4 ms·

I see what you're saying. You push content onto IPFS but you access it over HTTP using an IPFS gateway, which pulls content off an IPFS node and basically "stre

by 22c 3y ago

I see what you're saying. You push content onto IPFS but you access it over HTTP using an IPFS gateway, which pulls content off an IPFS node and basically "streams" it to the client. The IPFS gateway is acting only as a proxy to IPFS itself. IPFS clients can also download directly from IPFS but IPFS is not natively supported in a browser like HTTP(S) is. The content itself is stored on IPFS nodes which "pin" the content they wish to persist on the network. I think there would be grounds under DMCA to ask IPFS pinning services to stop pinning copyrighted materials, but going after the gateways seems misguided and a misuse of DMCA, as they're only acting as a proxy.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
'xoa actually explained what I meant better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480081 If you take IPFS for what it was designed to be - one big, distributed, content-addressable file system, then each individual IPFS gateway is effectively a server that serves that entire file system. Whether or not this is abuse of DMCA, I can't tell, though I feel it indeed is. It does make sense from practical point of view, though. From the point of view of the rights owners, IPFS by itself is, at the moment, too small and too nerdy to be of significance - however, gateways are projecting IPFS into the Internet inhabited by general population, and in doing that, they look like servers serving content. They're good targets because they're how most people would access copyrighted material stored in IPFS.
- 22c 3y ago
  xoa is kind of correct in describing IPFS as a giant CDN but there's a key difference here between IPFS and "IPFS gateways". IPFS gateways don't host any files, they act in the exact way that xoas comment talks about. > They don't host content, they don't discriminate, they just route traffic. Indeed an IPFS gateway does not "host" content either, it merely shifts bits around in the same way a proxy or VPN shifts bits around. It's not correct to say that when you're connected to a VPN that your VPN provider is hosting Google or Netflix, it's the exact same with IPFS gateways. The only difference between IPFS gateways and a proxy in that sense is that a proxy serves the client HTTP content from a HTTP source whereas an IPFS gateway serves HTTP content from an IPFS source. Equivalently imagine a proxy that could proxy traffic from any publicly accessible FTP server to HTTP. Is it correct to say that the proxy is hosting the content that resides on the FTP? No, it's not. The FTP server is hosting the content and the proxy is piping it to clients from FTP->HTTP without storing anything.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I think the difference is that FTP is historically known and easy to use with generic tooling. Or at least it was so a decade ago. Today, in fact, I bet that if you made a website that's fronting someone else's FTP server, it's you who'd get hit with DMCA first. IPFS is public only for a small subset of techies - at this point, for anyone else, it's some mystery alternate realm they don't have access to. This is not a theoretical issue, but a purely pragmatic one - but legal action is also mostly taken on practical grounds, not theoretical. Thus, obscurity of the tech involved matters.

by 22c 3y ago

TeMPOraL 3y ago

'xoa actually explained what I meant better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36480081 If you take IPFS for what it was designed to be - one big, distributed, content-addressable file system, then each individual IPFS gateway is effectively a server that serves that entire file system. Whether or not this is abuse of DMCA, I can't tell, though I feel it indeed is. It does make sense from practical point of view, though. From the point of view of the rights owners, IPFS by itself is, at the moment, too small and too nerdy to be of significance - however, gateways are projecting IPFS into the Internet inhabited by general population, and in doing that, they look like servers serving content. They're good targets because they're how most people would access copyrighted material stored in IPFS.

22c 3y ago
xoa is kind of correct in describing IPFS as a giant CDN but there's a key difference here between IPFS and "IPFS gateways". IPFS gateways don't host any files, they act in the exact way that xoas comment talks about. > They don't host content, they don't discriminate, they just route traffic. Indeed an IPFS gateway does not "host" content either, it merely shifts bits around in the same way a proxy or VPN shifts bits around. It's not correct to say that when you're connected to a VPN that your VPN provider is hosting Google or Netflix, it's the exact same with IPFS gateways. The only difference between IPFS gateways and a proxy in that sense is that a proxy serves the client HTTP content from a HTTP source whereas an IPFS gateway serves HTTP content from an IPFS source. Equivalently imagine a proxy that could proxy traffic from any publicly accessible FTP server to HTTP. Is it correct to say that the proxy is hosting the content that resides on the FTP? No, it's not. The FTP server is hosting the content and the proxy is piping it to clients from FTP->HTTP without storing anything.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I think the difference is that FTP is historically known and easy to use with generic tooling. Or at least it was so a decade ago. Today, in fact, I bet that if you made a website that's fronting someone else's FTP server, it's you who'd get hit with DMCA first. IPFS is public only for a small subset of techies - at this point, for anyone else, it's some mystery alternate realm they don't have access to. This is not a theoretical issue, but a purely pragmatic one - but legal action is also mostly taken on practical grounds, not theoretical. Thus, obscurity of the tech involved matters.