By Sean Flinn | July 28, 2000
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"I think that ultimately there is the potential for Freenet to replace the World Wide Web," Clarke idealizes.
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Visit the Freenet Web site
Watch Ian Clarke's speech at the 2000 MP3 Summit in La Jolla, Calif.
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Ian Clarke isn't a household name yet -- emphasis on the yet.
Clarke, if you're not the sort that closely follows technology news or developments in the realm of file-sharing software (and let's face it, not many people are that sort at all), is the 23-year-old Irishman who, as a student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, developed Freenet, a piece of technology that, if it becomes as virally popular as the Napster and Gnutella software applications, will revolutionize not only the Net but also the very concept of intellectual property.
That's a bold statement, but it's not an exaggeration. Why the commotion? Because Freenet works like Gnutella on steroids. File-swapping technology has created an uproar because it allows users to easily trade copyright-protected information -- MP3s being the format most commonly discussed (and, arguably, traded). As broadband access increases and as the world's telecommunications infrastructure grows stable and large enough to sustain massive transfers of data, it's feasible that movies and bootlegs of television programs may become as widely traded as MP3s are now. Imagine being able to access any piece of music, literature or cinema ever made at the stroke of a key. Imagine having access to any piece of information, from government documents to naked pictures of Jenny McCarthy, with minimal effort and minimal wait. Now imagine the creators of that information not being compensated for the use of any of that data. That's what file-sharing technology enables, albeit in an infant stage right now.
The major representatives of intellectual property owners (the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the National Music Publishers Association) are currently engaged in a vicious battle to stop the spread of what they consider to be digital piracy. Heretofore, the one method of combating unauthorized intellectual property distribution has been to identify a pirate through his or her Internet Protocol (IP) address, a series of numbers that communicates the location of a person's computer on the Internet, and to shut them down, either by legal injunction or law suit. Set up an FTP server for people to grab MPEG files, and in short order, a member of the RIAA or MPAA can have you shut down and, possibly, arrested. If you're a corporation whose software enables the unlicensed use of intellectual property, you could even find yourself being sued. Just ask the folks over at Napster and MP3.com.
Freenet circumvents this threat by encrypting the identities of its users, making all participants in the system completely anonymous. Further, unlike Napster, it is decentralized, meaning that there's no corporation channeling the data through one set of servers, thereby making themselves potential targets of litigation. In other words, Freenet is a freedom-of-information advocate's dream come true and -- in the eyes of the RIAA and MPAA -- the entertainment industry's worst nightmare.
It's no surprise, then, that Clarke has found himself under the media microscope lately. He has been the subject of numerous articles and has spent a lot of time enduring questions from members of the music industry (most notably at the MP3 Summit in La Jolla, Calif., and at a Digital Coast dinner / conference). He's also being followed around by a TV crew from the CBS news program 60 Minutes II; the show plans to air a segment on Freenet this fall. Thankfully, Clarke's not so inundated with press requests that he couldn't take time to speak to the Webcasting community. He spoke with RadioSpy's Sean Flinn via phone from the United Kingdom on, fittingly enough, July 4.
Sean Flinn: The first questions I have are directed at people who really are unfamiliar with Freenet and unfamiliar with who you are. Can you take a minute to introduce Freenet and introduce yourself? Tell me a little bit about your background and what you do for a living.
Ian Clarke: Freenet is a protocol, a system that allows people to distribute information on the Internet without fear of censorship. And it does that by providing complete anonymity to both those people placing information onto the system and to people who are [downloading] information that is stored on the system. It's also impossible to identify where a piece of information is stored on the system -- in fact, a piece of information can be stored in more than one place, which makes it very difficult -- if not impossible -- to remove information from the system.
In terms of me, I developed Freenet as part of my fourth-year project while studying artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. I completed that design in July of 1999 and released the design onto the Internet along with an invitation to people to help me make this design a reality. And really, it's gone from there. We released our first prerelease version in March [2000]; we released another version several weeks ago; and we're coming up to what will be the third version of Freenet.
This was a school project? What grade did you get on it?
I got a B.
Wow. What would it have taken for you to get an A?
I think it would have to have been less controversial.
Gotcha. So people are already a part of the system, and it's actually working?
It is. Yes indeed. It's been working since mid-March, although it is still very much in development. These are prereleases. We don't claim that Freenet is complete -- although it does work, and it is useful, and it does distribute information anonymously, and it does so quite efficiently. But there're still a lot of features that we want to implement before we're willing to describe it as "complete."
What was your inspiration for developing Freenet? I mean, I know that you were studying artificial intelligence at U of E, but what specifically led you to develop this sort of technology?
I think that there were probably two things. I mean, there's an ideological reason for it, and there's a kind of technological reason for it. In terms of the ideological reason, I believe in total freedom of information. And I think that if you do believe in total freedom of information, you can't have half measures. You can't say, "This is permissible, and this isn't." Now, I realized that it would be quite difficult to convince other people of this, and so the situation was unlikely to come about through democratic means. But I also realized that I could write a piece of software that would effectively force the issue.
My motivation from the technical side was, firstly, really, I was fascinated by the idea of complex systems, which are formed from simple individual entities all cooperating. An example would be an ant's nest, whereby all of these ants are following relatively simple rules, yet they all work together to make this effectively a kind of meta-organism, which is the ant's nest, which can feed itself and reproduce and defend itself. So I was fascinated by that idea, and I was very interested in trying to apply that to a computer system. And by combining these two ideas, I essentially came up with Freenet.
How many ants are in the Freenet anthill by this point?
It's just a suspicion because there's no way to take a census of people running Freenet nodes -- that's quite deliberate -- but we've had about 100,000 downloads now, and we have about 1,500 downloads a day. There's no guarantee that every single person who downloads the software is actually running a node, but it certainly gives an indication.
You mentioned there were some other features that you wanted to add to Freenet. What kinds of features?
At the moment, you can look at Freenet as [being] a little bit like a file system. And just like a file system, in order to retrieve a file, you need to know the file name. Now, unlike a file system, there's no way to get a list of all the files, and there's no way you can search through the files on the system. So you need to now the exact name of the file you're looking for. We want to address this issue. We're working, at the moment, on a system that will allow you to search Freenet, to do a fuzzy search of the system for files. We also want to install a mechanism whereby people can update information on Freenet. At the moment, once you place information on Freenet, it stays there, and you can't update it. So we also want to create a system whereby people can update information. I would say those would be the two core improvements that I hope we'll see over the next couple of months.
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