> If I could talk to the pirate community, I'd say, "MP3 swappers, consider
this: You might be getting free content now, but what you ultimately might be
doing is giving the government an excuse to snoop on your every communication,
whether voice or data. Is free content really worth it?"

This sort of argument always says to me, "The author does not really understand
strong crypto." I'm increasingly less worried about the government (or anyone!)
snooping on my communications, because the gap between cryptography and
cryptanalysis (deciphering encrypted material) continues to widen, heavily
favoring the cryptographers.

Honestly, half the time pirating stuff is just about the convenience. If I
want to hear just one track from an album, it's infinitely easier to fire up
Kazaa than it is to go buy the album or single. Until the industries that sell
intellectual property begin delivering these online, people will continue
pirating them. I'll bet that we simply move to completely anonymous,
cryptographically secure file-trading systems (such as Freenet) that will make
it impossible for anyone to figure out who is trading what.

It's a technological battle that the intellectual property cartels/government
is going to lose. It's similar to copy protection, which attempts to use
cryptography for something it is incapable of doing. You can talk all you want
to about "secure computing" (or "trusted" computing), but it's a sham that I
doubt will ever see much market penetration, let alone any sort of
effectiveness. Cryptography, at its core, is meant to prevent untrusted third-
parties from eavesdropping on communications. When the untrusted party becomes
one of the two parties doing the communication, no crypto system is really
capable of ensuring that the second party doesn't subvert it.

The correct response from the industry should be to give the market what it
wants -- the ability to download content with few restrictions for a reasonable
price. The author of the article suggests buymusic.com, a newly-launched
service. I was interested in the site when it launched, but was quickly
disgusted with it. Not all songs are 79 cents (though most seem to be less
than a dollar) and a full album costs about $12-15, which isn't a whole lot
cheaper than a new album in a store.

The site also uses some "digital rights management" through Windows Media
Player (which means you're stuck on one OS), and limits the amount of times you
can download the track to your PC, to portable players and burn to CD.
Furthermore, and more importantly, each track has a different license! So one
track may allow you to burn it once while another song lets you do it three
times. And the whole thing is tied to specific computers, so if you've used
your allotted number of downloads (usually like 2 or 3) and your hard drive
fails, you'd better have a backup of the song or you're rebuying it (and of
course backing it up is limited by the license for that song.

Uh. No. It is considerably less work for me to just open up Kazaa and have the song in an unrestricted file format. But I really would pay for it, given a decent online distribution system (I would also appreciate it if commercial systems encoded at higher bitrates than 128 kbps, which will sound like crap in a few years when everyone has high-quality computer sound).

Ste "Arrr!" phen