Word: freenet
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...money, Clarke insists, by sales of T shirts and other ancillary items, perhaps, or even voluntary payments from their fans. As for terrorism and child pornography, he doesn't believe humanity should be denied free speech because "a few people might use it for something unsavory." Ultimately, Clarke says, Freenet makes debates of this kind moot. "If you had to convince everyone freedom of information is a good thing, it would never happen," he says. "The point is, I made it happen...
...more precisely, he's still trying to make it happen. Clark has a day job, working for a company that consults for online auctions. (He makes no money from Freenet, and since he doesn't claim to own it, he can't sell it.) He spends much of his free time--along with volunteer code writers from as far away as Stockholm and Houston--working out Freenet's kinks. It's in a creaky early version right now, so hard to use that only some 35,000 people have hooked up. High on Clarke's to-do list: create...
...actual content, the pickings are still slim, but it's not hard to see Freenet's vast potential. Clarke scrolls down an index looking for items of interest and calls out what he finds. The Communist Manifesto. The U.S. Constitution. A document purporting to be a British Intelligence report on Libyan spying activities in Britain. A lot of files have names suggesting they're pornographic; a few seem to be child porn. There are files that appear to contain secret "OT" documents of the Church of Scientology. If they're real, they illustrate Freenet's power: the Scientologists have obtained...
Does this mean content providers will be steamrollered by Freenet? Not necessarily. Many media experts say people who create music and other copyrighted material will eventually find a way to charge for it. "Generating content is a valuable service," says Eric Scheirer, a media and Internet analyst at Forrester Research. "And as long as it is, there will always be ways to monetize it." What's more, anonymous systems like Freenet are inherently vulnerable. "The record companies could flood Freenet with a million copies of static," Scheirer suggests, "and title them The New Britney Spears Song...
...single CD--to have online access to thousands of albums. This music channel--along with the CDs already in their collections--will be available anywhere there's an Internet connection. Robertson believes the mainstream will choose this limited-pay model over legally dubious networks like Napster and Freenet. Thus far the rise of MP3s "has been painted as a college-kids-gone-crazy phenomenon," he says. "In fact, it cuts across all walks of life...