Unexpectedly, we have managed to squash the initial carefree copying of the internet with just a few ridiculous court cases. Even the pirate bay founders are starting to feel tired of maintaining it.
We should have two layers. Seriousnet and Freenternet.
Btw, afaik, entire tpb/kat archive is around few gigabytes.
You probably want something more like Tor. However Tor's design makes it no good for large transactions thanks to all the obfuscating hops.
There's always a price to pay when attempting to secure something... the trick is making design decisions such that the price is negligible. (Think HTTPS)
A search DHT makes much more sense, look up keywords based on hash. Think the Kademlia network from the ED2K days. Maybe I'm being too academic by even suggesting a DHT be used, you could do it in simpler ways like flood search in the style of Gnutella - any distributed search means would work really.
I believe there are a few attempts at this in the bittorrent world, like Tribler, which is probably the most practical implementation to date, there's a few others too, none of which look particularly mature yet:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/editorial/?sourc... https://github.com/lmatteis/torrent-net https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico
The problem with distributed search is that perfecting it is hard - bittorrent has won out because websites could be used to prevent spamming of malware, track reputation and discussion of torrents and individuals, etc. Tribler has some proposed alternatives here and I seem to remember Kad having done a decent job preventing this from becoming a significant problem, but it never had the popularity.
If someone manages to knock out all the big torrent and usenet indexes overnight, these systems will become a lot more necessary and probably get a lot more popular.
Even as legal as they are today, crypto tools are really not widespread. Release the Tobacco & Firearms (and their respective equivalent in different countries) and their userbase will shrink into oblivion.
Edit: Legalize Marijuana, vote the likes of Trump into power, leave the EU, threaten to nuke the US, fine, but some things, like intellectual property, are sacred.
And don't make the false assumption that you can't have attribution or compensation without copyright.