Brightnets are Owner Free File Systems

elucido writes "OFF, or the Owner-Free Filesystem is a distributed filesystem in which everything is stored in reference to randomized data blocks, as opposed to a 1:1 copy of the original data being inserted. The creators of the Owner-Free Filesystem have coined a new term to define the network: A brightnet. Nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away. OFF provides a platform through which data can be stored (publicly or otherwise) in a discreet, distributed manner. The system allows for personal privacy because data (blocks) being transferred from peer to peer do not bear any relation to the original data. Incidentally, no data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random." Their main wiki page discusses a bit of what this means and how it might work as well. I've been saying that we need this for many years now, if only because we all have 10 gigs free on our machines and if we could RAID the internet we'd need fewer hard drives.

Comments

Re:Encryption

[ultranova]

On aside note, assuming computing power is no problem, wouldn't it be better to distribute multiple MD5 hashes of 128kb chunks of a given file. Then through brute force reassemble the file by solving for what the MD5 represents. Not only are you drastically cutting way down on bandwidth, but arguably you are not committing copyright infringement by transferring hashes.

The chunks are (much) bigger than the hashes, so for each hash, there are multiple possible chunks which would yield that hash. So no, it won't work.

As for copyright law, I'm pretty sure you committed an infringement by even discussing a potential - although non-functional - way of circumventing it. But even if you hadn't, rest assured that Disney will have the law amended to close this loophole.

Re:Encryption

[sbillard]

"If I own copyright on one thing, and copyright inherits through XOR, then I own copyright on everything because everything can be obtained from my one thing by XORing it with the right file."

Very nice but why stop there? Maybe we could copyright all numbers starting with zero through the astronomically large? After all, digital media is just a very large number when you look at it a certain way. So, we could hamstring the entire industry by pro-actively putting a copyright (or copyleft) on any number large enough to represent some media content (song, movie, book, whatever) not already copyrighted by someone else. Think of it as domain squatting or patent trolling, but for digital content.