Oh, man. I know there was some reason I couldn't sleep last night (I'm up at 6:30 a.m. if that's any indication)--Paypal has refused to provide service to Freenet. Freenet was using Paypal as a means to accept contributions. Now, what would persuade a greedy little company like Paypal to refuse service to a wonderful organization like Freenet? My thoughts--they were tipped off. I bet in the next few weeks the RIAA/MPAA will make a move against Freenet, and Paypal wanted to step clear.

For those who don't know about Freenet, it's truly a wonderful bit of peer-to-peer networking. Indeed, I think it has some of the best commercial potential of any P2P service yet devised. The system is beautiful. Basically, it creates a partition on your drive that is inaccessible to you or anyone else; it's actually an encrypted piece of the Freenet. If you want a file, say, the latest Madonna mp3, you do a search and Freenet pulls the file together from all of the bits and pieces strewn across the partitions of other freenet users' hard drives. That's assuming that the Madonna mp3 is popular enough to make it to the freenet; the system automatically deletes the least popular files.

It's pretty obvious why this system poses such a threat to the corporates: It creates a public domain at the expense of the information feudalists. The feudalists have realized by now that freenet is one P2P that poses a truly horrible threat, because they won't be able to get those nice lists of 12-year old kids committing felonies for listening to their favorite music.

The obvious legal problem with freenet is that, inevitably, people using the system have copyrighted material on their hard drive. Even freenetters who only download "legal" stuff may still have chunks of corporate matter on their drives. Sure, it's encrypted, and, sure, it's of no use to them or anyone else, but do you honestly think such arguments will matter to those bribe-swallowing fat-heads we have in office today? No, I'm afraid freenet will go the way of Napster.

Now, I said earlier that Freenet had tremendous commercial potential. What I mean by this is that it's laughably obvious what the corporates could accomplish if they could only get their heads out of their asses long enough to ponder how they can use P2P to their benefit rather than their detriment. And, no, I don't care if iTunes is 50 cents a song, people would rather have it for free. The industry's war on the digital liberators won't be won by making them feel less guilty about enjoying content.

However, a system like Freenet could change the way music, movies, and software is delivered. Let me make some connections here.

Let's say that you can listen to any song from a library of tens of thousands of songs--all "legal" and perfectly legit. However, these songs are NOT downloaded to your hard drive, but are instead played much like one would listen to the radio; it would work rather like "request radio." You would pay a monthly subscription for this service; say, $30. In effect, what'd you be doing is building a massive song list, but the partition on your harddrive would not be accessible (it'd be encrypted and consist of a hodgepodge of content). As you listened to one song, the "Paynet" would scour the system to assemble the pieces to the next song. At no point would have an .mp3 on your computer; instead, the Paynet would assemble the content on-the-fly. The system would be setup to provide the best access to the most popular content, naturally--those of us preferring obscure Zappa b-sides would either have to do without or settle for less-than-lightning speed downloads and buffering.

What about those poor artists? Well, the Paynet gurus would simply rake in the earnings each month and distribute royalties according to the popularity of each song. Paynet would determine the slice of the pie depending on how many times a particular artist was played. If an artist was only played 1,000 times, the payout would be small, but if the artist was played 100,000,000 times, the payout would be considerably more than he or she would make under the current system. However, I doubt the artist would be paid directly--rather, a large cut would go to the label, who helped "promote" the artist in the first place.

Would this system work for software? Well, how about games? I suggest you take a moment to read about the Phantom. Do you see a CD-ROM input here? A slot for a cartridge? Nope. But it does have Broadband and comes with a $30 subscription fee. You better believe the industry has its eye on this baby.

Yup...The Internet is about to lose the war on free speech, buddy!