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LBRY sounds like some kind of combination of cryptocurrency and P2P file sharing. Notably, cryptocurrency has been used as a money payment system by criminals,

LBRY sounds like some kind of combination of cryptocurrency and P2P file sharing. Notably, cryptocurrency has been used as a money payment system by criminals, and P2P file sharing has been used as a content distribution platform for illegal content like child pornography. I know that this may come as a shock to some who are deep into the cryptocurrency rabbit hole, but common sense dictates that combining these two technologies in an irresponsible way can and will get you into trouble with the law. I don't think that you have clearly answered how LBRY would or even could address this problem. Worse still, you have admitted in writing that "The LBRY protocol is fully decentralized and censorship-resistant ... infringing content may be stored on our servers, by the uploader and by anyone else who may have downloaded it." [1] I understand that you plan to have some kind of censorship, but you cannot realistically monitor all of the data in your network. YouTube has resources to monitor what people are uploading to their content platform, you do not and you will have a hard time proving to the law that you did. Even if could you do this monitoring effectively, your product is designed and advertised to be "censorship-resistant." Walk me through this ... you find child porn on LBRY and you "censor" it in your "app," but you know that LBRY is censorship-resistant, and you know that the child porn is still out there, you even know which IP addressed might have it. What would you do then? At that point, you should get a lawyer. A lawyer would likely encourage you to contact law enforcement authorities, after taking your money. Either that, or you do nothing until the FBI knocks on your door. It appears that the FBI might not be the only three-letter agency you could be dealing with. You mentioned that you "banked millions in the cryptocurrency boom" and you provided a link to a page on your website which provides "Quarterly Reports" which imitate the Investor Relations web page of a publicly traded corporation. [2] Your "Q2 2016" report states that, "Depending on fundraising over the next 3 months, we may entertain private placements via structures that align with the long-term interest in LBRY and minimize market impact." [3] The "Q4 2018" report has statements like "118,635 operational credits were used for the LBRY employee LBC purchase program." [4] In other places you refer to your organization as "LBRY Inc." It is conceivable that the SEC could take an interest in this as well, after they hear from their pals at the FBI. [1] https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7 https://tinyurl.com/y5l7kpc7 [2] https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3 https://tinyurl.com/y2utrfn3 [3] https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83 https://tinyurl.com/y4kuww83 [4] https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd https://tinyurl.com/y4e4dnqd

finer9 8y ago
First off, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns. I'm from the founding team and work on compliance a lot. In all fairness, starting off with 'crypto and p2p are used by criminals' as the context was a bit unfair. There are many more people doing good things with both technologies vs bad things. We are the good guys. We are basically software engineers. In response to your specific concerns, I'd like to reassure you that LBRY works closely with our legal counsel Perkins Coie on several fronts. One of those is illegal content, of which CP would be categorized. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides fairly well established guidance for operators of networks such as ours. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 That being said, of course we dont want nor will tolerate this type of content and report each and every instance to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - including IP and/or any data we have in the specific situation. We would not hesitate to report to local or state law enforcment if we had information that was relevant. Fortunately at this time we have had very few things to report. With regard to your financial concerns - LBRY maintains the stance that we are a pure play utility token. We never had an ICO, have never made statements about future prospects or returns from our tokens, and do not encourage purchase of tokens except for use on the platform. We have put in a considerable amount of legal work in this regard too, and have had extensive discussions with many parties. While every single crypto company currently has regulatory uncertainty, we believe we have possibly the best facts of any utility token and stand behind them.
kauffj 8y ago
The nature of open protocols and standards is that they can be used to do illegal things. HTTP is regularly used for illegal activity. This does not make HTTP bad. I agree that what we're doing is at a legal frontier. Existing laws like CDA and DMCA are not set up to handle blockchain. That's why we've worked closely with lawyers from the very beginning. While we don't publicly share the advice we've received from our retained council (Perkins Coie), you're welcome to look at this memo drafted by the pro bono Cardozo law clinic on our behalf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oudj04lCTJOFZ5V1g5dG9tR2NrWGlYWU1ldVFpZ3EyZlNj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oudj04lCTJOFZ5V1g5dG9tR2N... Finally, LBRY is both a protocol and a corporation, just like BitTorrent is. We try to say LBRY Inc. when referring to the corporation and when simply saying LBRY is ambiguous.

finer9 8y ago

First off, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns. I'm from the founding team and work on compliance a lot. In all fairness, starting off with 'crypto and p2p are used by criminals' as the context was a bit unfair. There are many more people doing good things with both technologies vs bad things. We are the good guys. We are basically software engineers. In response to your specific concerns, I'd like to reassure you that LBRY works closely with our legal counsel Perkins Coie on several fronts. One of those is illegal content, of which CP would be categorized. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides fairly well established guidance for operators of networks such as ours. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 That being said, of course we dont want nor will tolerate this type of content and report each and every instance to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - including IP and/or any data we have in the specific situation. We would not hesitate to report to local or state law enforcment if we had information that was relevant. Fortunately at this time we have had very few things to report. With regard to your financial concerns - LBRY maintains the stance that we are a pure play utility token. We never had an ICO, have never made statements about future prospects or returns from our tokens, and do not encourage purchase of tokens except for use on the platform. We have put in a considerable amount of legal work in this regard too, and have had extensive discussions with many parties. While every single crypto company currently has regulatory uncertainty, we believe we have possibly the best facts of any utility token and stand behind them.

kauffj 8y ago

The nature of open protocols and standards is that they can be used to do illegal things. HTTP is regularly used for illegal activity. This does not make HTTP bad. I agree that what we're doing is at a legal frontier. Existing laws like CDA and DMCA are not set up to handle blockchain. That's why we've worked closely with lawyers from the very beginning. While we don't publicly share the advice we've received from our retained council (Perkins Coie), you're welcome to look at this memo drafted by the pro bono Cardozo law clinic on our behalf: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oudj04lCTJOFZ5V1g5dG9tR2NrWGlYWU1ldVFpZ3EyZlNj/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oudj04lCTJOFZ5V1g5dG9tR2N... Finally, LBRY is both a protocol and a corporation, just like BitTorrent is. We try to say LBRY Inc. when referring to the corporation and when simply saying LBRY is ambiguous.