Unstoppable file-sharing network ‘Tribler’ spells trouble for copyright holders
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Which is a pretty f--king stupid thing to say at a time when we are trying to avoid draconian, Big-Media-backed legal shenanigans like SOPA/PIPA and ACTA.
Are they trying to demonstrate that the only way to enforce copyright law really is to monitor everyone's communications 24/7, assume that anyone who uses encryption to an unrecognised/unauthorised host an infringer, and ruthlessly cut off Internet access to any such person? Because anyone who thinks such a scenario is unrealistic hasn't been paying attention.
People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity are the enemy of those of us who want to have such tools for legitimate purposes and of those of us who want to have the content we honestly pay for in unrestricted formats that don't get in the way of us enjoying them.
<skeptic>Also, with my technical hat on, how exactly does this work? I'm betting you aren't really as isolated and decentralised as you think you are, because, well, you can't be off the network and yet still be on the network. The article says it's a BitTorrent client, so surely someone is seeding something somewhere.</skeptic>
Yes. Because it's true. You can't legislate morality, and you can't prop up business models that require people to behave contrary to their nature. Even if you take the internet away, people will still trade CDs full of MP3s. If you take away all digital technology, people will trade mixtapes. If you cut people's hands off, they'll still sing "Happy Birthday" to each other. You can't stop it. Copyright enforcement is completely infeasible.
That cuts both ways. Expecting the same quantity and quality of work to enjoy without a system that compensates the people who worked hard to produce it is also expecting something contrary to human nature. You can get so far with volunteer works, but ultimately we've all got rent to pay/kids to feed/etc.
> Copyright enforcement is completely infeasible.
Of course it's not.
Sure, there will always be a few people who know enough to work around it. And sure, you can always exploit the analogue hole by literally recording poor quality video off your computer screen with an old camcorder or something similar if you've got such kit lying around.
But you could block the overwhelming majority of copyright infringement pretty easily if you were willing to impose severe enough restrictions and to make examples of those who tried to work around those restrictions. It's just that most of us really wouldn't like the collateral damage that such policies would cause.
Also, I need to point out that Copyright is not the only way to make a living. People really will give artists money without a threat of jail time. It's completely unnecessary.
Not today, but it would be if (for example) content were only available for streaming via end-to-end locked down hardware and possession of any hardware that wasn't authorised for use in the pipeline and duly locked down carried jail time.
As I said, if you don't think that's a plausible target for the Big Media lobbyists, or that enough politicians could buy into it to actually pass those laws, you're not paying attention.
> Also, I need to point out that Copyright is not the only way to make a living.
No, it's not. But the number of people involved in content production who make the kind of money required to fund major projects through non-traditional business models is almost statistically indistinguishable from 0 when you stack those people up against global content production industries as a whole.
Oh, the same old fallacy. How does that fit in with the studies that shows that "pirates" buy a lot[1], with the year over year MPAA record profits[2] or with a game company getting $1000000 before the game was even made?
[1]: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anothe... http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-898813.html
[2]: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/92692/piracy-who-mpaa-celebrate...
Correlation does not imply causation.
> with the year over year MPAA record profits
Most of the artists in the world do not work for Hollywood.
> or with a game company getting $1000000 before the game was even made?
That is tiny by modern AAA game standards.
Also, not everyone has the advantages the people with the successful Kickstarter project had.
The basic problem with the whole argument that copyright isn't necessary and people make can money from content in other ways is always the same: nothing in today's copyright law prevents someone using alternative business models if they really do provide a better incentive, yet hardly anyone does.
Which is fine, since I never implied that file sharing caused sales. The study shows that people still buy even if they pirate a lot. Causation is irrelevant.
Most of the artists in the world do not work for Hollywood.
Again, I never implied they did. The claim was that by removing copyright protection, you'd be reduced to volunteer work. The fact that Hollywood has record profits despite increasing file sharing implies that the claim is false, since Hollywood is professional.
