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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

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.

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.