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Comment by singron | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this is still killable. Someone needs to periodically publish up to date databases using some outside protocol. Also if you participate in the public DHT, then your participation is public and can have consequences on your real-life legal entity.

If you want to use TOR and onion sites, I don't think this really adds anything to those.

I think this just helps you optionaly crowdsource bandwidth.

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With a simple protocol on top it can be quite resilient. The database is updated only by a group of 3 admins, who perform the update once a week. When one admin initiates an update, the other two ask him the passphrase. If the answer is "tomato" (means "I'm compromised"), the update is rejected and they find another admin. Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders. You can expand the admin team to 5 members, so RIAA (or whoever stalks torrent sites) would have to compromise 2 admins simultaneously. Don't forget that the admins can be in different countries, making their legal pursuit a nightmare.

Isn't the entire point of bittorrent that downloaders are also uploaders?

That's mostly important due to social factors. Technically you'll find that most torrents are seeded by people who seed a lot, while most users just drive-by leech it.

What makes torrents special is that all leechers CAN be seeders, that don't have to be though.

> Regular users are generally safe: the laws dont punish downloaders, only uploaders.

Are you sure about that. The downloader is the one making the copy. The uploader is merely inducing the creation of said copy.

Yes, it's easier/more efficient to go after the uploader, but that doesn't immunize the downloader.

> Don't forget that the admins can be in different countries, making their legal pursuit a nightmare.

The US govt does multi-country activity all the time.

At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content. You are, by law, entitled to it, as you might get yourself a copy of what you already own. Bought a film on DVD? You can legaly download it from wherever.

This all ends once you start uploading it, tho. You cant upload it, period. Problem with torrents is theres no checkbox to signal "stricly no upload", you can only set limit to few kb/s to minimize this issue, but technically even few bits can still get you prosecuted.

(edit: following is wrong, perhaps germany is same as Czech, see child comment) In Germany, its a different story. You cant even donwload, not by torrent or even from sites. I know of people receiving fines in their mailboxes with IP/Date/Site/Material list and finig each piece by ~200€.

Your information about Germany is incorrect. The legal situation here is the same as what you described for the Czech Republic. You can download anything anywhere. What's illegal is making stuff publicly available, and BitTorrent uploading falls under that.

Source: was caught and got council from a copyright lawyer.

Thanks for correction! Looks like the letters sent were torrent regarded, then. I also knew of most sites to download from were being blocked at every possible level (ISPs, landlord...), so I connected those two in a wrong way

Pretty sure you can’t download either. But the fines would be very low, so instead they go after uploaders, convince the court it’s "commercial distribution", values skyrocket and for a small 1000€ fee you can make the problem go away.

ime correct: individual downloaders will not be prosecuted unless somewhat high-profile, intitutional/commercial users (vps) will only get a cease and desist. uploaders are fair game.

It also helps that it’s pretty hard to figure out who downloads. With torrents, you’ll always upload as well (outside using specific clients), with websites they have no data.

This is also not correct.

> At least in Czech republic, there is no penalty for downloading copyrighted content

This is not correct - you still make a copy and the copyright holder could still sue you over it, but it's just not worth doing. It's not legal to do so, the Czech Republic is a signatory to the Berne Convention, it's just not a criminal offense. Which to be honest is the situation in virtually every country in the world.

Make it 10 and it's still not unlikely to have law enforcement simultaneously break 10 doors at the same time.

The distribution technology is really interesting but certainly not censorship proof.

It's possible to publish updates to torrent files via the DHT. See http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

I've have a answer to this same thread specifying something i'm working on, so in case you are curious, you can have more info by reading the details i gave in the other answer, and the way to solve this problem is through indirection.

You don't expose your data layer directly to the consumer, you expose an api that will resolve to one, two or several databases from one or many peers. The indirection allow you to define your rules and use your data layer in a way that fits your application goals in the best way possible.

So whats is immutable is your application, api and initial data, which you can mutate at later stages through other torrents or by consuming other api's from other peers and mutating your initial database state.

The problem is, the current browser is not meant for this, Javascript is not meant for bigger and complex applications (of course you can do it, but..)

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