Two copyright-related news items just crossed my transom, which together remind me how foolish it is that we’re still pursuing technological and legal restraints on copyright infringement — which will only serve to generally screw up the Internet in new and exciting ways.

The first came by way of a tweet from Roger Ebert, pointing me to a story I missed about the new copyright infringement alert system. In brief, here’s how it “works”:

1) Copyright holders will continue to pay large sums of money to third-party companies hawking technological solutions.

2) These companies will monitor, or attempt to monitor, every P2P connection in existence in order to see whom is connecting to what.

3) If your IP address is displayed as connecting to one of these P2P clouds, you get a warning note from your ISP. After six strikes, undisclosed bad things happen.

The reason I put “works” in quotes earlier is that it’s trivially easy not to get caught. For example:

1) Use a BitTorrent client with an automated blacklist feature, and it will automatically refuse to connect to the IP addresses of any computer identified as doing copyright monitoring. (There’s a bit of an arms race going on here, and the blacklists aren’t always going to be 100% accurate, but they’re consistently pretty damned close.)

2) Use an open wifi hotspot.

3) Use any number of methods to spoof or block your IP address. Some of these are easy, some of these are difficult… but you can bet your socks that the more this feature is required, the more likely it will be that new P2P methods will spring up that do this automatically.

4) Or just ignore the whole thing. ISP involvement in this system is voluntary, and there’s no requirement that anything will happen to you after you get that sixth strike. It’s pretty much an open question how much heat the ISPs will want to bring down upon themselves, since any robo-cutoff system is almost certainly going to include grandmas who have no idea what they’re talking about.

In short, this system is geared towards that slice of the Internet-using market that is technically skilled enough to run BitTorrent, but not technically skilled enough to avoid getting caught. This is a very small slice of the torrenting market, and makes me wonder about the business opportunity to set up a turnkey safe torrent system as a consulting service. As always, torrents are completely legal, because there’s any amount of non-infringing data that can be downloaded over a P2P service.

The second bit of news relates to how impossible it will be to keep up with future technological advancements that make blocking impossible. For those of you already not up to date: the old argument that torrent sites were illegal hinged upon the idea that they hosted torrent files which in and of themselves proved that the site in question was engaging in copyright infringement. Torrent sites argued that the files themselves contained no copyrighted data, which presumably got them off the legal hook, but this argument didn’t fly in court.

So now, The Pirate Bay has switched to hosting its entire site using only “magnet” links that automatically link a torrent application to a P2P cloud. As with a torrent file, the link has a one-to-one correlation with whatever is being downloaded, but linking to a site is always legal; if this changes, then you can pretty much say goodbye to Google and any other search service.

The side effect of this change: The Pirate Bay’s entire database of 4,185,622 torrents is now a database that fits in 90 megabytes, which means you can store it on any one of the roughly 18 billion USB sticks that have been manufactured in the last decade. This also means that hosting the entire Pirate Bay is utterly trivial, and to generally prove this idea, The Pirate Bay is moving forward with a plan to host copies of its site in frickin’ low Earth orbit.

This sort of ties in with last December’s announcement that some groups are moving forward with the idea of setting up a “darknet” Internet which would be hosted on a private set of satellites. IMO, this particular idea is nutty as a fruitcake — satellites are a fairly expensive proposition — but the idea of creating a parallel Internet which is unmonitored and uncensored is completely doable. The process by which you and I connect to the same Internet is managed by the DNS system, and it’s perfectly possible to create two parallel Internet networks by deliberately creating separate DNS networks to manage them. This is generally seen as a Very Bad Thing — one of the major knocks on SOPA and PIPA is that it would essentially create these forks by breaking DNS — but a deliberate DNS fork is created every time a company sets up an intranet.

The same technology can be used to create a communications network that has content which skirts around national and international enforcement mechanisms. The primary vulnerabilities of such a secondary network would literally be based on military attack or police action that physically destroy servers or their connections, hence the plans for satellite bandwidth and orbital server hosting. These plans up the ante for what any nation or private entity would have to do in order to bring them down.

Personally, it seems to me that the technologies discussed in these plans are fairly dystopian, and I’d prefer to believe that after generational lag time is taken into account, it’s not going to be too long before Western governments understand that the legal framework forcing the existence of these secondary Internets is itself the problem. But the very fact that such things are possible with existing technology — and potentially necessary given our general moves to equate copyright infringement with terrorism — should demonstrate that the move to prevent piracy with laws and technology is a lost cause, as it has been for roughly five hundred years.

Photic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze upon exposure to a bright light.

Phobic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze upon exposure to a fearful situation.

Pholic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze when examining one’s own bald spot in a mirror.

Phoric sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze after erroneously telling someone your name is Richard.

Phowic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze after erroneously telling someone your name is Richard, if your name is actually Elmer.

Phoic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze when eating Vietnamese soup.

Phrolic sneeze response n.: the urge to sneeze immediately after gamboling.