Hacker News Reader

Comment by Miner49er | Hacker News Reader

I'm not with OpenBazaar, but I believe with how it works it's not possible to do anything. It's decentralized. The government should go after nodes hosting the illegal content.

View on HN

I'm not a lawyer but I can confirm that there's no more that we can do to control content than Google can for the web or email. We (OB1) follow US law in our services but we have no control of the p2p network.

You should probably talk to a lawyer, because given what’s been said in this thread alone, you’re never going to be able to argue that you didn’t knowingly facilitate. Love it or hate it, new laws make that problematic even for Google.

I mean, this is damning: Illegality and immorality are different, and - speaking personally - I don't have an issue with the platform used for moral but illegal uses.

Why do you think that is damning?

I believe a bunch of legislation has language regarding being "aware" and "knowingly facilitating." Safe harbor goes out the window if you know things are going on and do nothing. How being p2p factors in is beyond my armchair.

Because Google isn't aware of pirate/CP search results on their platform?

I too think this statement matters with regards to law. Knowing that your platform can be used nefariously is one thing, being ok with it is another. Once the witch hunt starts it can get tricky fast.

And SESTA/FOSTA will apply to them too. It's a horrible set of laws.

Does that apply to software developers as well as service providers? Wouldn't the Tor project get prosecuted into the ground under such legislation?

It's obviously damning because it shows that he knows he's potentially facilitating illegal activity.

A blacksmith knows good and well that his newly forged hammer, meant for building and construction, is also used for destruction and despair.

I'm pretty sure a vanishingly small number of hammers actually get used for destruction and despair, so I would have no problem being involved in hammer production.

It does not just matter that something CAN be used for evil, it matters how likely it WILL be used for evil.

It seems you fully understand op's point!

Google can and does delist content, for example in response to copyright violations.

I don't think you're able or willing to delist content right?

Well that what happened to the guys behind piratebay. They weren’t responsible for the actual content, but they were still convicted since they made it possible. Right or wrong, sometimes how the tech actually work doesn’t matter.

The piratebay had direct access to their database index and deleting content was as easy as running "delete from torrents where torrent_hash='xyz'". This case is different, there is no way for openbazaar to delete remote nodes hosted by other people. It's like ordering Google to delete content hosted on someone else server, they can remove it from their index but the server would still be online accessible to all.

Well they weren’t convicted because they didn’t delete it, they were convicted because they made it available. The hash is still not the actual content, which were One of their actual argument in their case. Depending on where you live there are serves cases where making things available is criminal. Have ISPs ordered to block domains etc. VPN is illegal in China etc.

> Well they weren’t convicted because they didn’t delete it, they were convicted because they made it available.

They did. The piratebay default search engine allowed people to find illegal content. That's why they got in trouble. If Google Chrome default search engine had CP and drugs on it, they'd get into trouble too. Anyone can use chrome to find CP but Google is ok because they don't enable it by default. As long as OpenBazaar default search engine does not contain anything illegal and forces people to use a different search engine to find illegal stuff, they will not get into trouble.

The law they broke was “assist in copyright infringement”, not that they actually broke “copyright infringement”. The law don’t care about the tech, it’s about the intentions.

The piratebay had a list of most popular keywords directly linking to illegal content. Also their very name _pirate_bay made them a target for bad intent. OpenBazaar doesn't link to or has anything in its name offering or encouraging illegal content. I used to work for isohunt by the way who got shut down by the MPAA and it was because of these details that they lost. If OpenBazaar never links to anything illegal and does not host hashes or any other data of anything illegal, then they'll be fine. Another point is that OpenBazaar is at least so far not profiting from anything illegal such as showing ads on pages featuring illegal content, that was a big point against bittorrent search engines.

Building a system with the specific goal of making it impossible to follow the law does not make it acceptable.

With this as a stated goal, The world needs a protocol and network for trade that no one company or government controls. That's OpenBazaar... going after the network as a whole doesn’t seem unreasonable. The FBI for example, probably isn’t still in their Atlas Shrugged phase.

How do you go after the network as a whole?

The nice thing about decentralization is that it forces government to be more surgical in their enforcement. State actors have all the tools necessary to identify and target individual bad actors. You have to be a real champion not to leak data or make a mistake over time. Bitcoin, for example, is much harder to hide than cash. In centralized systems it's just easier to be lazy and implement mass surveillance and absolute control - which a lot of people in the community disagree with.

Terrorism for example barely exists, and barely ever existed, but massive apparatuses that infringe on the liberties of billions of people have been implemented in the name of it.

Child porn, chemical/radioactive weapons trading, and assassination requests are the big 3 often cited - but really these too barely exist, and nations have more than enough resources to counter them with precision.

>The world needs a protocol and network for trade that no one company or government controls.

Strictly speaking, that is marketing hyperbole on their part as the world already has a lot of protocols and networks for trade that no one company or government controls, otherwise stuff like international mail would have problems.

International mail is far from being a distributed system like OpenBazaar.

> The FBI for example, probably isn’t still in their Atlas Shrugged phase.

Where can I read about the Objectivist FBI phase?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com