The ever-lucid Clay Shirky has written one of the best essays yet on why the RIAA's cmapaign to make its customers hate the recording industry is doomed in File-sharing Goes Social
The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA's waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded efficiency for resistance to legal attack.Read on to find out the full recipe for failure the record moguls are currently pursuing. Posted by Vanderleun at October 13, 2003 4:28 PMThe RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting.
