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>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other a

>An embedded PeerTube video comes with a warning, because when you watch one of these videos using the web player, you may also be serving that video to other audience members watching it at the same time. This is something the distributed video people don't seem to entirely understand. Look at how many copyright disputes happen on YouTube - not actual piracy, just disputes. Now imagine every dispute was resolved by sending DMCA takedown notices or subpoenas to individual users who happened to have the misfortune of watching a particular PeerTube video someone didn't like. Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. So you need some sort of mechanism to ensure people who provide you the video don't have an IP address to trace, which immediately puts you in all sorts of hard UX problems that the wave of encrypted P2P software from a decade and a half ago never really figured out.

ekianjo 6y ago
Or, alternatively, you just stay connected to a VPN when you browse the web, and stop worrying about this aspect. (yes, I know, VPNs are not the silver bullet they are advertised to be, but in this particular case they are helpful).
akersten 6y ago
Wouldn't I , as a user, have the same DMCA safe harbor as long as I stopped streaming the video if I were to receive one of those letters?
- LeegleechN 6y ago
  To have the DMCA safe harbor you have to submit a form at the copyright office and follow certain procedures. It's not automatic the way copyright itself is.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Definitely sounds like PeerTube needs a discovery mechanism for users so you don't serve content out of certain jurisdictions.
  - zo1 6y ago
    Yet another way that legislation creates monopoly-like pressures on the market, and makes it more difficult for smaller players to get in and compete.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  What if some company decided they just wanted to bully you?
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    We’ve been there before: https://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2008/12/02/riaa_sues_hospitalized_teen https://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2008/12/02/riaa_s... https://betanews.com/2005/02/04/riaa-sues-deceased-grandmother/ https://betanews.com/2005/02/04/riaa-sues-deceased-grandmoth...
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  The DMCA does not allow you to disclaim liability for your own infringement. It only covers specific kinds of contributory liability that other people do using your online service that you do not have actual knowledge of. This is fragile enough that having human curators prevents you from using your safe harbor for anything they touch. (See Mavrix v. LiveJournal)
Barrin92 6y ago
>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN. Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.
DINKDINK 6y ago
Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech. >Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed A more compelling argument: >>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09971.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...
- bagacrap 6y ago
  these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won. When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
  - unionpivo 6y ago
    Spotify still isn't accessible where I live, so music piracy is live and well. On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent. It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in mind can be more convinient. More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only solution that has all the content in one place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DINKDINK 6y ago
ryukafalz 6y ago
I am really curious what would happen if a case like this ever made it to court. Copyright law was designed when copying was a difficult and intentional act; how that computers are ubiquitous, that is very much no longer the case. Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict? If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  In 2015 in Germany, popcorn time users received ~$1000 fines. The use is similar to peertube, many users were not aware these files were shared with other users as well but they were still in violation of the law.
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    I can't imagine this flying in the US
    - nextlevelwizard 6y ago
      In the land of lawsuits? You really sure about that?
      - edgyquant 6y ago
        Yes I'm sure because these people clearly weren't intending to pirate anything.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Copyright is a strict liability tort. That means considerations of intent or knowledge don't matter. The legal arguments for taking down a sophisticated BitTorrent piracy operation map one-to-one with suing individual PeerTube users. There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.
rezeroed 6y ago
How much has to be shared before it's a copyright infringement, ie three sequential bytes, three non-sequential bytes?
progval 6y ago
> Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. For what it's worth: France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight). It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  In America, we had a company whose business model was to make fake porn, upload it to BitTorrent, and then sue anyone in the swarm. It actually worked for a while - the only illegal part of this is that they lied about uploading the content to get around implied license arguments. (That and the fact that they made their lawyer drink himself to death, but that's not material to the scam.) There's other companies clogging up court dockets with similar infringement lawsuits against John Does to get access to expedited discovery. This shit is profitable enough that any video sharing service needs to either avoid legal liability for it's users or find a way to prevent copyright holders from gathering evidence from them.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Does it matter for the video sharing sites in the US? DMCA gives them a pretty good format - immediate block and forward the notice to the uploader and they're free of pretty much any responsibility.
zelly 6y ago
Remember a lot of people try these options because they post or watch controversial content. Now what happens when dissidents, or anti-dissidents, whatever all share their IPs with the world. The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.
infogulch 6y ago
Don't burn me at the stake... but what if we could solve user liability with DRM? Hear me out: What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability. Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution. If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it. This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement. What do you think?
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  DRM is unnecessary - what you're describing sounds like a variation on FreeNet, MUTE, WASTE etc. Contributory liability would still be present if movie companies could prove you were distributing encrypted copies of their films. The main problem I would foresee is swarm security. If you're sharing your videos out to a wide audience, then the encryption isn't going to help. Your adversary isn't a passive deep packet inspection filter, it's copyright owners joining a swarm through normal means in order to IP addresses of people who are distributing content. The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot. What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.
strogonoff 6y ago
Any CDN is bound to run into thousands of such issues, and yet they survive. What is the difference between tracing a video to a CDN and to a user? In fact, the former should be more straightforward to prosecute, as CDN’s IP is CDN’s, while a physical person is likely to share an IP with others behind the same router, no?
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  You're entirely correct, and that's why the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure exists. It's the only way to disclaim contributory liability for copyright infringement as an online service. An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    Interesting. I also wonder how would the exact video can be detected, if the viewer serves it to other viewers over encrypted channel. Edit: besides traffic being (hopefully) encrypted; let’s say someone files a takedown for video page X—if I am viewing a video from page X, and stream comes from peer A, how does a third party arrives at a conclusion that the stream coming from peer A corresponds to page X (presumably required in order to sue the physical person behind A)?
    - kmeisthax 6y ago
      Encryption is useless in open peer-to-peer networks if you can join the swarm. Everyone in that swarm will fall over themselves to hand out legally-compromising evidence of their infringement. The idea is that "Peer A" in this scenario is actually a copyright enforcement bot logging evidence that you are sending it the infringing content. This is how BitTorrent copyright enforcement works.
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        In my example peer A is serving the video to me; a conclusion that I am serving the stream anywhere would be unwarranted and must be easy to debunk in court.

