Legal defense of peer to peer idea (is having a piece of a file as bad as the whole?)

I don't think file sharing should be regulated because of the infinite replicator argument (if people can easily make infinite copies of any object they want, should you really stop them?). However, most governments hold a different position on the matter. This leads to a situation where the legality of a system matters nearly as much as its function.

As I understand it, people are primarily sued for sharing files, not downloading them.

If I may ask, do you think that companies would find it as easy to sue someone if they just had a 1 kb piece of a copyrighted file? Would the person's position be any stronger if they didn't even know that they had it?

I have an idea for a peer to peer file sharing system design that would make it so that all files are split evenly among all peers. Once a file has been submitted, no one person stores it. Files would be retrieved by looking up the hash of the name and using the hash chain to find the rest of the chunks. All you would need to retrieve a file is its name. There would be no central servers (that said, you would probably eventually get lists that people maintained of file names that they know are findable). Participants could be considered guilty of storing all files, or none.

Do you think it would be worth building such as system? Or would it not be any more defensible than the current setup? (Or has it been done before?)

Thanks.

I am always suspicious when I see someone who creates a new account, then proposes to design the "future of filesharing" and gets into legal defense ideas...

That said, I have pondered a similar de-centralized system myself. I do believe something like this will be necessary. There are some downsides present:

1. Having a universal collection of "unknown parts" requires people to set aside a portion of their HDD for sharing of these parts. EVERYONE would need to add to this storage as more files became available. BT shows that people will not offer more without some sort of recognition or benefit.

2. Missing/rare pieces would be as problematic for this system as they were for this system as they were for kazaa/emule.

More later...

Besides the fact of somebody not understanding the meaning of "infinite",let us hypothesize that I spend 100 million dollars to create something new and unique,like for the sake of argument,a software or anything else mass reproducible.
Now although that thing cost me 100 million dollars to produce,the only real,tangible value is in mass (re)producing it and selling the copies ,so basically whatever you are implying is seriously off the mark.

As for the rest,really don't care, as anything you propose can be rendered null by a simple rewording of the Law.

I strongly suggest instead of wasting whatever precious time you have left of the Earth fighting idiotic battles you have exactly zero chance of winning, I suggest you take all that moral indignation and apply it to helping the poor and needy instead.:)

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

I am always suspicious when I see someone who creates a new account, then proposes to design the "future of filesharing" and gets into legal defense ideas...

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I immediately thought the same thing.

More likely a front for something devious.

Also pretty hilarious how few "members" of this site bother to read the thread.

Btw hilarious meaning not hilarious.

First off, thank you both for replying to my post. I am fairly new in these circles and it is great to get advice from people who know what they are doing.

I do not claim that this idea is "the future" or even particularly useful. That is what I am asking (from people with far more experience than me).

As far as the infinite supply debate, I merely think that a Kickstarter style model (payment before production, followed by replication) might be more appropriate given the current state of technology.

For a brief and topical discussion on why it might not be a good idea to restrict people from sharing information, you could take a look at the following article (it is just one of many points of view): https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...41286162.shtml

For point #1, that is correct. You would have to allocate more storage as more files were put in the system. It is probably, however, that as the number of files scales the number of users would as well. The file load would be distributed more or less evenly across users, which would lead to a roughly constant amount of storage required as long as the amount of data/user ration remains approximately constant.

For point #2, I'm not sure that is necessarily true. If you use a structured network, then each peice of information should be equally easy to find unless it is lost entirely (peer leaves without transferring to neighbor). If you interleave the data in the file and then encode it with a Reed-Solomon or Turbo code, you should be resilient to a certain fraction of the pieces disappearing. You can also incorporate replication and repair.

The concept still needs to be fleshed out, but I would be happy to post the details so far if you are interested. It is about 3 pages of notes in my notebook. The real question is whether it would be worth the effort for me to write it and deal with stuff like getting it to work across NATs.

There is a double-edged sword present in your system that has not occurred before: the need for a user/sharer to occupy space on a HDD for the allocated "data", as well as the files he will be making use of. Sure, storage space is getting cheaper, but you are asking for (ideally) as much "data" space as would be used for personal use. If not, then there would be an imbalance similar to the upload/download speeds that exist now.

How would your system determine how much redundancy to give files? Surely, obscure files should not have the same importance as the latest blockbuster. However, sometimes the rare files are of incredible importance to a particular user. If the plan is decentralization, how much communication would be necessary between peers to insure that no files get lost?

By no means am I trying to deflate your ideas. These are problems that have met with various success in past systems.

Assuming (and this is a pretty big assumption to be making, I am in no way a lawyer nor do I play one on TV) that with "less" of a file you are "less" liable, there is a very tricky balancing act. One the one hand, if you divide a file into a large number of parts to hold each user less liable, that just means there have to be that many more users simultaneously online (and have the motivation to do so) for someone to download the file. And if you decide to only split up a file into a few parts so that only a couple of users need be online for someone to download a file, you start to lose the entire reason for creating the protocol - people will end up having a large portion of the file.

It seems like it would be rather ineffective for anything that isn't intrinsically popular (blockbuster movies/triple a games/mainstream tv shows), and would have a very heavy reliance on the network effect (moreso than other protocols being used right now) to get off it's feet.

That being said it could certainly work and could be very useful to those looking for something like it.

There's already something similar out there called the Freenet Project.

There's no servers. All the content is spread out among the users. People have no way of knowing what exactly they are holding.
I've only used it once a few years back. It was like the regular net.... Only 10 x slower. Files of EVERYTHING posted freely... somethings on three I wanted nothing to do with.

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Originally Posted by Broken

There's already something similar out there called the Freenet Project.

There's no servers. All the content is spread out among the users. People have no way of knowing what exactly they are holding.
I've only used it once a few years back. It was like the regular net.... Only 10 x slower. Files of EVERYTHING posted freely... somethings on three I wanted nothing to do with.

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Did you know you have a typo in your graphic sig?