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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

For publishers, it's probably best thought of as a combination of a free CDN and the Internet Archive.

But I don't think it's going to take off until there's a way to take down files you don't want published anymore. Even with the Internet Archive, if you add them to robots.txt, they will take it down. [1]

Removing things from the Internet is always going to be imperfect since there will always be people who archive old copies of files (and that's a good thing). But the official software should honor retractions or mainstream publishers won't be interested.

[1] https://archive.org/about/exclude.php

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If Bittorrent has taught us anything, you don't need a publisher's permission for a technology to take off.

This'll most likely start as CDN endpoints (that no longer need an origin), and move on from there.

I didn't say it wouldn't take off with the Bittorrent crowd. Website owners and file sharers are different users with different concerns. Publishers already have CDN's so if they can't undo, this would be a downgrade.

See https://github.com/ipfs/archives/issues/7

This is crazy. IPFS is a protocol, not a central authority.

Also, it is impossible to know who owns a file. Since it is identified only by a hash, everybody possessing the same file at any point could claim that file is theirs and prove it by producing the hash. In this way, downloading a file is owning it.

Also, the Internet Archive policy seems too naïve. So anyone who just bought a domain can exclude everything saved at that domain in the IA up to that day?

I think it's less about who owns the hash and more about who refers to it. Think about how git works. If more than one place refers to it then it's like it was copied. If you remove a hash from a directory, it's gone from that directory. If no other directory has it then it can be garbage collected.

The key would be to convince publishers that removing the hash from their directory tree counts as deletion. Maybe the hashes shouldn't be that prominent?

I don't see how the Internet Archive policy is naive. Yes, they're assuming whoever owns the domain owns the files and maybe sometimes that means someone deletes some files when they didn't have the right. But taking a stand against domain owners who want the files gone would probably land them in court.

IA policy is not naïve from the juridical/real-world point of view, but considering their own goal of keeping files and pages archived.

Should be easy enough to add.

You're going to be able to force me to remove a hash/file off my own IPFS node? Fat chance.

No, just publish a list and allow people to voluntarily ignore those files.

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