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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?"
Because here's a hint: make the protocol open, and people will re-write it to exclude the copyrights.
:P
Oh, it's server-based and not 'true' P2P...my mistake.
No one will use it
OF course it won't fly... the good of mankind is dwarfed by the needs of a few to make and control trillions of dollars.
I thought one of the main purposes of P2P was that it is decentralized. A supercomputer cluster is hardly decentralized.
Also, how will it "detect" copyrighted works? I can just zip up my favorite illegal MP3s and give them a name like "good.zip" and it would have to be manually flagged as "bad".
You basically admitted that nobody will use it because copyrights are enforced.
Unless they can come up with a better selling point than "with added restrictions" then of course nobody will use it.
People who don't want to infringe copyrights are entirely capable of not infringing copyrights. They don't need a system that prevents them doing it.
People who do want to infringe copyrights also obviously don't want a system that prevents them doing it.
Unless there's actually something they do BETTER than the competition then they aren't going to appeal to anyone.
However, in addition to technical and scale issues mentioned elsewhere, I can see some points of controversy:
Hmm... Come think of it, there's something fishy here. Let's say I download the song and I get to play it as much as I want. Let's assume I can't share it over non-protected P2P, but hey, I can sell it again when I no longer want to listen to it (as if there's no way to copy to another, unencumbered format, but bear with me...) Why on earth should the artist get a piece of it every time the same copy is sold? I understand they are trying to appease to RIAA & Co with this but this is not fair. It's not like they get a dime if I re-sell my CDs.
Furthermore, it may well be that the label claims copyright over the songs, thus keeping any proceeds from methods like this and not really helping the artist.
Very interesting - I would really like to see it or some equivalent take off, but until then I'll wait with plenty of healthy skepticism.
The revolution will not be televised.
I would rather like to see every public domain human creation in existence that can be expressed by a digital medium to be archived. A Project Gutenberg so to speak, but for not just books but also images, audio and video as well. For example, there are veritable treasure troves of old films just lying around degrading and collecting dust in television archives around the world but even if they were all digitized (as is being done with some extra valuable movies in danger of degrading to unusability) I doubt we would see them offered for free to the general public. The bandwidth costs would just be too big for any company/state television attempting it. A distributed P2P system however would be ideal for this.
In the meantime, there are a few sites attempting it on a smaller scale - the Prelinger Archives over on archive.org are definitely worth a look for anyone interested in old American war, educational and propaganda films for example (like the (in)famous "Duck & Cover" movie)...
I'm guessing that dollar figure comes from 50000 lost sales at $55 a pop. The question that always needs to be asked is "how many of those 50000 wouldn't have bought the game anyway?" I'm not saying that they should have downloaded it... I'm no where near saying that id shouldn't be rewarded for 4 years of effort... but I do dispute the statement that id "lost" that amount of money. For the record, I haven't bought Doom III. I'm waiting for the Demo to see if it runs on my hardware, and to work out if the game justifies updating my video card.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
So, what about public domain works? They have no copyright to sign them, and it is impossible to sign and register them all -- can they not be distributed by such a system?
If not, then it will create a situation in which only works approved (directly or indirectly) by a cenralized signing authority can be distributed. Bad if such systems become legally mandated.
On the other hand, if unsigned PD works can be distributed, then there's not much point -- you can (via analog holes if nothing else) strip the signature from a copyrighted work and distribute it that way. So there wouldn't be much point.
DNA just wants to be free...
As an addition to this, how many of those 50,000 had already pre-ordered the game, and just wanted to get an early start? I know of at least 2 people who did this. Myself, I am in the same boat as you, wait for the demo, then buy it if I like it. Plus, I'll probably wait for it to hit about $30 before I shell out for it, I just can't bring myself to pay $55 for a game anymore.
The dollar figure is just a made up number to throw around to make it sound like ID lost a bunch, there really is no way to know.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The number you show in you sig was never claimed by id software, it was done by some BBC journalist. The id officials never used it - because it is nonsense. The news about "losses by piracy" alone probably were PR (concidering ids cool statements in the same article) worth 2.7 million in sales. And thats not just multipling supanova-downloads (before release) with the game prize. Without a estimate on how many users would buy the game when it hits the stores this number is utterly worthless.
Link to the BBC article about "lost sales" for reference.
I actually got accused of trolling the other day because of my sig.
well, you are.
You basically admitted that nobody will use it because copyrights are enforced.
No. He says that nobody will use a network which relies on central servers and a registration. Maybe because of:
Nothing quite pisses me off like the so-called free speech zones. I thought this whole country was a free speech zone. Didn't you?
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
I don't think you understand. even with a real Doom 3 CD in the drive you cannot run the game if you have drive emulation software installed on your computer.
/writer software. If it is simply installed you cannot get the game you paid for to work.
there have been other games (e.g. Painkiller) where you cannot run the game if you have CD writer software installed on your computer.
I'm not talking about actually using the emulation
This is like not being able to play DVDs if you have video codecs installed, just because some dumbfuck company thinks having codecs installed mean you will rip, encode and pirate.
P.S. I don't have to justify anything - since I cannot run the software I don't. I have not pirated the game, or any other game. I have no problem paying for software, but if the software will mess me about and try to say what I can and cannot have installed on my own computer, then I simply take my business elsewhere.