticated DRM systems are inherently ineffective… in the presence of an effective darknet… (DRM systems) complete(ly) collapse. We conclude that such schemes are doomed to failure…
There is evidence that the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers… This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects.
In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet’s own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security…
