Clay Shirky thanks the recording industry for stimulating innovation in social software.

Such a system would add a firewall of sorts to the client, server, and router functions of existing systems, and that firewall would serve two separate but related needs. It would make the shared space inaccessible to new users without some sort of invitation from existing users, and it would likewise make all activity inside the space unobservable to the outside world.

Though the press is calling such systems "darknets" and intimating that they are the work of some sort of internet underground, those two requirements -- controlled membership and encrypted file transfer -- actually describe business needs better than consumer needs.