Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Next-gen Copyright-aware P2P System Whitepaper

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the p2p-stands-for-pay-to-play dept.

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?"

28 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Wonder how long that will last. by ScytheBlade1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because here's a hint: make the protocol open, and people will re-write it to exclude the copyrights.

    Oh, it's server-based and not 'true' P2P...my mistake.

    No one will use it :P

    1. Re:Wonder how long that will last. by dmayle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      make the protocol open, and people will re-write it to exclude the copyrights.

      And well they should. I'm not saying that copyright should go away, or anything quite so dramatic, but as soon as you have a system whereby it's possible to physically limit free speech, you no longer have free speach. (Yay free speech zones!). Let the judicial system do what it's supposed to do, prosecute those who deserve to be prosecuted, and stay away from any new forms of enslavement like this...

  2. BitTorrent, Microsoft by Animaether · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I see that BitTorrent wasn't listed along with Kazaa, eDonkey and Morpheus.

    Strange, as it was recently used as an example of "a responsible and legitimate use of P2P" by distributing Microsoft's Windows XP SP2.

    I don't suppose this has anything to do with the SP2 torrent seeds being 'pulled' from the organizer's website at Microsoft's request (read:order) ?

  3. All This by The-Bus · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...and still no Metallica?

    --

    Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.

  4. It'll never work :) by dan+dan+the+dna+man · · Score: 5, Funny

    I suspect we like our non-copyright aware distribution channels too much ;)

    --
    I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
  5. Whitepaper by r2q2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A whitepaper alone doesn't say much. Trying to scale to that level hasn't been done before and is very ambitious for it to do. It could possibly be done but the better question is when.

    --
    My UID is prime is yours?
  6. But why? by M51DPS · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why would I want to stop using current systems? FastTrack, Gnutella, and OpenFT let me exchange any files I want, and there just doesn't seem to be any reason I would want to switch.

  7. Great... by Cinematique · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is great and all, but I think the stat we *really* want to know is... how many Library of Congress' will this thing hold?

  8. An honorable goal for the good of mankind by erroneus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. I have a similiar project.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny


    but mine is concentrated mostly on pr0n.

  10. detect copyrighted works? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    so what exactly is a copyrighted work? when i worked in a copy shop, we were told anything created (in our examples: photos) were automatically protected as property of the creator for such and such a time frame.... what then, would be able to be sent, besides GPL stuff?

  11. Idiotic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

  12. Kinda sad... by rd_syringe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You basically admitted that nobody will use it because copyrights are enforced. Heaven forbid people respect copyrights. You know, like we demand with the GPL. I actually got accused of trolling the other day because of my sig.

    1. Re:Kinda sad... by rking · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Kinda sad... by Mateito · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:Kinda sad... by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Interesting

      well, your sig is a bit misleading. at least the number is taken out of ass, since how can you LOSE money if you're not yet even SELLING anything(later release date for europe).. you're just guess-estimating the number on how many people will not buy it because they could download it with torrent - but since they weren't going to buy it anyways how it was loss is beyond me(they could just as well have calculated that OMG every chinese guy skipped buying this game because of bad crop - WE LOST GAZILLION BILLION DOLLARS. or that a million people will play it in net cafes: another 20 million 'lost').

      It's just a big number they invented for some pr.

      but it is true, if I was _paying_ I wouldn't want to bother with p2p since I'm already _paying_ for it I could easily pay the cent or two that would go into the necessary bandwith to get it from the centralised server and certainly wouldn't bother with donating bandwith to their business volunteraly.

      if the material were legal(licensed with $$) and there were a working micropayment(hell, it's not going to be micro when the mpaa/riaa gets around) there wouldn't be need for p2p since you could finance the fat pipes and buying the bandwith from akamai with the money.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    4. Re:Kinda sad... by rokzy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ID Software will not let you run the game on a computer with legal CD emulation software installed.

      Thus the only version of the game I can run on my system is a pirate version.

      Thanks, guys!

    5. Re:Kinda sad... by Sylver+Dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.
    6. Re:Kinda sad... by Sweetshark · · Score: 4, Insightful
      id Software lost $2.75 million to record-breaking piracy on the weekend before Doom 3's release. Thanks, guys!
      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:
      • fear they will start to charge fees
      • because it is clumsy to register every little poem or pic you made
      • because central servers are easy to watch (collecting spam targets and what not)
      • other p2p networks dont have these problems and are more popular
      • .... (many other reasons)
      • copyright issues
    7. Re:Kinda sad... by jparker · · Score: 5, Informative

      (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.

  13. LOVE the pictures on the fourth page by ScytheBlade1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://www.bitmunk.com/images/tutorial/payment.png <-- That sums if all up right there.

    Note the /. geek in the bottom right-corner, left out. =(

  14. It is an interesting idea, but... by r.jimenezz · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You have to give it that. Personally I think this is what the music industry should have done a long time ago.

    However, in addition to technical and scale issues mentioned elsewhere, I can see some points of controversy:

    • Associating a digital certificate with a real life identity. How are they going to check this? Also raises a lot of privacy issues and so on
    • Micro-payments. Remains to be seen whether that's going to work. Will it use a credit card? A custom system? Has Bitmunk got enough of a name for people to trust them?
    • Minimum price. One has to assume that the system won't allow transactions where the artist's (and Bitmunk's!) share is not covered...

    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.
  15. Well, sounds nice but... by __aagctu1952 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)...

  16. "P2P whitepaper" indeed by k98sven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    First: This ain't a whitepaper - it's a sales pitch.

    Second: How is this P2P when there's a big centralized "Authorization service" in the middle?

    And guess who is supposedly running that service? Why the paper's authors..

  17. What about the public domain? by MenTaLguY · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...
  18. why don't you.... by zogger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... just publish it and release it yourself? It's digital, it doesn't get much easier than that to publish, and you can contract dvd or cd burning and packaging yourself, or even do that yourself.

    To me, and I'm not a downloader of anything that is gray market, music movies or games,so I got no dog in this fight, I just wonder why they charge those ridiculous prices, when they could severely drop the prices to very cheap and make it on volume sales. Like today, there's no reason music cds couldn't be 3 bucks retail at the store, they don't need to be 10 to 20 dollars. The companies would most likely even make more money and there would be less pirating/copying/trading going on if they had kept dropping prices as the technology let them. Instead, the rest of humanity noticed that "copies" were extremely cheap, that the technology had arrived and was universally avaialable, then they looked at the rip off prices still being charged, got pissed off, and went "screw it, they want to rip me, I'll rip them back first" and this stoopid digital war started. That's exactly what happened, and it never had to happen in the first place.

    Now, it's up to the content producers to take charge of their own productions and start to cut the middleman skimmers out of the deal and go direct to the end user with your product, at very reduced rates. It has to be cheap enough and clean enough to let people get the content they want, yet still make ya'all a few coins. Seems like a happy medium would be possible, as long as you cut the middle man profit skimmers out of the transaction. IMO, that's about the only practical way this dilemma will be solved, unless we go to a totally regulated internet and a bunch more stupid draconian laws applying to everyone and with future hardware and software.

  19. OT: free speech zones by edalytical · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  20. Re:Id's Doom3 by rokzy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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 /writer software. If it is simply installed you cannot get the game you paid for to work.

    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.