By Sean Flinn

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.

"I think that ultimately there is the potential for Freenet to replace the World Wide Web," Clarke idealizes.

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.

"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.'" - Ian Clarke

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.

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