On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 09:02 AM, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

I'm sure certian Virginia boys around here would say that that there's a misspelling in there, somewhere...

Certain Californians will say that the "Darknet" allegedly coined in 2002 by these guys is clearly a misspelling of "Blacknet," coined for this usage in 1988, by me, and made popular in 1992-3, when it was actually deployed (by me)...and investigated by various TLAs on espionage grounds. Not surprising that this "appropriation of the term" came from our friends in Redmond. Perhaps they will copyright the term and then send me and others threatening letters. --Tim May (a few excerpts follow)

The script for the next Matrix sequel? No -- because the darknet is already here: it is the unofficial side of the internet. And its resilience guarantees that it will remain a thorn in the side of the music and movie industries, whatever successes they may have in crushing its early manifestations. --Richard Waters, "No respite from the forces of darknet," Financial Times (London), July 29, 2003

Backgrounder --------------------------------- The ominous tone that pervades the word "darknet" is probably no accident. That's because the joint coiners of the term -- Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman -- are employees of Microsoft, a company on the forefront of something called digital rights management....

Earliest Citation --------------------------------- First Use --------------------------------- We investigate the darknet -- a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content. The darknet is not a separate physical network but an application and protocol layer riding on existing networks. Examples of darknets are peer-to-peer file sharing, CD and DVD copying, and key or password sharing on email and newsgroups. The last few years have seen vast increases in the darknetms aggregate bandwidth, reliability, usability, size of shared library, and availability of search engines. In this paper we categorize and analyze existing and future darknets, from both the technical and legal perspectives. We speculate that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle. --Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman, "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution," Digital Rights Management conference, November 22, 2002