ekianjo 6y ago

Or, alternatively, you just stay connected to a VPN when you browse the web, and stop worrying about this aspect. (yes, I know, VPNs are not the silver bullet they are advertised to be, but in this particular case they are helpful).

akersten 6y ago

Wouldn't I , as a user, have the same DMCA safe harbor as long as I stopped streaming the video if I were to receive one of those letters?

LeegleechN 6y ago
To have the DMCA safe harbor you have to submit a form at the copyright office and follow certain procedures. It's not automatic the way copyright itself is.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Definitely sounds like PeerTube needs a discovery mechanism for users so you don't serve content out of certain jurisdictions.
- zo1 6y ago
  Yet another way that legislation creates monopoly-like pressures on the market, and makes it more difficult for smaller players to get in and compete.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
What if some company decided they just wanted to bully you?
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  We’ve been there before: https://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2008/12/02/riaa_sues_hospitalized_teen https://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2008/12/02/riaa_s... https://betanews.com/2005/02/04/riaa-sues-deceased-grandmother/ https://betanews.com/2005/02/04/riaa-sues-deceased-grandmoth...
kmeisthax 6y ago
The DMCA does not allow you to disclaim liability for your own infringement. It only covers specific kinds of contributory liability that other people do using your online service that you do not have actual knowledge of. This is fragile enough that having human curators prevents you from using your safe harbor for anything they touch. (See Mavrix v. LiveJournal)

Barrin92 6y ago

>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed: it's harder to sue users. That's because you'd have to first sue the host to get logs, which requires at least some legal adjudication of the merits of any underlying copyright claim. In Germany at least as of a few years ago it was exceedingly common for people who seeded torrents of movies/tv shows etc to receive copyright infringement notices which were sent out on mass, which is why pretty much everyone used a VPN. Not sure what exactly the legal situation was but I think they simply relied on third party services who would host/scan for copyright infringement, colllect a ton of IPs, then go to a court, and thus you pretty easily circumvent any individual issues because you just do it in bulk.

