On 08/26/2011 11:09 PM, Tony Arcieri wrote: > On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 9:29 AM, David Barrett wrote: > > Would you and your 7 friends be equally enthusiastic early adopters > if the 9th member of your node was the RIAA/MPAA/etc? > > The RIAA/MPAA could join our cluster, however the design properties of > Tahoe would prevent them from accessing our data.
Perhaps I misunderstand Tahoe. Is it intended for groups to share data (eg, I add a file, you discover and download it), or is it purely for me to backup my data? If the latter -- if it's purely for individual backup -- then I agree there's no risk from the RIAA: you're not sharing it so there's no problem. But if the former -- if there's some way I can join your Tahoe cluster and access data that's already there -- then would you be willing to let the RIAA join your cluster with the keys to access the data there? Because for something like Tahoe to work on a global scale, eventually you're not going to know with certainty all the other members -- and any one of those could in fact be the RIAA trolling for people to sue. For example, is it possible to determine who (username or IP) added the content in the first place? Is there some way to differentiate between when a node is requesting a specific piece of content from you, versus when it's just rebalancing some tree? If so, then it's limited to groups of trusting friends -- still a great tool, but not a vast treasure of human knowledge as it sounds like you want to build. But if not, if it's truly impossible to know whether a node is downloading and storing something because the user actually wants it or because the system forced them to get it unaware, then that could be a pretty good defense against overzealous copyright enforcement. Though I wonder if a simpler model is to just start with something like BitTorrent, except every time you download anything, you also download something else randomly. So half of the content you download/seed is what you actually picked, and the other half is random. Then there's no way from the outside to tell which was for you, versus which is caching random content to increase the uptime and performance of the whole system. -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
