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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how it's bad: the hosting user receives no credit, and local mirroring keeps retrieval speeds high. Your users effectively become a giant CDN for you. Who would sue?

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I wouldn't sue anyone. But I can watch music videos on YouTube without contacting all of the the relevant rights holders to ensure both the uploader and YouTube have permission to show me the video. On a distributed file share lacking anonymity and/or immunity, I have to ensure that I have those rights before viewing (thus distributing) any content.

Immunity is not likely to happen, as it would amount to granting redistribution rights to anyone who downloads a piece of content. So the political solution is out. Anonymity is a requirement.

That's not to say IPFS is useless. It's just not going to "replace HTTP" or any significant part of the web as long as it's possible to see who's sharing what. Or if it does, the sharks will feed.

No, that doesn't add up: You only host data that's already available on a public network, pretty much by definition. If the rights distributor didn'f want it to be globally accessible, they wouldn't have put it up on IPFS.

I'm happy to play the naivete card when it comes to downloading. (If the producers didn't want me watching this CAM footage of a new release on YouTube, they wouldn't have uploaded it, wink wink.) I'm a bit more cautious when it comes to uploading.

But you're not uploading something that hasn't been, you're mirroring something that's already up.

You won't have any luck with that argument in court.

If you doubt me, see all verdicts for infringement when bitorrenting.

But this is very different: This is more like the original copyright holder putting something on BitTorrent, inviting people to download it freely, and them suing anybody who seeds it: By putting the data on a P2P protocol, you've kind of implicitly stated that you're okay with people seeding, or whatever the local terminology for the same is.

Um, no.

You have no guarantees that the content put up via IPFS is by the original copyright owner.

Thus immediately after you receive the infringing content over IPFS and start seeding it, you are infringing on the copyright owners rights. You have no recourse and no legal defenses to protect you.

Well, then, as soon as you receive notification, you can immediately stop hosting the data: it's like a DMCA takedown, but you have to send it to way more people.

Too late. Once you've retrieved content via IPFS, you are already infringing. You can still be sued, waiting for a DMCA notice won't save you.

From what I understand, the plan is to have blacklists that you can subscribe to, so if you don't, then you can be legally presumed to have knowingly pirated material.

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