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I love couchdb and what jchrisa is doing there, but this wrong on a variety of levels IMO. First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anyth

I love couchdb and what jchrisa is doing there, but this wrong on a variety of levels IMO. First, on a practical level, no one wants to deal with hosting anything, let alone "civilians", so billions of web servers on the edge of the network is simply a no-go unless and until doing so becomes appliance-esque (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.). Second, 99% of users and cumulative usage time is spent consuming, not producing stuff. Third, this is just crazy: """The online content farms profit based on the fact that it's hard to share your own content, yourself, via a means of production that you control. This is the central fact free-speech activists should be upset about.""" There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster.

crux_ 17y ago
Why is it crazy? It's completely true when you take into account that he wasn't advocating a "means of production" that you rent (aka hosting) but one that you actually own.
- pyre 17y ago
  But he also advocated that the one that you own (the appliance) use hosting services (aka 'the cloud') for backup and distribution purposes. Though he does advocate that such cloud services do deserve safe-harbor protection. I feel there is a disconnect with the 'landlord' analogy here. The author feels that the 'landlord' is the hardware/internet connection provider/host, while the grandparent poster feels that the YouTube also qualifies as a 'landlord' that is renting out space for people to display their videos (where the 'rent' is the ability to display adverts).
jchrisa 17y ago
I actually said I think services like S3 / EC2 / Rackspace should have safe harbor protection, as they are as content-agnostic as possible under the law (like landlords, not nightclub owners.)
- tensafefrogs 17y ago
  So then by this reasoning, YouTube would be ok if they allowed any content and not just videos?
  - loup-vaillant 17y ago
    Videos on YouTubes are located at http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx. youtube.com On Amazon, your content is at http://example.com/ http://example.com/ . Your domain. Your site. This is not about content. If YouTube allowed any content, that wouldn't change anything. If Amazon would only allow videos (but let you have your domain name), that wouldn't change anything either.
jchrisa 17y ago
As far as making the tech easy for civilians, it turns out that's what I spend the majority of my time doing. Slowly. Working my way up the stack takes time.
- cemerick 17y ago
  And I'm 110% behind that effort -- but on its own merits, not as an upshot of "the old regime" losing safe harbor protections.
- rflrob 17y ago
  While I certainly respect the work you're doing, I think there is still a long way to go before the appliance model of serving becomes feasible. The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical. I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.
swernli 17y ago
I think the author makes a similar point (about third party hosting services needing safe harbor) when he points out that Amazon EC2 is like the landlord, who of course can't be held responsible for underage drinking at the club. I agree that appliance-esque simplicity is what is needed to allow/encourage "civilians" to host their own content, and I hazard to guess that the author would too. And what is stopping us from creating that? I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...
- lincolnq 17y ago
  Yeah, I agree somewhat. The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff. If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc. So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.
  - Blasa 17y ago
    I hope to get a sheevaplug* at some point to be a small multi-purpose home server. If we can get setup of that (or something similar) to be as painless as setting up a facebook account and friending, we might be on to something. I also want to use it for things like storing scanned images and possibly home automation/monitoring. In short there might be a market niche for a low-power headless server to solve this kind of situation *http://www.openplug.org/ http://www.openplug.org/
greyman 17y ago
As I think about it now, it seems to me that the author is into something here. Everyone cries that this is attack of the freedom of expression, while it is actually not. It is just an attack to automated content hosting like Youtube. Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue. Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.
- knome 17y ago
  I think a better example would be an art show. Say someone starts an art show that lets anyone display their work inside. It's a huge art show with tens of thousands of persons setting up their pieces over acres of land. Is the proprietor of the space responsible for picking through the inordinate amount of material brought in, checking that all pieces are owned by the person entering and that none are copies or otherwise unworthy of showing? Is it enough that they kick out artists when they receive reports of ill doing? Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation. The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one. Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.
janl 17y ago
So you're saying you're not willing to "imagine"? :) If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.
- cemerick 17y ago
  I can imagine very well, I would just rather not have that vision tied up with advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions. By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)
  - pyre 17y ago
    I don't think that you read that post very well. He's not advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions. He's advocating the limitation of who they apply to. It's debatable whether that's a good or a bad thing, but we have to at least be on the same page to have a decent debate on the issue.
    - dantheman 17y ago
      I'd say youtube in that case would be the landord for the page that holds the video and the creator of the video would be responsible for it. To say that a web host or postal office isn't responsible but that message board is arbitrary. Also craigslist would obviously fall under a the youtube designtion -- and other such services that require scale.
      - jchrisa 17y ago
        The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them.
        pyre 17y ago
        > The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them. So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort? Amazon YouTube ------ ------- Rents Generic Space Rents specific space (videos-only) Charges Rental Fees Free rent Provides a minimal API Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space Profits from rental fees Profits from adverts in/around the videos Please explain the huge difference here and how the law should differentiate between one service and another. Is the major difference here that YouTube uses advertising to turn a profit rather than rental fees? Is that really what makes them deserving of losing safe-harbor? Do the GeoCities-type hosting services also fall into this niche because they monetize through advertising rather than fee-collection? [Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space] {edit} Some more points: * If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?' * Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded? {/edit}
pyre 17y ago
> (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.). The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions. > There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster. But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.
- natrius 17y ago
  So hosting services deserve safe harbor protections, but hosting services that provide a nice front-end to your data (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, etc.) don't. This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.
  - pyre 17y ago
    I don't think that I advocated what the author is necessarily. I feel that people should be working towards a more decentralized web, but removing safe-harbor protections from large sites just because they provide an obstacle to a more decentralized web is not really the correct stance to take. Take Facebook for example, why couldn't we just have a number of providers of social networking services with an agreed-upon protocol to communication/authentication between them? Then I could run my own server for my profile/albums/etc while someone less tech-savvy could sign up with a ready-to-go service that pays for itself with ads.