That is tiny by modern AAA game standards.
Again, the claim was that professional works would disappear, not AAA games alone. Personally, I couldn't care less about most of them.
My claims, as you put it, would be that:
(a) without some form of effective incentive for people to create and share works, you are necessarily reduced to volunteer efforts, and
(b) while volunteer effort does produce valuable works, there is little evidence to suggest that such efforts alone would produce a similar quantity and quality of work to what we enjoy today.
These points are relevant because if we're talking about a technology that potentially renders the current legal incentive scheme, copyright, unenforceable, then those who currently produce works using business models built around that scheme have a legitimate concern that they will no longer be able to exercise their legal rights in the that situation.
Since no-one has yet demonstrated a more productive system that is viable on the same scale, that will give Big Media lobbyists a very strong argument that copyright enforcement is necessary to protect the supply of new and high quality works and that all these draconian proposals they keep asking for are the only solution.
And that will lead to another round of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA, but with more politicians on-board. That is worrying because if we don't reach the point this time where serious international copyright reform is on the cards in a way that is both socially acceptable and economically credible, that could be game over for the free Internet as we know it for at least a generation. The wheels of legal systems turn slowly, particularly where international agreements are concerned, and once the lobbyists have got what they want and the popular revolt has died down, we'll be stuck with whatever was left.
My post has three small examples of how the incentive (people paying for works) still exists without copyright.
Since no-one has yet demonstrated a more productive system that is viable on the same scale
Works that produce profit without relying on copyright have been demonstrated more than once, and are constantly dismissed as flukes. In any case, demonstration of a system without copyright at the same scale is impossible until you actually eliminate/suspend copyright. It's a common case with economics: you'd need multiple identical Earths to create the same conditions.
Since no-one has yet demonstrated a more productive system that is viable on the same scale, that will give Big Media lobbyists a very strong argument that copyright enforcement is necessary to protect the supply of new and high quality works and that all these draconian proposals they keep asking for are the only solution.
But whether those arguments are valid or not is irrelevant, because they're impossible to conclusively disprove (see above) and that's good enough for them, since what they really want is a decent excuse. And I'm of the opinion that most politicians are looking more for an excuse than for a real argument too.
The thing is, when the same handful of high profile cases get trotted out every time this discussion comes up, they do look like flukes.
> In any case, demonstration of a system without copyright at the same scale is impossible until you actually eliminate/suspend copyright.
That's a bit of a stretch, though, isn't it? There is nothing in law today that would prevent anyone from building a more effective business model that doesn't depend on copyright, if they can find one. If it's as easy as the copyright opponents make out to produce works without relying on the copyright protections afforded by the law today, why is hardly anyone doing so?
Right now, the only people who are making serious money from creative content using alternative business models tend to be keeping that content locked up via technical means so consumers can't just copy it, as with software-as-a-service, pay-per-view TV, and the like. Advertising also works, up to a point, but the serious money there isn't going to the content generators in most cases, it's going to the middlemen like Google and Facebook, and obviously ad-ridden content gives an inferior experience for consumers.
> And I'm of the opinion that most politicians are looking more for an excuse than for a real argument too.
Perhaps, but they're not all completely clueless, as the hesitation over PIPA/SOPA and ACTA in the face of widespread popular dissent has shown.
My concern is that if we don't achieve a fundamental shift in perceptions and attitudes to content production/consumption among the political classes, building on those recent successes, then that will be game over because sooner or later the lobbying will result in the kind of crackdown Big Media wants.
This issue needs to become politically toxic, so no-one who needs to be re-elected wants to touch anything associated with Big Media lobbying. That's hardly going to happen if the politicians start seeing lots of "how to avoid being done for copyright infringement" campaigns that convince them the protestors were just an isolated group of criminals anyway and Big Media was right all along.
Except that's not what Tribler is. If you can't think of legitimate reasons for a decentralized, censorship-proof file sharing network that don't violate the law, I daresay your imagination is broken...
Anything and everything that isn't otherwise proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be illegal in a court of law.
Perhaps not, but this story is running under the headline "Unstoppable file-sharing network 'Tribler' spells trouble for copyright holders". What is the guy about to vote on ACTA going to think?
The copyright lobby aren't the problem here. We pretty much know where they stand.
However, for the first time in several years, there is enough debate about this area for politicians who actually make laws to sit up and take notice. Right now, Big Media are losing the debate. As long as that continues to be the case and the politicans won't pass their lobbyist-led draconian laws, they can bleat as much as they like and no-one needs to care.
If that changes, if the politicians see obvious piracy advocacy as the reason these tools exist (and let's be honest, most of them wouldn't look for or possibly even understand the more legitimate uses of the same technologies) then the political winds could change and all those crazy laws will be going back on the agenda. I don't know about you, but if that happens, I for one won't be grateful to the people who've been promoting censorship-proof P2P tech as a piracy tool.
It's worth saying (and has been said elsewhere already) that fully distributed search has existed for years. Kadmelia is just one notable example in wide use. I do think it's great that it's coming to the torrent world though!
The characterization of it by many seems to suggest that this is novel and groundbreaking.
The statements made about how you'd have to shut down the internet to take it down are also a bit hyperbolic. After all, algorithms to sniff, detect and either block or throttle this kind of traffic are widely deployed. Of course it's an arms race and encryption and obfuscation are used to counter. I'm not sure what the current state of that battle is, but clearly the main tool in protecting these kinds of capabilities is our voices, not fundamental technical properties.
Well there we go. A bunch of sensational journalism hype again.
The problem with Tribler then is that the network becomes stagnent once the tracker goes down. Sure peers receive shared connections from one another to create a web architecture but unless you've dialed into a web that has the host of a scene group the group will stagate on content will it not? Without a central tracker to facilitate the sharing of new peer data to prevent the swarm from becoming stale the content will eventually all reach 100% download and remain so with no nocomers being able to find the network.
My knowledge of the DHT and Peer Exchange protocol extensions to BitTorrent are limited but isn't this what they tried to accomplish? How does Tribler make this any better?
I'm stuck on the fence now. Tribler doesn't appear to be new and fantastic because its still strongly relied upon by central servers for bootstrapping abilities. Sure the network established might be large in size but without fresh peer exhanges the swarm will die off once the tracker is brought down.
Someone to enlighten me perhaps?
It's the search part that's hard to do, and I wonder how tribler do it? Anyone analysed their code? I wonder how you'd do a true decentralised p2p search system.... (i.e. do to p2p search what google did to web search, come up with a new algorithmic invention)
If someone has finally developed a way of sharing large amounts of data in an efficient, decentralised, and secure way, then it's not just the copyright holders who need to be afraid, it's also anyone planning on investing in Facebook (or those operating any other content-driven walled-garden services).
Justin Frankel released WASTE in 2003 and it does the basic P2P friendnet thing, but without a great user interface, ability to log in via the web browser from any random Internet cafe/computer lab, and a load of luck ("traction"), it's not going to work.
Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is
divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and
stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file
hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node
with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames
that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash
attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.Yeah and I've used eMule back in the day. It would be interesting to see if this tribler system uses the same thing and has the same drawbacks, or will be as fast an accurate as normal torrent sites.
http://www.oneswarm.org/ http://alliancep2p.com/
Is it because Tribler is more focused on having everything public, while the other 2 are more focused on "friend sharing" networks, so it's easier to find files on Tribler?? From what I can tell they have more security/anonymization than Tribler, and it's not just because of the limited access between friends.
No. Not really. What will most likely happen is that big-media will just use it to push legislation that assume the users cannot be trusted and that enforcement must be more thorough to catch all those bad guys. If you do a lot of high bandwidth encrypted data exchange, someone will have to search your computer for "stolen" content.
Come on, that wasn't THAT long ago. Do people really not learn anything from history?