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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Crypto can unironically solve this

I am sure you, personally, are a good person. At least I want to believe it. Its more a me-failing than a you-failing. I've been told by people I consider wise, that to believe in the goodness of others brings grace into your life.

That said, I believe that many in the world who say things like 'crypto solves this' have ill intentions and are looking to introduce more bag holders to the world. I think it would help if you explained why you believe this. It would certainly have helped me.

I hope you have a pleasant day man.

Where does "bag holding" come into this conversation? Crypto doesn't have to be tied to a token or any exchange of monetary value. Its just a piece of tech. None of it really requires a token if you don't want it to. IPFS storage, for example, doesn't require any tokens or create any bag holders.

I encourage you to look beyond what you've read about crypto.

What's crypto offer that a torrent and 99.9% less energy usage doesn't?

The Pirate Bay already unironically solved this decades ago

No: because once you have the keys to decrypt the movie once, you can decrypt it forever. I can just buy the NFT, store a decrypted copy of the movie, then pass it on to someone else for 90% of resale value.

DRM-free is the only solution.

So would being able to download a file. But Sony doesn't want that. Tech is not the problem here.

ipfs, ardrive are an interesting direction for allowing ongoing access beyond one-off personal archives (yes there are also more problems than this)

I think you're imagining some kind of high quality digital ownership contract system built on top of blockchains.

But the part that actually solves the problem is the digital ownership contract, and there is basically no benefit in this situation from using blockchains.

So "crypto" wouldn't be the solution.

Yes. I made a post long ago on reddit explaining this in detail but can't really be bothered to find it.

But basically you can solve this with crypto in fashion that

A) Allows you to actually own the game/movie

B) Allows you to redownload it from third parties in case the first party disappears, including incentives for third parties to actually want to serve you the data

C) Allows you to have a reasonable second hand market (such as with physical goods) that both allows you to resell your stuff, and doesn't completely cannibalize the IP owner because people buy the movie second hand for cents and immediately cell it for the same price after watching it. This is done with fees and/or timelocks and/or max transfers.

You can't solve this with crypto alone without some (external, legal, non-crypto) way to force Sony (and others) to permit these conditions.

The existence of some platform (crypto or otherwise) where (a) (b) and (c) are supported is not a solution, since obvious financial incentives and all the historical experience clearly show that Sony (and others) will distribute their content there if and only if that platform can prohibit these things, especially (c).

The key problem is a misalignment of incentives where content producers have a strong desire to distribute things only in a user-hostile way and the market power to do so - it's a market problem, not a tech problem, it is not possible to solve this problem by providing some new user-friendly platform or technology.

> You can't solve this with crypto alone without some (external, legal, non-crypto) way to force Sony (and others) to permit these conditions.

My original reddit post explaining all this (it was only focused on games, but something similar could be done to movies) did include the fact that the game developer would indeed have external agreements with distributors/publishers/etc (think steam, gamestop, microsoft store, walmart, amazon, etc) to make all this work.

Not really, I think? The video would still have to be hosted somewhere by somebody. How would a crypto token be any more valid than the license they grant you now if the video goes away?

How would it do so? You wouldn't store gigabytes on the blockchain, so what you would store would just be a marker that you had a license to watch something. But as the owner of the copyrights isn't the person making it available, and the third-party who do make it available have lost the right to do so, I'm not sure what crypto would add here.

We already had this same conversation 4 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32010891

Using less cryptography can solve this

If Sony creates a crypto contract with the same terms as their store contract, it solves nothing.

No it can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com