Stardate 20010904.2305 (On Screen): One of the critical issues that has to be analyzed in military acquisition when working on a defense system is how expensive it is and how slow it is to expand it. This is known as the expense "at the margin". In other words, if your opponent has an offensive weapon system and you then deploy an adequate defensive system, he can deploy more of the offense thus requiring you to deploy more of the defense to stay even. But if he can deploy offense faster than you can deploy defense, or if he can do so more cheaply, then your defense is worthless. In a time of crisis, when your opponent wants to make his force useful, he can rapidly build it up and temporarily overwhelm your defense just before beginning an attack. Thus the mere fact that a defense is possible doesn't mean it is militarily useful. Equally, if the defense is cheaper than the offense and can be ramped more easily, then it makes that offensive weapon useless. A good example of that was the deployment of wire-guided antitank missiles (TOW) in the 1970's and 1980's by the US in Germany along the front with the Warsaw pact. Those missiles were cheaper than tanks and could be built and deployed more rapidly, thus making it impractical for the Warsaw pact to try to build up rapidly in preparation for an attack. A good example of the opposite state, where offense has the advantage, is in a missile defense system. It is faster and easier and cheaper to deploy a new kind of decoy then it is to determine that a decoy exists, analyze what it is, and deploy a countermeasure to that decoy in the defensive system.
That's mainly because the decoy can be kept secret and that the decoy doesn't have to be deployed system-wide. But countermeasures to the decoy do have to be deployed system-wide once the decoy is discovered. If every time I upgrade 5% of my missiles you have to upgrade 100% of your anti-missiles, I can spend you into the ground. If you only upgrade 5% of your anti-missiles, then when I launch my upgraded missile it may not go where the upgraded anti-missiles are, and the non-upgraded anti-missiles may not be able to stop my attack. You can't know where I'll aim, so your entire system has to be able to deal with it. But I don't have to upgrade all my missiles, because as attacker I have the initiative. This is one of about four major reasons why the missile defense system is a foolish waste of time and money.
But this principle applies to all kinds of things. It applies in the commercial world, too. If one company can deploy a product cheaply and rapidly, and if the commercial countermeasure from an opposing company is expensive and time consuming, then the former company has an advantage. That is the situation that the RIAA is facing now. Having slain Napster by attacking it with lawyers, it is now facing other companies who are trying to do exactly the same thing. But those companies have learned from the Napster debacle and have elaborate defenses. One in particular has its main server located on the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean, and it is a directory server for a series of distributed main servers in diverse locations. The system has no central control and the company itself isn't incorporated in the US. Its software is designed in such a way that it isn't possible to institute centralized filtering control, and the traffic on its system doesn't all pass through a single point. Thus it would not be possible to issue a court order to it comparable to the one that Napster received to either filter or be shut down. Filtration isn't possible and neither is shutdown. And in any case the company isn't located in the US and it's not clear that US courts would even have jurisdiction. But the real point is expense at the margin: it is cheap and fast to set up this kind of system, but slow and expensive for RIAA to sic its lawyers on it. It took RIAA two years to kill Napster. In the last six months at least four replacement systems have popped up. If a new file-sharing system can be created in six months but it takes two years for RIAA to prevail in court, then RIAA will win the battles but lose the war. It looks like they're beginning to realize it, too. (Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys, I tell you.) (discussion in progress)
