Are Darknets The Future Of File Sharing?

I came across this rather long but intriguing article today here  discussing the future of copyright and what changes could be in place in the near future.  When it seems like it is everyone vs the RIAA and MPAA, I think its a good time for us to contemplate our digital future.  The part of this article that really got my brain moving today was this:

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” [7] The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data). Within 10-15 years a cheap pocket-size media player will probably be able to store all recorded music that has ever been released — ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?” [8]

“I have all the music from 1950-2010 (In my pocket), do you want a copy?”. How profound is that.  When you can carry every song ever recorded on a jump drive that fits on your key chain and costs less than a day’s work, how will that affect the RIAA.  The industry will have to change, if it doesn’t change willingly the people will force it to change.  I don’t know what the solution is, but I can tell you that it’s not DRM, as you can see by the epic failure of the EA game spore. Pepole are sick of DRM, as one digg user wrote regarding that article, “I don’t want to rent a copy (of spore), I want to buy it”.

It’s time to take that cliche “think outside the box” to heart, or get trampled inside of it.