[Greg Anos]

I know this is going to be perceived as a troll, but it is not.

Piracy on the internet has been mostly done as a widespread, public accessible, clear text file transfer. Whether it was done by a central server (the original Napster) or Peer-To-Peer, it has always been about finding and uploading/downloading clear text files.

Now, one of the most (in)famous names in the pirate world is going to set up a world wide Cloud storage with automatic, inherent, strong encryption on the upload. Only the uploader will have the key. (How strong the encryption will be remains to be seen.) However, the file can be downloaded by anybody who know it's there, and anybody with the decryption key can decrypt it. It would be perfect for friend-to-friend, small sale piracy.

What I wonder, and would like to get other views on, is will this start changing the shape of piracy from wide availability piracy to narrow focus, friend-to-friend piracy, where person a know person b and wants to share something with them, but not the whole world.

I'd like to Delphi this among the Mobile Read posters.

(This it not to say I am in favor of piracy. This may be a total paradigm shift though...)