Is The Answer to the Machine Really in the Machine? Technical copyright protection and file-sharing communities

E-.commerce and content distribution models rely on working copyright protection. Copyright is a part of the necessary trust infrastructure of ecommerce for immaterial goods.The recently introduced legal protection of technical measures is theoretically interesting in that it uses legislation to protect a certain form of architecture. This seemingly double protection is also highly paradoxical, since the technical measures were invented in part to deal with law being unable to protect content on the Internet. We use file-sharing networks, where most piracy is found, to formulate hypotheses about this legislation. It is suspected that the number of circumventions and cracks is low relative to the number of copies – implying that few people actually circumvent copyright protection. While this may seem to strengthen the usefulness of trying to stop such circumvention, we will argue that the relatively low number is not due to a cost constraint, but to the low actual demand for cracks, as opposed to copies and that current legislation will fail.