At 8:43 AM -0800 3/1/01, Blank Frank wrote:

The company [EBay] also has instituted a policy to prohibit the sale of anything recorded on a blank compact disc, and it stops sales of certain types of DVD players and gaming equipment that can be used with illegally copied media.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-28-ebay.htm

The RIAA must have some very scary lawyers.

This is a very good example of a problem which was predicted by some on this list, and which is now happening: the electronic agora is so much more visible than the traditional flea markets, so much more efficient, and thus is so much more targettable. Ebay restricting DVD players, the French trying to prosecute Yahoo (and probably, soon, Amazon, Ebay, etc.) for selling thoughtcrime books and regalia, the Germans doing similar things. This is the flip side of "regulatory arbitrage": a nexus of corporate control which can be sued, have executives threatened with jailing (*), and even RICO and other conspiracy suits. (Wags usually say that France cannot jail a VP of Ebay or Yahoo, that the U.S. will not cooperate with French authorities and arrest and extradite. Ah, but the French can arrest any Ebay or Yahoo exec, or even middle manager, who lands on their shores. Or who passes through a similarly-minded nation with good relations with France. Recall a few years ago when Germany arranged to have a transitting thought criminal arrested in Denmark or Holland, I forget which, and then extradited to the Fatherland for political reeducation.) This general situation of a "nexus of corporate control" is one reason Napster is about to go down for the count. By having a centralized service, and a suable corporate or partnership entity, and by essentially advertising themselves as a pirate music source, they were a ripe target. Long-term list members will know that many of us said the same thing about Zero Knowledge Systems. I specifically predicted to Austin and Hammie in a meeting we had in late 1998 that ZKS would come under legal assault as soon as the Freedom Network became implicated in sufficiently serious crimes. Porn rings, pedophile networks, plots to kill the Canadian PM, extortion threats, etc. (ZKS has "abuse" policies in place, but so long as Freedom nyms are not actually traceable, which is what they say and which no one has demonstrated otherwise, an after the fact cancellation policy is not a powerful deterrent for criminals and thought criminals. Do the math and see that the $50 for 5 nyms is a trivial cost for those incentivized to be untraceable.) Back to suing corporations. Instead of suing a thousand individual flea markets for "allowing" sales of DVD players, just threaten Ebay with a lawsuit. Ebay backs down and issues an instruction, backed up easily by software filters. The efficiency of electronic agoras result in efficient threats agains those who run such centralized agoras. As this process unfolds, expect lawsuits from Pez dispenser manufacturers claiming that bootlegs of their products are being sold. Expect sales of used machinery to be threatened by the original manufacturers (perhaps claiming that used generators and lawn mowers are "potentially unsafe"). Expect Saudi Arabia to sue to block sales of Islamic (and, obviously, anti-Islamic) materials. Is it all hopeless? Are we destined to see a world of a few corporations like Yahoo and Ebay and Amazon being choke points for any tinhorn dictator threatening to sue them and arrest their employees? The answer is, of course, decentralized networks, decentralized markets. Gnutella, Open Napster, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Cypherpunks-style remailers. (Some of these still have elements of centralized control. But the centralized control and corporate points of attack may someday be discarded as unnecessary, pace the discussions we've had of "everyone a mint" in digital money systems.) The Cypherpunks future lies with these decentralized systems. Obvious, but true. Cyberspace has enough degrees of freedom that various markets can be instantiated without some corporation operating the "market." (Usenet is a primitive example.) There really is no long-term need for an Ebay to be a "market maker." The future will bring more options for online auctions, for new pricing mechanisms. (Personally, I can see systems like Mojo recasting themselves as alternatives to Ebay. I don't know if Jim and his friends are thinking along these lines, though.) Centralized control is a more general problem than just "men with guns" controlling others. Centralized control is also a target for other centralized controllers. Ebay and Yahoo are finding this out in a big way. Let a billion buyers and sellers bloom. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns

At 09:46 AM 3/1/2001 -0800, Tim May wrote:

Is it all hopeless? Are we destined to see a world of a few corporations like Yahoo and Ebay and Amazon being choke points for any tinhorn dictator threatening to sue them and arrest their employees?

The answer is, of course, decentralized networks, decentralized markets.

Gnutella, Open Napster, Freenet, Mojo Nation, Cypherpunks-style remailers. (Some of these still have elements of centralized control. But the centralized control and corporate points of attack may someday be discarded as unnecessary, pace the discussions we've had of "everyone a mint" in digital money systems.)

The Cypherpunks future lies with these decentralized systems. Obvious, but true.

This is a reasonable description of my current project - I gave a presentation in it at the O'Reilly P2P conference, slides are at <ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/conference/p2p2001/1178/broiles_1178.sdd>.

Centralized control is a more general problem than just "men with guns" controlling others. Centralized control is also a target for other centralized controllers. Ebay and Yahoo are finding this out in a big way.

Let a billion buyers and sellers bloom.

Exactly. Control freaks and lazy people hoping to exploit designed-in architectural weaknesses or choke points in commerce systems will find themselves hoisted on their own petards, like Napster and Ebay. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com "Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler

-- At 12:14 PM 3/1/2001 -0900, Daniel J. Boone wrote:

So far, all of the ideas I have come up would require a relatively stable system for recording reputation capital and associating it with nyms. I haven't figured out a protocol for doing THAT without it becoming a point of attack for the decentralized market system.

EBay's primary asset is that it is a repository of reputation capital for buyers and sellers. Naturally it will attempt to capitalize on that asset, taking a share of the value generated by your reputation capital, and naturally the state will attempt to confiscate that asset, and "correct" the information in that asset, to punish certain people and groups and reward other people and groups. Misbehave, perhaps by selling thought crime products, and your reputation capital will be expunged. Or, if you are a member of a protected group, unfavorable comments will be expunged. Therefore, in the long run, people will find it more profitable to control the reputation information that they generate -- we will need a peer to peer reputation system. Proposed system: When I transact with someone, the auction client on my computer generates a record, containing proof of some parts of that transaction, signed by myself and the other party, stored on my computer. By default I make that record public. If I like, I can add any comments I please to that record. A key problem is that people need to look all this stuff up. This requires indexing servers that keep track of all or most such records. However we can have multiple indexing servers, which spider through such transaction records. Thus the spider might start with me, and find all the people that I made public transactions with, and then for each of those people, find all the people that they made public transactions with. A spider exercises no monopoly power, since anyone can set up a spider. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG MQrHOcZ42QomrtqWpHa5yFOd2cJ7Q1nP4/RpMmLU 4IAi3ZRjN5ygCUfAKEIcHx/++oYWJoNr6TrN6ZJ+C