On Friday, March 22, 2002, at 01:55 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote: >> Suggestions for more criteria welcome. > > Motivation. > > I cannot find a non-computer paradigm that relates to sharing in-house > private > resources with unknown others. This maybe the the principal conceptual > obstacle. Outside irrelevantly low-numbered activist circles, masses > just do > not want to share without very obvious and immediate gratification. > > Sharing copyrighted material in order to get the same is the only > working > example that I can see. If someone can point to reason why large number > of > people would give a fuck about fighting censorship, enhancing privacy > and > anonymity, I'd like to be enlightened. With working real-world examples. > Unemployed cypherpunks do not count. >
This was the same objection I presented to Phil Salin when he was attempting to get his "information market" business idea going. AmIX, the American Information Exchange eventually got funding from Autodesk, but only lasted about 3-4 years before having the plug pulled. I gave Phil the example of someone soliciting something like "Optimum implant doses for CMOS process sought. Will pay $500." A company like Intel would have spent tens of millions figuring out the answers to such questions...the last thing they would tolerate is having an employee on his lunch hour surfing the Net and offering up the answer so he could pocket the $500 (or, even if he were naively honest, making sure Intel got the $500). To make the point graphically to Phil, I devised "Black Net" as the place where epi implant information is bought and sold, where someone offers $100K for the Stealth bomber blueprints, where all sorts of secrets are solicited and offered. This was in 1988, long before EBay, and one former employee of AmIX told me later that the Black Net scenario became their worse nightmare, as they realized the liability they would face if corporate or national secrets were sold. Now, does this mean such information will not be bought and sold? No. The prospects for Black Nets remain strong...and arguably they are already here. People want free stuff. They download free/pirated music, free/pirated DVDs, Warez, etc. A lawyer friend of mine says that lawyers in the office--even those handling copyright cases!--still seek "free stuff." It's Economics 1. Only when the hassles or expected punishment (risk of being caught times penalty) of stealing are larger than the market price will people generally NOT steal. (There's a moral component, sort of. Some people will never think about copying their friend's CDs or buying a bootleg DVD or "borrowing" a copy of Microsoft Word from their friends.) Anyway, the market for distributed data storage is the obvious one: Napster. 'Nuff said. (Yeah, some market differentiation, but it's basically summarized in one word: Napster.) Any person, any organization, any company which gets into the napstering business will face the guns of the lawyers, the Feds, international bodies (when it suits them), and so on. Whether that company is Mojo or BitTorrent or whatever, the criminal and civil suits will be aimed at whomever can be identified as a nexus. My advice? (*) (* It may be that even these discussions, archived and searchable, will expose participants to some future aggravation. I think lawsuits will fail, as we are just talking here. But if people talk traceably about their inputs to a napster product, and it has some effect the way Napster and Morpheus and Gnutella had, look to be dragged in.) So, my advice: * Forego ego and develop and release a product _untraceably). * Forget trying to use the corporate laws (incorporations, sales, revenues, legal offices, etc.) when what you are doing is fundamentally Napster, fundamentally _worse_ than Napster (warez trading, of very high value programs), even to the level of a Black Net (secrets for sale, national security hot buttons). * Remember, where PRZ faced possible criminal charges, with the Net lining up behind him and lionizing him, lawsuits based on huge financial losses will be devastating. And the Constitution generally can't be used as a defense. The burden of proof for winning against you (the identifiable authors or funders of this napster) will be lower. The corporations will take everything you have. This won't be a replay of the PRZ crusade, for multiple reasons. It was always weird to see Napster, Incorporated with a big "So Sue Me!" sign painted on their corporate headquarters. * Don't even _think_ about trying to raise VC. VCs either won't get it, or, when they do, will freak out and demand changes. The cool Black Net stuff will suddenly start morphing into yet another boring bandwidth-selling scheme. (Agorics and several other companies have been doing work on this for years. IBM is moving into this, calling it Grid Computing.) * Nearly all the best things in software have been done by a couple of people. While I don't agree with everything Stallman talks about, what he has done as a one man show is very impressive. A couple of my friends are very much in the same mold...and when they have tried to add staff, it usually slows them down. (Sidebar: Arguably PGP was best when it was a very small project team, that of the original 2.x releases. When it got "big," and diluted, and corporatized, look what happened. And not even a lot of people got rich off of the corporatizing. A shame.) * Bottom Line: One good programmer can, with maybe a year or two of solid effort, produce something that is interesting in this niche (marketspeak: "space"). If he doesn't identify himself, and releases the product through the familiar untraceable channels, he stands a good chance of not getting sued, jailed, or worse. The interesting projects are the ones dangerous to the state, dangerous to the corporations, dangerous to the establishment. (This is not "Mattd" rhetoric about smashing the state...this is just the basic fact about these technologies.) Don't hire a single lawyer. As soon as even a single lawyer is hired, you're lost. Because it means you're thinking in terms of using the legal system, of striking business deals with those whose products you napster, and with working within the system. Not hiring a single lawyer, not even _consulting_ with a lawyer, means you are fully aware of how much you are relying on the laws of mathematics rather than the laws of men. And don't tell anyone what you're doing. Maybe you can leave a clever encrypted message in your work, in case you wish to someday reveal you were the genius behind Thieve's Market. But find other ways to make money or stroke your ego. The familiar saw about two people being able to keep a secret...if one of them is dead. --Tim May "That government is best which governs not at all." --Henry David Thoreau