DINKDINK 6y ago

Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech. >Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed A more compelling argument: >>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09971.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...

bagacrap 6y ago
these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won. When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.
- unionpivo 6y ago
  Spotify still isn't accessible where I live, so music piracy is live and well. On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent. It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in mind can be more convinient. More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only solution that has all the content in one place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DINKDINK 6y ago

ryukafalz 6y ago

I am really curious what would happen if a case like this ever made it to court. Copyright law was designed when copying was a difficult and intentional act; how that computers are ubiquitous, that is very much no longer the case. Sure, there have been lots of successful lawsuits against BitTorrent users, but the level of sophistication involved with using BitTorrent in the traditional way is high enough that it's pretty clear it's being used intentionally. But if you showed a jury what the purported infringement consisted of with a PeerTube video (clicking play on a video in a webpage, something that almost all of us do every day)... do you think they would convict? If that ever did make it to court, and someone did end up losing a suit after playing a video, I would hope it'd make the news and that we'd get new legislation that reflects the reality of the internet today.

gnopgnip 6y ago
In 2015 in Germany, popcorn time users received ~$1000 fines. The use is similar to peertube, many users were not aware these files were shared with other users as well but they were still in violation of the law.
- edgyquant 6y ago
  I can't imagine this flying in the US
  - nextlevelwizard 6y ago
    In the land of lawsuits? You really sure about that?
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      Yes I'm sure because these people clearly weren't intending to pirate anything.
kmeisthax 6y ago
Copyright is a strict liability tort. That means considerations of intent or knowledge don't matter. The legal arguments for taking down a sophisticated BitTorrent piracy operation map one-to-one with suing individual PeerTube users. There is a legal defense called "innocent infringement", but it's very limited. You have to be in a situation where it wouldn't be possible or reasonable to know about the copyright status of a work, not just be ignorant of the law. As an example of how fragile this is, merely putting the words "All Rights Reserved" on a work will generally prohibit defendants from using this defense. It also only disclaims statutory damages down to about $200, if the judge is okay with that. If the plaintiff can convince a court that you caused more than that in actual damages, then this defense won't do much, if at all.

rezeroed 6y ago

How much has to be shared before it's a copyright infringement, ie three sequential bytes, three non-sequential bytes?

progval 6y ago

> Distributed systems shift that legal liability directly to viewers. For what it's worth: France tried suing people using bittorrent to download illegally with the Hadopi law from 2009 to 2020 (it was ruled unconstitutional in May, because of a lack of judiciary oversight). It cost between 5 to 10M€ every year, and resulted in only 87k€ in fines total. So not a huge success.

kmeisthax 6y ago
In America, we had a company whose business model was to make fake porn, upload it to BitTorrent, and then sue anyone in the swarm. It actually worked for a while - the only illegal part of this is that they lied about uploading the content to get around implied license arguments. (That and the fact that they made their lawyer drink himself to death, but that's not material to the scam.) There's other companies clogging up court dockets with similar infringement lawsuits against John Does to get access to expedited discovery. This shit is profitable enough that any video sharing service needs to either avoid legal liability for it's users or find a way to prevent copyright holders from gathering evidence from them.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Does it matter for the video sharing sites in the US? DMCA gives them a pretty good format - immediate block and forward the notice to the uploader and they're free of pretty much any responsibility.

zelly 6y ago

Remember a lot of people try these options because they post or watch controversial content. Now what happens when dissidents, or anti-dissidents, whatever all share their IPs with the world. The privacy scare that Snowden brought to our attention is kind of abstract--"someday a different regime may use this data against me". But some lunatic who tracks you down because of an ideological dispute is a very real and physical threat.

