On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 9:29 AM, David Barrett wrote:

Would you and your 7 friends be equally enthusiastic early adopters if the 9th member of your node was the RIAA/MPAA/etc?

The RIAA/MPAA could join our cluster, however the design properties of Tahoe would prevent them from accessing our data.

In these digital inquisition times, where your entire net worth can be vaporized at a whim, how do you convince people that it's safe to share your data even if it has a normal amount of pirated content? (After all, everybody has *some*, and probably enough to trigger catastropic consequences if noticed by the right party.)

Again, the design properties of Tahoe blur the concept of whose data is actually on the cluster. From the outside looking in, the contents of data you provide to the cluster is cryptographically opaque. Unless they can prove you have the cryptographic keys to access a particular piece of content, you can make the argument that you literally had no way of knowing that the encrypted data you are storing was in fact pirated content.

With this in mind, ask your testers to participate in a challenge: they use it as normal, but offer to pay $100/instance to anyone who can prove a given IP address pirated something -- a crowdsourced RIAA simulator. If there are no takers, try $1000. Once you've got it to a point when nobody can tell who has what (yet the system continues to work and provide real value), you're onto something that might get widespread appeal. If it's usable, that is.

In the type of system I'm envisioning, it would by design allow you to easily discover which node IDs had chunks of a given file. However, that file is encrypted. Provided you can obtain the encryption keys, you may be able to prove that a particular file is, in fact, infringing on a copyright. However in order to prove that participants in the network actually engaged in an act of piracy as opposed to merely providing nodes which engage in the free exchange of encrypted data, you would also have to prove that a particular user also has the encryption keys needed to access a particular piece of content. I think this would complicate prosecuting users for copyright infringement, however IANAL. -- Tony Arcieri _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE