Comment by mrkgnao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkgnao | Hacker News Reader

> What happens when you build your business on YouTube or Amazon and they change fees? Or Apple drops your content because the Premier of China thought your comedy went too far? Only LBRY consists of a known, promised set of rules that no one can unilaterally change. LBRY provides this by doing something unique: leaving the users in control rather than demanding that control for itself.

> It is also worth noting that in the event that LBRY received notice that either name contained an illegitimate copy of Spider Man, LBRY would dutifully and quickly put that content id on a blacklist, blocking discovery or purchase via any legal services. LBRY and users of LBRY are still subject to the DMCA and other relevant laws of their respective countries.

These two goals -- being subject to the DMCA (and similar laws), and promising a predetermined, immutable set of rules -- are incompatible.

As long as you intend to abide by $LEGAL_CODE, the set of laws you follow is not fixed since it is subject to changes in $LEGAL_CODE. What happens if the Premier of China, to use the example from the page, decides to make it illegal for some content to be viewed in China?

Of course, this is in addition to the whole problem of the bidding system being flawed since there is (apparently?) no concept of ownership, as opposed to a continuously running auction where the highest bidder as of some time controls an address. The idea is unquestionably elegant, but leaves open the potential of some evil party with significant funds taking control of your address, where you need to buy the address back, causing, e.g. some sort of Gawker-esque financial ruin. The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to have some kind of judicial arbitration. I suppose people still remember the whole Ethereum fiasco.

Besides, there may be two "reasonable" addresses for some content, or more. I find it highly unlikely that there is some kind of economics-assured "existence and uniqueness" theorem that assures otherwise. How about "/wonderfullife" vs. "/itsawonderfullife"? You will need some kind of signing or cryptographically robust identification system to ensure authenticity, because you risk not being able to keep up with a stream of DMCA takedown orders against YouTube-style indiscriminate uploading of copyrighted material.

It's interesting because if you remember, there were some Diaspora nodes (or pods I think?) supposedly spreading "terrorist" propaganda. Certain pods started blocking that content, but others just let it through. There were complains, but this was the nature of decentralization. In effect, this was one of the realize goals of Diaspora; to transport censored content.

From what I've gathered, LBRY doesn't offer this same type of decentralization.

I checked out the old GNU MediaGoblin site to see how it's been coming along. It would be nice if we had a real decentralized, easy to use, video hosting service.

I agree with your point about owning the LBRY address. The article kept referring to the people who value the name the most being the ones who eventually own the addresses, but that doesn't stop big enough freebooters from squating on address smaller creators with less funds need. I'm thinking of YouTube folks who may have to compete with large media firms without the advantage of an arbitration system. To add to that, the fact that address ownership isn't permanent also weakens the position of small creators.

I'm hopeful, though. I like the idea of a decentralized content platform.

> I'm hopeful, though. I like the idea of a decentralized > content platform.

We have one of those, the WWW.

What we need is a decentralized method for the social aspects: identity management, networking (following/liking, etc), etc. We had some of that with the early blogosphere stuff, but we largely let it slide into oblivion.

I suppose the Internet is a "content platform," but that's in the most basic sense of the term. I mean things like YouTube and Vessel that are trying to bring together all those things you mention. If anything, I wouldn't begin to consider a service to be a content platform unless it had those things.

From the text: "...it is community itself that has ultimate controls over the catalogue of what is available."

I take that to mean that this isn't really controllable by DMCA. So, they are just giving DMCA lip service.

Lofty goals of that sort are fine, and easy to write about, but I wonder how the situation will change when someone inevitably uploads $MOVIE -- and for a fee! -- and the movie studios come knocking. Indeed, I do not expect (or hope!) that LBRY will act to evade copyright or IP law.

The point is, complete lawfulness and blockchain utopias aren't really compatible.

For maintaining ownership, it seems owners are given time to counter bids for their URIs. However, it's unclear who gets the money when the existing owner wins. Does he just pay himself? In that case, why not just bid eleventy billion every time?

If I read it correctly, nobody gets the coins that are bid on something. They just are frozen and can't be used otherwise as long as they are used to bid on a name. Retract your bid and you can use them again for other purposes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com