How About An Anonymous Olympics Video Mirror?

tickback asks: "As I was reading about how the International Olympics Committee has bandied the television companies together for something along the lines of several BILLION dollars worldwide (Over $700 Million to NBC alone for this year) and how they're citing copyright laws as a way to police ANY Internet traffic relating to video of the Olympics, a thought-sequence started to form on how simple it would be to get video into the hands of the Internet users at large, regardless of how deeply entrenched the IOC has their hooks in the television and data carriers in Australia. Of course, as with any self-respecting geeky thought-process that these days seem to end up with some sort of a lawsuit because you happen to ask how a law should be interpreted (See the wonderful discussion at Dr. Touretzky's page Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers), I'd like to explicitly state that this is simply a plausible hypothesis meant to encourage thoughtful discussion on the pro's and con's of current copyright law and enforcement of such and how effective it is or isn't."

"Normally with video, the problems are that it has to be really well handled in terms of latency, is delivered using UDP (ie, lossy) transfer, and can be traced easily through the ports used to deliver it. What if the live or close to live video was encoded by a party in Australia or any area served by satellite or whatnot, automagically broken into 5 minute pieces (to pick a reasonable small chunk) of realvideo (to pick a random but popular video codec), encrypted, dispersed to any number of mirror sites over any normal TCP form (SMTP/FTP/HTTP/POP whatever), re-assembled, and then broadcast in its normal form with the resulting say 15 minute delay meaning the video would still be over 12 hours ahead of whatever the IOC is allowing to be broadcast?

Now, there are some technical issues that whoever pursuing this path would have to overcome: how to distribute the material from the mirrors, how to anonymize any connections, how to handle similar streams from mutiple sources, and after the recent rashes of gnutella 'spamming' and such, how to distinguish 'legitimate' incoming data from 'trojan' data meant to disrupt any system.

Now, I'm not a programmer by any means, so I certainly have no way of testing this theory even in a closed network (although it doesn't seem like the technical hurdles are insurmountable, or even serious hurdles at all) and I honestly don't care much about the Olympics (I'd be happy getting the data the next day, since I don't watch much video on my computer; I happen to think TV belongs on a 32" screen, and I can't afford a monitor that large). I *do* wonder about just how often laws are being used to enforce practices that the internet has made a bit archaic, and think that a few more discussions into the matter are needed. Hopefully, this will promote just such a discussion, especially considering how quickly new laws are being discussed concerning digital copyright."

Comments

Ideal use of freenet

[griffjon]

This would be the PERFECT application of the Freenet project (freenet.sourceforge.net)--it offers anonymity to its nodes, and--even better for this--will cache oft-requested data near the requesting parties--no slashdot effects, because if it's retrieved once, it's already one hop away next time it's requested.

By the time the Olympics are active, so should freenet be--this would be a wonderful PR stunt for the project (hear that Ian??), not to mention a demonstration of its applicability.

Civil Disobedience, or just plain cheating?

[ptbrown]

And we get flustered when the MPAA says open source is thievery.

Did this thought process at any time consider whether doing this would be legal? I assume this would come under the jurisdiction of Australian law. I know that the US forbids retransmission of television, and iCrave took advantage of Canada's less restrictive laws. But what would the situation be down there?

I don't mean to argue against breaking the law when the law is unjust. I understand hosting a mirror of DeCSS, and before that PGP, and before that the E911 document, etc. And yes, the IOC is way out of control and needs a serious bitch-slapping. But what you're saying sounds not so much like a righteous stand, as it does a greedy child lusting after the cookie jar.

Unless, of course, you intend to do this without using any "official" broadcast material. In which case, I wish you all the luck in the world. Unfortunately, I doubt that would be enough. But hey, you can't expect to accomplish anything if you're afraid of the impossible.

Usenet

[Vassily Overveight]

Consider packaging the video of a particular event into a single file and making it available on usenet (larger files have to be broken up across multiple messages, of course). The distribution and mirroring will be taken care of for you, and there already exist a number of anonymizing methods.