Downhill Battle is one of the best, most effective group of copyfighters on the net, fast turning into a MoveOn for the P2P wars. They've just posted a fundraising campaign to raise a bounty for software authors who extend the "Gaim" encrypted instant messaging protocol — which is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License — to add filesharing to it. Doing so would make it nearly impossible for the recording and movie industries to run file-sharers who used the system to ground, effectively cloaking users' activities from the industry and from network administrators and ISPs who've been co-opted into enforcing copyright for entertainment companies. I just put $100 into the fund. This is an important piece of software and it needs to exist.
We propose an extension to the Gaim chat client that lets users do gnutella-style search & download filesharing, where search requests propagate out to trusted buddies, buddies of buddies, etc. This approach has several advantages. First, people will be more altruistic sharing with friends and won't be as worried about RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. At the same time, because they can share with friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends, they'll often be searching a very huge library. This software will be just as simple as an IM client, and it will be easy for people to invite friends (so it spreads virally). No other piece of filesharing software is this well positioned to become hugely popular with the average, not-so-knowledgeable, Windows user. As a bonus, it will convert many users to using the open-source and ad-free client Gaim–a good thing in itself. The immediate goal is creating a working version that is extremely simple but very modular and easy to modify or expand upon.
(via /.)
