Hostile rant

Mark has written a nice rant about the whole Napster/Anti-Napster debate.

What I find so amusing is the whole irrelevancy of Napster; enormous amounts of illicit data were traded before Napster was even a gleam in some coder’s eye, and even more is traded today, without ever touching a Nap server. All this fuss about Napster is akin to running front-page newspaper articles about a speeding ticket in Idaho that happened in 1972.

The sad and scary fact is that any security measure a thirty-six year old computer programmer can design, a fourteen year old hacker can un-design. The reason for this, among many, is that the programmer is paid to work forty or so hours a week on thinking about how to box something up, and the little hacker kid wants to spend his virtually limitless free time trying to break that thing out of that box.

Furthermore, and scarier still: nobody really cares. Taking into account the whole population of the planet, most of them would really like to know where their next meal is coming from, and could care less whether Metallica gets a penny or two for their quasi-legally traded songs. Whoever Metallica is, anyway. For those people who are lucky enough to live in developed nations, have decent homes, maybe a computer, and possibly even know how to turn the danged thing on, you can bet that almost all of them give not two drops of urine for such high-minded ideals as “information property”. You can’t convince someone that freely trading music files are bad if you can barely make them understand that they really didn’t “buy the Internet” when they signed up with AOL, CDs and floppies aren’t the same thing, or that sending 50MB scanned .bmps of their kids via email is just not gonna work.

The root of the problem is not that technology isn’t advanced enough to cope with these issues; the root of the problem exists in the pervasive attitude of most people, and I don’t forsee these attitudes changing any time soon. You can put a lock on every door in town, but if nobody understands why the doors should be locked, they’ll just blindly bludgeon the darned things until they fall off, and walk right on in.