The key weakness in every smartass technical technicality to circumvent the law is forgetting that intent is core concept when the law is interpreted in the court.
Did the defendant have intent to do X? Did the defendant use some purpose build technique to avoid doing the most literal interpretation X ? .. Yeah, defendant is guilty of doing X.
The real difference is between criminal law and contract law. In contract law. In contract law the intention is fixed by the language of the contract document. It matters less if matter if one party didn't intent to violate the contract. It is what it is.
I think we are ok as long as there are no precedents? Isnt that how smartass laws work?
The Whonix wiki has an incredible amount of information on topics such as this: https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation
Basically, it's very hard to protect the security of users when a government seeks to prosecute dissidents. There's a lot to take into account. A simple "we saw an upload from IP address x.y.z.w containing <illegal file>" will be enough to hang whoever it is.
On second thought, I guess it would be a nice addition to let users control which files they're seeding, rather than the whole torrent. I'm just not sure it's enough to get them off the hook in the event of legal troubles.
Or you could make the block size smaller (e.g. 1 bit) and tell the lawyers to piss off because 0 and 1 are public domain.
Sadly, new domains of this sort were discontinued in 2010. A cool relic of the internet past and massive geek cred. I remember these URLs from my childhood and they make me very nostalgic.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca#Third-level_(provincial)_a...
One implementation of this is the "Owner-Free File System"[0], but it is no longer being maintained.
> If you create a new 1GB torrent, you'll need 1GB of new (never seen before) blocks
If you XOR your 1GB file (X) with 1GB of blocks that already exist on the system (Y), you get a new set of 1GB blocks (Z), but it will be hard for an observer to prove that your Z blocks don't actually pre-date Y.
Your defence would be that someone generated Y based on your Z in order to frame you as having created X, when actually your Z, when combined with another set of random-looking blocks Y2 produce a different 1GB file, X2, which is completely legitimately.
I'm not sure if "scraping the network" is possible if chunks have unguessable names. Also, it's possible that someone could have a file shared among friends (over TLS), for years, without it being publicly announced.
> it will be mighty suspicious when the Y blocks are scattered randomly across the network, and the Z blocks are conveniently hosted in one place.
I suppose it depends on how blocks are distributed in the system. If the blocks of Y are all served from y.com and you host your Z blocks on z.com, then both hosts will look equally suspicious is Y XOR Z produces an infringing file X. The owner of z.com just needs to be able to credibly claim that y2.com was already hosting the Y2 that XORs with Z to produce a legitimate file.
Alternatively, a single node could host Z, Y, and Y2, all created by users, with no logs kept of when each block was created or requested (and no search/listing function). Such wilful ignorance may not impress a court, but is roughly equivalent to running a non-logging VPN, or a chat service that doesn't retain metadata, or a Tor node, or an online encrypted backup service. The service could even offer to follow a DMCA takedown procedure, in case non-XORed non-encrypted blocks were stored on it.
At some point, I suppose things get very fuzzy, e.g. you're just uploading a single second of an album, but I don't know who practically useful that would be.
Cynically I'd assume they'd just use it to add a conspiracy to commit a crime charge to the list since you technically need to coordinate with other people.