crux_ 17y ago

Why is it crazy? It's completely true when you take into account that he wasn't advocating a "means of production" that you rent (aka hosting) but one that you actually own.

pyre 17y ago
But he also advocated that the one that you own (the appliance) use hosting services (aka 'the cloud') for backup and distribution purposes. Though he does advocate that such cloud services do deserve safe-harbor protection. I feel there is a disconnect with the 'landlord' analogy here. The author feels that the 'landlord' is the hardware/internet connection provider/host, while the grandparent poster feels that the YouTube also qualifies as a 'landlord' that is renting out space for people to display their videos (where the 'rent' is the ability to display adverts).

jchrisa 17y ago

I actually said I think services like S3 / EC2 / Rackspace should have safe harbor protection, as they are as content-agnostic as possible under the law (like landlords, not nightclub owners.)

tensafefrogs 17y ago
So then by this reasoning, YouTube would be ok if they allowed any content and not just videos?
- loup-vaillant 17y ago
  Videos on YouTubes are located at http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx. youtube.com On Amazon, your content is at http://example.com/ http://example.com/ . Your domain. Your site. This is not about content. If YouTube allowed any content, that wouldn't change anything. If Amazon would only allow videos (but let you have your domain name), that wouldn't change anything either.

jchrisa 17y ago

As far as making the tech easy for civilians, it turns out that's what I spend the majority of my time doing. Slowly. Working my way up the stack takes time.

cemerick 17y ago
And I'm 110% behind that effort -- but on its own merits, not as an upshot of "the old regime" losing safe harbor protections.
rflrob 17y ago
While I certainly respect the work you're doing, I think there is still a long way to go before the appliance model of serving becomes feasible. The question, then, should be what do we do in the mean time? Would shutting down the YouTubes of the world actually hasten the advent of server appliances? I'm skeptical. I also have trouble imagining how new social networking-type applications spread in a world where we have personal servers. The next YouTube/Facebook/Whatever will now have to write their software for a variety of different home servers (and there almost certainly will be a moderate-to-large number of incompatible devices), then convince people to install and correctly configure these apps, update them somewhat regularly to fix security holes, etc. Given the non-zero fraction of people who have trouble simply logging into Facebook, I think we're still a long ways off, and stand to benefit from the rich communities provided by simple, corporate-run networks.