infogulch 6y ago

Don't burn me at the stake... but what if we could solve user liability with DRM? Hear me out: What if all video was encrypted with DRM by default, and viewers/peers only shared DRM-encrypted data? This would still enable the biggest benefit of PeerTube: viewer/peer bandwidth sharing. But now we've (arguably) reduced the scope of 'publishing' -- for the purpose of legal liability -- to only those PeerTube instances that provide the DRM key. That is, just sharing the encrypted video data no longer carries the legal significance of 'publishing' it, because the data is useless without the key. Wield the media companies' own DRM as a legal shield to limit user liability. Now to be clear, I'm not an attorney, so I'm not making any kind of legal claim, or saying that this is an argument that a court would find convincing. But I think there's a chance this could work out because I'm pretty sure this strategy where the DRM key is more protected than the video data is utilized in the video distribution industry today, and considered to be an ok solution. If DRM is used, the encryption key itself becomes the unit of publishing. How keys are distributed between instances is not limited at all, maybe by default the key is shared with all the other instances in its federation. Also, now instances have an instant way to "unpublish" a video in case of DMCA: just stop sharing the key. And since no users share the key with each other, even if they are unaware of their instance taking down a video that they watched and are still sharing it, downloading peers still won't be able to view it. This idea isn't perfect of course. All viewers would still need to connect to a central/federated instance to get the key, but compared to sharing the actual video data this is much more reasonable to scale. Also, getting access to DRM itself is still pretty centralized today, so it might take significant effort to implement. What do you think?

kmeisthax 6y ago
DRM is unnecessary - what you're describing sounds like a variation on FreeNet, MUTE, WASTE etc. Contributory liability would still be present if movie companies could prove you were distributing encrypted copies of their films. The main problem I would foresee is swarm security. If you're sharing your videos out to a wide audience, then the encryption isn't going to help. Your adversary isn't a passive deep packet inspection filter, it's copyright owners joining a swarm through normal means in order to IP addresses of people who are distributing content. The no-sharing-keys property isn't useful either. Presumably someone is going to want to archive PeerTube content (P2P swarms tend to archive poorly), which means modifying PeerTube or a browser to scrape keys. If an archivist can do this, so can a copyright enforcement bot. What you would really want is something more akin to Tor, where both ends of each peer connection don't know who each other are. The way this works is by using multiple layers of encryption, so each link in the chain just knows where to send which packets of nonsense. You can do this today, actually, but BitTorrent-over-Tor is heavily discouraged as speeds are slow even at low hop counts. There's also the problem of accidentally leaking your own IP address over Tor. This is why, for example, most VPNs ship browser extensions that disable P2P features such as WebRTC.

strogonoff 6y ago

Any CDN is bound to run into thousands of such issues, and yet they survive. What is the difference between tracing a video to a CDN and to a user? In fact, the former should be more straightforward to prosecute, as CDN’s IP is CDN’s, while a physical person is likely to share an IP with others behind the same router, no?

kmeisthax 6y ago
You're entirely correct, and that's why the DMCA notice-and-takedown procedure exists. It's the only way to disclaim contributory liability for copyright infringement as an online service. An individual user watching a PeerTube video would not be able to do the same thing. The DMCA only protects against infringement liability that other people cause. If you watch an infringing upload, well, that's your liability.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Interesting. I also wonder how would the exact video can be detected, if the viewer serves it to other viewers over encrypted channel. Edit: besides traffic being (hopefully) encrypted; let’s say someone files a takedown for video page X—if I am viewing a video from page X, and stream comes from peer A, how does a third party arrives at a conclusion that the stream coming from peer A corresponds to page X (presumably required in order to sue the physical person behind A)?
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Encryption is useless in open peer-to-peer networks if you can join the swarm. Everyone in that swarm will fall over themselves to hand out legally-compromising evidence of their infringement. The idea is that "Peer A" in this scenario is actually a copyright enforcement bot logging evidence that you are sending it the infringing content. This is how BitTorrent copyright enforcement works.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      In my example peer A is serving the video to me; a conclusion that I am serving the stream anywhere would be unwarranted and must be easy to debunk in court.