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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

If you read the white paper, it pretty clearly says that your node will cache files that peers request in order to build reputation on the network. Maybe IPFS doesn't actually do that currently, but it could and the whitepaper says it should, so it is a very valid question to ask.

edit: double checked the whitepaper, and it says "In the case that a node has nothing that its peers want (or nothing at all), it seeks the pieces its peers want, with lower priority than what the node wants itself. This incentivizes nodes to cache and disseminate rare pieces, even if they are not interested in them directly."

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I believe this is correct.

I'm not sure how IPFS addresses this, but one method is to have an oracle that reports DMCA takedowns. Nodes can achieve takedown compliance by subscribing to the blacklist.

Obviously there are lots of technical challenges. Just a few:

- Who gets to add entries to the blacklist? - How do infringement victims know that's the right person to contact? - How do you avoid creating a central point of failure? (at minimum nodes need ability to choose their blacklist provider) - Since it's all content-addressed, how do you handle near duplicates? e.g. same movie encoded in different formats (basically have to punt on this one unless you implement some kind of contentID, which is a whole other problem)

Anyway, you need to have some figleaf policy so people have a clear way to opt-in to compliance.

I would be completely skeptical of this approach except that it appears to work for adblockers. Extensions like uBlock Origin let users choose from a several third-party blacklists, with sensible defaults. Of course, there are fewer ad servers than pirate movie copies...

I think it is a non-problem, because the node is just a cache, just like an optic-fiber acts as a cache (you can actually compute the storage capacity of an optic-fiber of a given length using the bitrate and the speed of light). Owners of internet infrastructure (fiber&routers) are never sued for e.g. infringement of copyright, and infrastructure is exactly what an IPFS node is.

You need to understand WHY people sue others to be able to draw the correct conclusion.

There are reasons why infrastructures don't get sued, yet users who download illegal files very often get sent a warning from their ISP that they may cut them off and charge them with penalty.

If IPFS takes off the same way BitTorrent took off and a lot of people end up using IPFS to download illegal content, ISPs will do the same thing, not because each individual file is illegal, but because they look at the entire network as a whole and conclude that it was this network that caused the rise in pirating, which is technically true. Their goal would be to scare the users into NOT using the network altogether unless they know EXACTLY what they're doing. That's their playbook.

The reason people don't use torrents as much as they used to is because people are afraid of getting sued by their ISPs and content owners. They know it won't completely get rid of all BitTorrent pirates, but they DO know that it will lower the usage. And they will do the same for IPFS users if that's what it takes.

> but because they look at the entire network as a whole and conclude that it was this network that caused the rise in pirating, which is technically true.

But at the same time, ISPs were also profiting from the pirating (in fact, but this is beside the point, they were financially profiting, while the users were just getting movies).

In the case of IPFS, the ones running the infrastructure are not actually profiting directly from the distribution of content in their caches. I.e., the IPFS users are more "innocent" than ISPs in the BitTorrent case.

So if BigMedia wants to sue anybody, they should sue the ISPs, OR the people who placed data in the cache in the first place.

Finally, if this is all insurmountable, then there is still a solution. All users of IPFS transfer ownership of their harddrives (or parts thereof) to the IPFS foundation. That way, the users are not liable.

PS: With IPFS, users are at the same level as ISPs. So if users are getting sued, they can say "I'm an ISP, and I got my data from that ISP, sue them!"

This is why there has been a so-called "the great vertical integration" of the ISPs and content providers.

It's easy to understand if you take a look at what companies own or are owned by major ISP companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

Once you start digging deeper into how the Internet "actually" works, you quickly realize it's not as decentralized as we thought, and you become very pessimistic. But I do hope there's a solution for this, which is why I am a fan of people working on stuff like IPFS.

That said, if you really want to overthrow the current structure, you should really understand the history and why and how things work the way they do currently. Not just at a technical level but on economical level as well.

>The reason people don't use torrents as much as they used to is because people are afraid of getting sued by their ISPs and content owners.

do you have any proof of this? That may be one reason, but surely streaming and availability to buy on itunes/amazon etc has to be a factor.

It's one of the reasons. Did I say it's the absolute singular reason behind all this?

Streaming services cost you money, and if you study microneconomics, humans are rational animals that always tend to move towards maximizing their gains, which is calculated by subtracting cost from benefit. And there are many factors involved here.

The ISP suing people problem causes people to decide between mental cost and financial cost.

If you know what you're doing and have an efficient workflow that doesn't cause you to have a lot of mental cost, then you may use torrents, but otherwise for most people the mental cost overweighs the financial cost, and that's why many people switched over.

You said the reason. You didn't say one of the reasons.

Or it could be that owners of internet infrastructure are never sued because they have legal departments that can spend a lot of resources fighting back, keeping the copyright holders laywers busy (and draining resources) for a long time. On the other hand, end-users don't have legal departments, and probably don't have the resources to pay for a single lawyer for very long, and are much more likely to settle to make things go away, so it makes much more business sense to sue them.

Which absolutely sucks. But there it is.

The DMCA has explicit exceptions very clearly spelled out for service providers that do not store content and/or do not choose which content gets cached...

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#512

As long as everything is automatic and the "provider" doesn't pick and choose what gets cached you're in the clear.

Perhaps nodes could seek only parts of files, a sub-set of the pieces that make up the full file, for the purpose of building reputation? It could offer some differentiation between users who are seeking the full file vs those that are just acting as a pipe.

I talked to some of the IPFS folks a while back, and they were planning on publishing a blacklist. It would be up to the individuals running IPFS nodes to subscribe to blacklists, and anyone who wanted to do so could publish them (after all, there's very little technical capability required to publish a simple list of hashes).

This was in the context of child porn though, not copyright. I imagine that they wouldn't bother publishing a blacklist of copyrighted items (since every item is copyrighted, and a copyright holder is perfectly within their rights to publish their own copyrighted works via IPFS). Instead I suspect that they would suggest that copyright holders publish their own blacklists.

Whitelists are probably a lot more practical. With a blacklist there is the problem that vast numbers of new files will be coming on the network all the time, and so you would need some mechanism to determine which ones should be put on the list. There are only two ways to do that, neither practical.

One is machines, but then you need a huge server farm and lots of sophisticated software, and even then you get lots of false positives and false negatives.

The other is human beings, but that would require a huge army of people. You can't get that many volunteers as people don't want to spend their time, and besides they don't want to be traumatized by looking nasty pics. So you have to hire them, and where would the money come from?

  As a consequence, I think white lists are the way to go.

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