swernli 17y ago

I think the author makes a similar point (about third party hosting services needing safe harbor) when he points out that Amazon EC2 is like the landlord, who of course can't be held responsible for underage drinking at the club. I agree that appliance-esque simplicity is what is needed to allow/encourage "civilians" to host their own content, and I hazard to guess that the author would too. And what is stopping us from creating that? I remember in my freshman year of college when students discovered the library sharing feature in iTunes. Word spread pretty quickly, and soon most folks were using their laptops to do what the Zune tried to popularize: sampling the music of peers for free over the network in order to connect over musical taste and find new bands. I think what the author points out is that other programs have similar features (such as iPhoto being able to share a folder of images to the network), but they are limited to local networks and can't be reached from everywhere. Why not institute a system that allows that same "share my photos" check box to make them available on the web? Then I, and many of my friends who have faced the same problem, won't have to create a facebook account just to be able to see a friend's wedding pictures...

lincolnq 17y ago
Yeah, I agree somewhat. The current problems are security, upload bandwidth, and NAT traversal. As well as that your computer has to be on whenever your friends are accessing your stuff. If (when) ipv6 becomes widespread, we will be able to cut out the NAT. If lots of people start doing it, then the upload bandwidth that ISPs give you will probably increase. And security should be solvable for most consumer purposes when the quality of software (both server and OS level) goes up -- it needs to ensure that your firewall is properly configured, etc. So we're left with leaving your computer on. And that's an expensive problem, because it's not very power-efficient to leave a desktop computer running all the time to serve a website that gets two hits a day. That actually seems to be a strong argument against everybody running their own webserver. But maybe it doesn't really matter, because a lot of people run a computer all the time anyway. I'm not sure.
- Blasa 17y ago
  I hope to get a sheevaplug* at some point to be a small multi-purpose home server. If we can get setup of that (or something similar) to be as painless as setting up a facebook account and friending, we might be on to something. I also want to use it for things like storing scanned images and possibly home automation/monitoring. In short there might be a market niche for a low-power headless server to solve this kind of situation *http://www.openplug.org/ http://www.openplug.org/

greyman 17y ago

As I think about it now, it seems to me that the author is into something here. Everyone cries that this is attack of the freedom of expression, while it is actually not. It is just an attack to automated content hosting like Youtube. Really, what would happen if content providers will be held liable for uploaded content? The megasites like Youtube couldn't legally exist. And the author argues that this is maybe not a bad thing, which is quite a fresh view of the issue. Let's use this analogy. Imagine someone was able to build automated mega pub, where anyone could come and buy beer from robot innkeeper. But the pub would be such huge, that it won't be humanly possible to check if everyone was legally allowed to drink alcohol. So the owner would say: We have so much customers that it is not within our means to check if everyone is of 18+ age. So let's anyone go in and drink beer, and if we are notified that someone is underage, we will promptly kick him off. But we are not liable, since there should be a freedom to drink beer. So what do you think - would such a pub be allowed to exists in a real world? So then, why Youtube is allowed to exist, when anyone can do illegal things anonymously there? (Of course that was just a reasoning exercise, I am not advocating Youtube ban here. ;-)) But overall, I tend to agree with the author, good article.

knome 17y ago
I think a better example would be an art show. Say someone starts an art show that lets anyone display their work inside. It's a huge art show with tens of thousands of persons setting up their pieces over acres of land. Is the proprietor of the space responsible for picking through the inordinate amount of material brought in, checking that all pieces are owned by the person entering and that none are copies or otherwise unworthy of showing? Is it enough that they kick out artists when they receive reports of ill doing? Youtube is not a pub selling beer. They are a virtual location that allows any artist to hang their work. They benefit by selling space for advertisements around the booths. When notified of an artist showing an illegal or otherwise unacceptable piece, they remove it. I see this as a perfectly reasonable situation. The metaphor used in interacting with websites is that of a place. I think the metaphor is a good one. Hosting a space for other people to use should not make one de facto guilty if others abuse it. One could argue for negligence if they had no reporting system or ignored it. But so far as I have read, this is not the case.

