How The RIAA Has Jumpstarted The Use Of Encryption

Ramblings

from the driven-underground dept

We’ve said it plenty of times before. The only thing the entertainment industry has done with their file sharing lawsuits is drive the file sharing underground, and made it much more difficult for them to realize their mistake and embrace it down the road. While many others have compared the RIAA’s battle with Prohibition, Clay Shirky has taken the argument one step further and is pointing out that the RIAA’s lawsuits have done what the cypherpunks failed to do over the past decade: encourage everyone to use encryption. While the cypherpunks have been warning about the need for encryption for years (usually as a protection against government behavior), most people ignored it because they didn’t see the need. They weren’t doing anything “bad”, so why should they bother with the trouble of figuring out how to encrypt their messages. However, now it turns out that plenty of people are doing something that the recording industry has deemed as “bad” and are being sued for it. Thus, people suddenly have a real incentive to use encryption that they never had before – and that’s likely to be a lasting result. Shirky suggests that five years from now, people will look back and wonder what the music industry was so upset about, but plenty of people will still be encrypting their communications.