3 ms·
Can we completely anonymize and decentralize filesharing?
- pwg 11y agoA technical solution [1] to a legal problem. If it got big enough to be targeted by copyright holders, it would fall afoul of the "What Colour are your bits?" problem: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 [1] large copyright holders will not care that a 'weak hash' might match multiple blocks. They will take the fact that the 'weak hash' matched a block in their copyrighted movie to assert that the downloader was, in fact, requesting and downloading the movie. And given the recent raid on a tor exit node operator where the judge was not even told the IP was a tor node, even though the police knew, means that big copyright will ignore the fact that there 'might' be plural matches and simply argue before a judge that 'weak-hash' matching block X of movie Y is evidence of copyright infringement. And because of the 'What colour are your bits?" problem, arguing that weak-hash X might also match open source file Z isn't likely to get very far due to lack of technical knowledge on the part of the judges.
- thebrainnetwork 11y agoThat might be so. But with this system it's a lot harder to figure out who was requesting and downloading that block in the first place. And if the proof is an incomplete hash of only a part (a block) of copyrighted material... I don't know. I'm no legal expert, but that doesn't sound like it's enough to actually prosecute someone. But hey, I'm just glad someone actually took the time to read the whole thing ;)