janl 17y ago

So you're saying you're not willing to "imagine"? :) If it weren't for Alan Kay we'd be all using DOS prompts on our iPhones (oh wait… :) and that was in the early 70s.

cemerick 17y ago
I can imagine very well, I would just rather not have that vision tied up with advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions. By all means, let us all become publishers, hosts, etc. etc. Maybe an enterprising someone can make that easier and more attractive than the current regime. :-)
- pyre 17y ago
  I don't think that you read that post very well. He's not advocating the elimination of safe-harbor provisions. He's advocating the limitation of who they apply to. It's debatable whether that's a good or a bad thing, but we have to at least be on the same page to have a decent debate on the issue.
  - dantheman 17y ago
    I'd say youtube in that case would be the landord for the page that holds the video and the creator of the video would be responsible for it. To say that a web host or postal office isn't responsible but that message board is arbitrary. Also craigslist would obviously fall under a the youtube designtion -- and other such services that require scale.
    - jchrisa 17y ago
      The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them.
      - pyre 17y ago
        > The difference is that YouTube profits from the videos, EC2 rents generic capacity to someone who could choose to profit from them. So profit = bad? Do you think that Amazon runs EC2 as a pro-bono effort? Amazon YouTube ------ ------- Rents Generic Space Rents specific space (videos-only) Charges Rental Fees Free rent Provides a minimal API Provides a nice web front-end tailor to specific space Profits from rental fees Profits from adverts in/around the videos Please explain the huge difference here and how the law should differentiate between one service and another. Is the major difference here that YouTube uses advertising to turn a profit rather than rental fees? Is that really what makes them deserving of losing safe-harbor? Do the GeoCities-type hosting services also fall into this niche because they monetize through advertising rather than fee-collection? [Note: I've never used EC2 so I don't know what they provide other than a low-level (and maybe a high-level) API into their space] {edit} Some more points: * If you don't like that fact that YouTube does not rent generic space and rents space specifically for videos, then how do you rectify more to-the-metal type services that rent space specifically for video, or music distribution, but still profit from rental fees (instead of ads)? Do they qualify the same as YouTube because they are not providing 'generic space?' * Do you not like that Google possibly profits more from popular videos than from unpopular videos (i.e. you don't like that they profit more or less based on the content of the video)? If this is the case, how is it any different than Amazon EC2 profiting more from someone that serves large files that such up copious amounts of bandwidth if they get to be popular/highly downloaded? {/edit}

pyre 17y ago

> (which will necessitate provisioning of backups and failover using...wait for it...third party services that could only exist given safe-harbor provisions.). The author did mention an appliance that backs things up to 'the cloud.' The author believes that hosting services (e.g. Amazon EC2) do deserve safe-harbor provisions. > There's oodles of places to go that will host your stuff far better than YouTube et al. can, but most people don't care enough to pay for it. Go to vimeo, pay whatever trifling sum they charge these days, and you'll have all the control you want, a better experience to boot, and all the free speech you can muster. But is it easier for the average user? There's also the issue of branding/marketing. There are probably a lot of users that have never heard of Vimeo, but they have heard of YouTube.

natrius 17y ago
So hosting services deserve safe harbor protections, but hosting services that provide a nice front-end to your data (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, etc.) don't. This is wrong. I think the internet would be a better place if it were easier for people to run their own servers, but that doesn't mean we should make it more difficult for hosted services to operate.
- pyre 17y ago
  I don't think that I advocated what the author is necessarily. I feel that people should be working towards a more decentralized web, but removing safe-harbor protections from large sites just because they provide an obstacle to a more decentralized web is not really the correct stance to take. Take Facebook for example, why couldn't we just have a number of providers of social networking services with an agreed-upon protocol to communication/authentication between them? Then I could run my own server for my profile/albums/etc while someone less tech-savvy could sign up with a ready-to-go service that pays for itself with ads.