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Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

Is your position that centralized services can out survive distributed ones? Because user IP's are less observable? The past 25 years of cyber/cypherpunk software and legal battles say otherwise. Decentralized solutions outlive centralized ones not because there is "no one to shut down" it's because there's too many people to shut down. Enforcement processes don't scale, especially when it comes to speech.

>Centralized and non-distributed video platforms have one critical advantage over distributed

A more compelling argument:

>>You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > > >Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > >Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...

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You're thinking about this from a pirate's point of view: "they can't sue all of us", and that's entirely correct. But it's also not what I'm worried about. People who know they're breaking the law and don't give a shit will take steps to protect themselves from legal prosecution. People who just see "oh hey free movies" will wind up using insecure services that get them lawsuits. This is what happened with people who used Gnutella and KaZaA back in the 2000s, or people who pirated fake porn from Strike 3 Holdings, or people who use Popcorn Time now. The more accessible an infringing service is, the more likely people will get legal nastygrams in the mail.

Imagine you're an average Internet user, you follow, say, a YouTuber that reviews movies. They say that their latest review isn't on YouTube, but on their website. You go there, watch the review, laugh, and move on with your life. But then you get a nastygram in the mail a week later. Turns out that particular YouTuber didn't have great copyright hygiene, and used an unlicensed music clip. Them moving it to PeerTube means that instead of their video getting taken down, the copyright holder has to sue the swarm - and they do. You get caught in that dragnet, and now you have a nice fat $10,000+ settlement you have to pay for watching a video, because PeerTube puts you in the chain of copyright liability.

>You're thinking about this from a pirate's point of view

I'm thinking about it from a cost / enforcement point of view.

PGP survived outright, explicit ban by the most powerful government with some of the most powerful cryptanalysis agencies in the world at the time not because "a company hid people's IPs". Your argument is: some users will be attacked for using applications for which lawyers have cheap attack costs/enforcement. It does not follow that, some agents being unable to survive their strategy results in an alternative strategy dominating.

Let's be real: legal systems that have the power to demand IP records subpoenas also have the power to demand logging, so you're argument that white-market companies can somehow provide anonymity, or shielding from culpability, to users doesn't hold water. One might interpret the outcome of the PGP battle happened because of some advanced concept like free-speech rights but the unavoidable reality is, attackers have limited resources and if the benefit is less than the attack costs, the attack won't survive.

these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.

When I did torrent, I would frequently get warnings from content owners by way of my ISP, so at least identification of offenders seems to have scaled. They didn't take me to court personally, but some other end users were compelled to settle, and even the threat of punitive measures should be enough to discourage many others. So overall I don't agree with your characterizations.

Spotify still isn't accessible where I live, so music piracy is live and well.

On the other hand steam is so game piracy is almost nonexistent.

It's mostly about convenience, since centralized app if designed with users in mind can be more convinient.

More and more people are pirating tv shows aswll, since pirates have the only solution that has all the content in one place.

>these days people get music from spotify ($$) and similar services, not from torrents ($free). I'd say centralized won.

My point is less about what content delivery systems are most prevalent at the present moment, more so about which are more survivable. Protocols and physical media outlive centralized content delivery because they are more fault tolerant. One doesn't need the commercial and technical apparatus of Amazon Inc to pick up a physical book and read it. The market trades convenience for future performance default.

TCP/IP will outlive your national-post service.

It wouldn't matter if your IP is observable or not. It is not illegal in the US to download material even if you know the uploader did not have the rights to it. But uploading/sharing as in the case of peertube is illegal if the uploader did not have the rights

Source for this? I've heard it said a number of times but haven't looked into it. It makes sense, but I know many countries have laws about possession too.

Don't you have searchable law texts in US? This info should be a single Google search from you.

You can't find a negative value, or a lie, in a text search, which this is.

You should be able to find the section that covers the issue and literally just read if it contains the thing or not...

"Copyright" means the rights holder has the following exclusive rights. The right to reproduce and make copies of an original work; The right to prepare derivative works based on the original work; The right to distribute copies to the public by sale or another form of transfer, such as rental or lending; The right to publicly perform the work; The right to publicly display the work, and The right to perform sound recordings publicly through digital audio transmission.

Someone uploading a file, or downloading a file on a peer to peer website that also involves uploading a file is violating a number of these rights. Downloading a file(not on a peer to peer site) is not a violation of any of these exclusive rights. This is analogous to an unauthorized public screening of a movie. The the person who displayed the movie without permission is infringing on the rights holder's copyright, the people who are watching are not.

The uploading (in a peer to peer sense) I've always found interesting. Because most of the time, a casual downloader who doesn't seed, but only uploads for the duration of their download, would actually upload very little. How much do they need to upload to be in violation of copyright? Does any part of the upload need to be convertable into part of the original work?

For instance, let's say the bittorrent protocol was altered such that instead of pieces, you're assigned random bits to upload that are never enough to be assembled into any part of the original file in human watchable form. Have you actually violated copyright if you upload some of these bits?

Eg what if you uploaded a single bit (a 1 or a 0). Clearly not in violation. How many bits do you need to upload to be in violation?

The RIAA has unsuccessfully tried to claim that "making available(for download)" is infringement. So there would need to be some amount of actual uploading to prove this as a civil case.

But even if you only seed while downloading it is likely even the relatively small amount uploaded would meet the legal requirement, the law does not require that you distributed a full copy of a particular work. Ultimately whether a specific amount would be enough would come down to the judge or jury.

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