Next-gen Copyright-aware P2P System Whitepaper
meier73 writes "A whitepaper has just been released detailing a secure (OpenSSL/digital signatures), copyright-aware P2P network. The paper claims that this system enables legal file trades, something that isn't guaranteed by Kazaa, Morpheus or eDonkey. The whitepaper goes on to state that the long-term goal of this system is to catalog
every human creation in existence that can be expressed by a digital medium. Project stats: a super-computing cluster that will scale to more than 900TB of storage, 300M transactions per day and trade music, television, movies and books.
Doesn't this constitute a responsible and legitimate use of P2P?"
(Disclaimer: I don't work for id and don't know the details of their situation, but I do work in the game industry and am familiar with the practices in general.)
In many cases, copy protection like this is forced on developers by the publishers. The devs usually have absolutely nothing to do with it, never even touching (or knowing) the copy protection software used. For all of us, it's very frustrating because we try to provide users with as bug-free an experience as we can get, and then publishers slap a buggy-as-hell copy protection system on and we take the flak. They're the ones who are all paranoid about pirates, while we mostly just want people to have fun playing our game.