Anthony Doesburg: Where freedom of speech means precisely that

As changes to copyright law attempt to stop online music and movie pirates, one place where they might seek refuge is Freenet.

Freenet is the creation of Irishman Ian Clarke, who was a student at Edinburgh University when he came up with the design for a distributed data store that would be resistant to censorship.

He wasn't aiming to provide a haven for pirates or pornographers or outlaws of other persuasions, but to ensure freedom of political speech.

Clarke's 1999 university paper developed into the Freenet Project (not to be confused with the New Zealand or German companies of the same name). He now co-ordinates the project while also running Houston company SenseArray, which predicts people's online behaviour, a service it offers to online advertisers.

If Clarke had been asked to predict how people might use Freenet, chances are he would have anticipated that it would become a place for every flavour of dodgy online behaviour imaginable. But his belief in freedom is such that he doesn't think the crimes of a few - child pornographers, for instance - should limit the communications of the many.

And there are many. Clarke says a couple of a million people have downloaded Freenet's software, which works with an internet browser to create a peer-to-peer network separate from the world wide web. Users donate hard disk space to store Freenet content and bandwidth to access it.

Don't be too generous with that bandwidth, though. Within days of installing Freenet, I found my monthly 10GB data cap had been gobbled up despite browsing the network for barely an hour or two.

Depending how paranoid you are, or if you genuinely fear for your freedom, you can configure the software to provide anything from low security ("I do not care about monitoring and want maximum performance") to the maximum level of protection ("I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). The setting you choose determines the level of encryption of the Freenet content stored on your computer.

The underground network has its own jargon. Rather than websites, Freenet users can publish "freesites"; instead of blogs, many users write "flogs". It is slower to use than the web, although the more you use it, the faster it becomes, and it is less adorned with images.

The content is heavily biased towards political extremes and activism - you can find references there to New Zealand animal rights campaigners, including the 2006 graffiti attack on the Auckland home of a pharmaceutical company director.

That's the stuff for which Clarke dreamed up Freenet. However, with New Zealand proposing to turf music and movie downloaders off the internet if they don't reform after three warnings, he can see them also turning to the anonymity of Freenet.

"This would certainly be a logical thing for them to do, but our motivation for building Freenet was to ensure freedom of political speech, not to help people infringe copyright," he says. "Of course, you can't build a system that allows one thing without allowing the other."

How much music or video they would find on Freenet is difficult to say, but there is nothing to stop file sharers from using it. That goes for files of all kinds.

Clarke says the Freenet Project's largely volunteer development team - it has one employee, paid from donations - is no more liable for illegal content than postal services are for the mail they deliver. But he would prefer the network wasn't used to distribute child porn, for instance, and urges Freenet users to help by not accessing it.

Even without accessing content that could land you in trouble if found on your hard disk, as a Freenet user you are making your computer available to store such material. But it would be in such small fragments of encrypted files that it would be impossible for anyone to tell what it was, Clarke says.

"The way I view it is that by joining the Freenet network it is like you are volunteering to operate something akin to a post office. Yes, it is possible that unsavoury material might occasionally pass through your post office, but you have no way to identify it or stop it when it does because it's against the law to open people's mail.

"I think most people would say that you are doing a good thing by helping other people communicate, and you are not ethically culpable if someone happens to use the service you are generously providing to do something bad."

Compared with the web, Freenet is tiny. Downloads surged after an article in Britain's Guardian newspaper last November, but Clarke estimates just 20,000 computers participate in the network.

During the week we were in contact in mid-March, there were about 140 visits to the Freenet Project website from New Zealand.

If the three-strikes copyright bill becomes law, maybe that number will jump.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist