Comment by stfu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stfu | Hacker News Reader

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I like that strain of thought with making it more easy for users to download stuff. But the problem with repositories is, that they are requiring a specific intent of the user to do something.

Let me try to contribute to the discussion with a few unrelated thoughts with the hope that some others are willing to share their own too.

I would love to see is for example an in-browser plug in, that is based on the torrenting idea. Similar to streaming, but just that the cached data is redistributed among those who stream a particular video. It somehow should reach a level, where users have a plausible deniability to not be able to differentiate between legal/illegal anymore and at the same time an implementation that is ideally only depending on an existing widespread standard/plugin.

Another idea would be a physical device that handles torrent downloads, i.e. the VPN connection, encryption of external HDs, and has a super simple and stupid interface to use. There would be lots of opportunities to cooperate with existing VPN providers plus advertising on trackers should be relatively cheap.

I like the steganographic approach, and it could also work with a repository. Consider the following:

-Let Pc be a copyrighted package in the repository

-Let Pd be a public domain package in the repository

-Let Kc be the "key" of Pc

-Let Kd be the "key" of Pd

The keys are stored in the metadata of the packages, so we don't need to break any copyright laws to get them.

Suppose we have the following operations:

-E(Pc,Pd,Kc,Kd) = X

-D(X, Kc) = Pc

-D(X, Kd) = Pd

With this infrastructure, if we want to get Pc or Pd, we simply ask for X and then decode our desired file. This also gives plausible deniability, but I'm not sure how this will hold up in court.

This is analogous to downloading some thing after encrypting it. Or a zip file with a password.

Its a clever hack though. Because you can always argue, that File you downloaded has meaningless contents and that some algorithm at your end is re arranging it as a meaningful form.

But the copyright enforcers can always argue this is a clever way of stealing something. More like smuggling a big thing by dividing into pieces and transporting them in surrogate objects.

Therefore it is key that the legitimate vs questionable content ratio is not getting too much out of balance.

I am sure it helped a lot for Megaupload's public perception that regular people actually used the service for sending files and were screaming about the government stealing their holiday videos. The narrative of the Torrentfreak story is awesome as it humanizes the subject and creates sympathy for the cause.

In an ideal case an approach would fill a minor existing need in a way that is impossible to separate from "other" content. I was trying to do this in the comment above by suggesting some form of torrent driven YouTube alternative (i.e. video embedding witin a browser), but contravert's encryption idea could really make this even more awesome.

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