Here's another shot in the p2p wars. Can "polluting" (lowering the signal/noise ratio) make a FastTrack network unusable? Perhaps, until this drives the p2p guerillas to adopt (perfect?) digital watermarks (which ironically is what Big Media needs anyway). Cool.
Got turned on to this via Dave. The open warfare between the RIAA and p2p music sites is fascinating on many levels, but reading this memo reminds me of the electronic countermeasures (ECM) wars that happened in the late '70s and '80s. In those days I worked for a defense contractor, and spent my time studying the latest "enemy" RF and weapons gear, then coming up with ways to defeat it. Each year brought a new generation of technology-enabled threat, so we'd have to do better with our response. It accelerated the engineering process for radar and signal processing by decades, which is what I think is happening now with Napster, FastTrack, KaZaA, MusicCity et al. The description of FastTrack's p2p architecture and its adaptive supernode topology is brilliant. It's a dynamic, robust commications network, for which I can think of hundreds of applications beyond music sharing. Whatever the RIAA does to attack it technically (attacks in the courts are another matter) will drive more innovation and make it stronger in the long run. That's what happened during the Cold War, and it's happening again in the music wars. It's digital Darwinism at warp speed. Stay tuned...
