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This is an age, Ian Clarke says, when copyright laws and freedom of speech cannot coexist. One of them has to go. And, if he has anything to say about it, freedom of speech won't be the one.

By day, Clarke is the chief technology officer for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Uprizer, which Clarke describes as a non-controversial software maker. It's his hobby, he says, that is his true calling. It's also what's making him famous.

Clarke is the founder and project director for Freenet, an open-source content exchange project that many are calling the next Napster, or even the indestructible Napster, because of its ability to function as a place to swap MP3 music files undetected.

Freenet has an offshoot, Espra.net, that is intended to function like a more secure Napster. But in Clarke's mind, Freenet stands for much more than just swapping music. It's more than just swapping the documents, films and images that also can be exchanged over the online platform. If anything, Freenet is the online manifestation of Clarke's deeply libertarian political viewpoint.

"In the simplest terms possible," Clarke says, "Freenet attempts to permit true freedom of speech. Copyright law attempts to prevent communication in some circumstances. And therefore, in order for Freenet to do its job successfully, it must prevent enforcement of copyright law."

The buzz you hear is the hornets coming out of their nests. There are, after all, a lot of people who rely on copyrights to help them earn a living, or to keep their businesses running.

Copyright is the exclusive legal right to publish, reproduce and sell literary, music and artistic works - or at least that was the definition in the 1966 edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. But that was published before people starting applying copyright laws to claim exclusivity over things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the human genome. And, of course, that definition also was written before the Internet was invented.

More recently, copyright claims have been at the heart of the Napster case. They have come into play in disputes involving Steven Brill's online service Contentville.com and over the digital dissemination of the decryption codes that allow users to crack and copy DVDs, among other cases.

Meanwhile, the entertainment industry often wields the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) like a club. That l998 law has often been invoked to crack down on Web sites that digitally facilitate the circumvention of copyrights. Critics of copyright law say its original intent has been warped by industries that refuse to adapt to the public's demand for inexpensive and immediate access to digital material. Clarke agrees, but he takes the argument a step further.

He thinks that copyrights in general have lost their place in the digital age. "In my view," he said, "copyright has been a failure, in addition to being based on something that simply isn't true: namely, that information is property."

If Freenet lives up to Clarke's description, however, the point would be moot. Everybody, and nobody, would own all information, be it written words or movies or music. It all would be free to anyone who wants it, at any time, without cost and without penalty.

Freenet was Clarke's brainchild, developed in July 1999 while he was a student of artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Edinburgh. In a paper he wrote for a class, he came up with a design for a distributed file-sharing network, in which all users can be anonymous, or not, according to their choice. He put his idea out on the Internet, and, much like the Linux operating system, contributors from around the world were allowed to tweak and improve on it. Freenet was finally released on the Internet in March 2000.

Unlike Napster, there's no central distribution server, just a Web-like interface through which people can obtain whatever form of digital content strikes their fancy - as long as they know the addressing "key" that allows them to find it. Unlike Gnutella, a piece of content on the network is not stored on any one computer; it continually shifts from computer to computer, making it virtually impossible to track down. And even if a file is tracked down to a particular PC, there is no way for investigators to know whether it originated there, or if it was forwarded from another node, or from 300 other nodes before that, on the network.

All of which means no there is no master list of users, no one to sue, and, Clarke insists, no way to kill Freenet off. "It's really pretty much impossible to shut down legally," he said.

No Names, Please

Perhaps the crux of Freenet's philosophy is the idea of anonymity. Clarke says anonymity is the essential element of unrestricted free speech. "If you cannot remain anonymous, then you can be punished for what you say, thus discouraging others from putting forward their opinions," he said.

It's an idea that has many champions, but Esther Dyson, founding chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is not one of them. While she too believes that copyrights may need to go, replaced by such things as paid public appearances by writers and the like, in her book "Release 2.0," Dyson expresses reservations about encouraging the use of anonymity in online society.

"When people operate anonymously," Dyson writes, "there's no incentive to tell the truth; dishonest people easily betray others for their own gain. . Overall, everyone is worse off on average."

Clarke is unmoved by such objections, saying that Freenet neither encourages nor discourages bad behavior online. "I just think that Freenet allows someone to remain anonymous if they so desire," he said. "One person's watchdog is another person's censor. Freenet is designed to prevent censorship. Censorship by a majority or censorship by a community is still censorship."

But What Of The Artists?

Steve Jones finds Clarke's arguments troublesome. While he's hardly pro-censorship, the University of Illinois - Chicago's communications department head is a copyright holder, in fact owns more varieties of copyrights than most. He's written books, had originals songs released on records, published scholarly papers, produced journalistic pieces for newspapers and magazines.

Jones says he thinks that in Clarke's zeal to protect free speech, he may have lost sight of what copyrights are really about - making it possible for the creators to create and get paid for it. "I don't think he's ever written a book or created a CD," Jones said. "And I think he doesn't quite understand the relationship between authors and creators, and the works that they create."

Andrew Bridges, a Silicon Valley new media attorney, simply thinks Clark's anti-copyright rhetoric is wrong. Copyrights still very much matter, the lawyer said. "Last I heard people were willing to pay a lot of money for information," he said. "I went and paid $299 for a 2-ounce piece of software last week. That's a hell of a lot more expensive than steak."

Asked about Clarke's criticism that the music industry is a prime example of why copyrights don't work (Clarke contends record companies use the laws to prevent artists from receiving pay, not to protect their right to be paid), Bridges conceded Clarke's point.

"Is any legal doctrine subject to abuse? Absolutely," he said. "Have the traditional, fortress-like media interests tried to abuse certain laws in their favor? Absolutely. Does that mean that the law goes out the window? I don't think so."

Charles C. Mann is somewhat more sympathetic. Mann, a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote a seminal 1998 piece for that magazine about copyrights in the digital age, "Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?" In it, he concludes that current copyright law is rife with flaws, but that the regulations need to be retained at some level.

Mann says that he understands many of Clarke's points. He agrees, for instance, that copyrights do impede the free flow of information.

"It's obviously true," he said. "If I have the copyright to my own work, I can control to a large extent the reproduction of those works. Clearly it doesn't have any meaning if I can't say no."

But he thinks the situation is more complicated than in Clarke's vision. "The part where personally I would disagree with him is that I don't see that all blocks of any kind should be tarred with the brush of censorship," Mann said. "This is a debate that's gone on forever."

Mann said that Clarke's argument is one with which it is in some ways easy to sympathize. "His argument might be that it's just a heck of a lot more important for dissidents in China, and people who are fighting against terrible regimes in Africa, and who are working against corruption in the former Soviet Union, to have guaranteed freedom of expression," Mann said, "than it is for Disney to milk another few dollars out of Mickey Mouse."