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How Proxied Torrents Could End ISP Subpoenas
Now, I'm not advocating the creation of software that enables piracy. And I don't mean that in a nudge-wink kind of a way, I'm serious: I think people should reward movie studios for making content that they like, if only because that means studios will make more of that type of content. For my last cross-country flight I paid an honest-to-God four dollars to download a movie from Amazon Unbox to watch on the plane, even though I fondly like to think of myself as smart enough that I could have figured out how to find and download the movie for free. (Well, not all that smart; the movie was Lockout.)
However, the idea of users anonymizing each others' downloads is so elementary, that I literally mean it's inevitable that we will see the rise of such software. Whether I'm in favor of it or not, it's going to happen. In fact, under certain assumptions, there's really only one logical direction that it can evolve in.
First, some background. Under the current BitTorrent protocol -- with no built-in support for anonymization -- some server S makes a large file available for download. When the first downloader, say user D1, requests a copy of the file, they have to begin the process of downloading it from S. But when the next downloader, say user D2, requests a copy of the same file while user D1 is still downloading, the BitTorrent server S tells D2 to start downloading the file from D1 instead of from S directly. (D1 is required at this point to share out the file for download, in order to earn enough "credits" to continue downloading from S.) Subsequent downloaders are similarly told to download from other downloaders instead of from the original server S. In this way, the server S avoids incurring massive bandwidth charges (since S only actually served the file one time), and each user on average only has to share out the file once in return for downloading it themselves.
Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out the whole file at least once, to the first downloader -- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's permission, then the operators of server S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves. But with both BitTorrent and magnet links, users who are downloading content from other users, can see those other users' IP addresses -- and they know that those other users are serving the content from files stored on their own hard drives. This means that if you're the copyright owner of that content, you can subpoena the identities of the users behind those IP addresses, and taken them to court for unauthorized possession and distribution of copyrighted material.
So what would a protocol look like with built-in support for anonymization? In my first draft of an idea, I thought that each download could take place using one intermediate user as a proxy, so that instead of server S telling D2 to download from D1, the server would tell D2 to use download D3 as a proxy, and tell D3 to proxy the connection from D1. (As with BitTorrent, the downloader D3 would be required to allow their machine to be used as a proxy, in order to earn credits to continue with their own download.) So D1 would not be able to see the IP address of user D2 downloading from them, and D2 would not be able to see the IP address of user D1 that they were downloading from. Both of them would be able to see the IP address of user D3 which is acting as the proxy between them, but as long as it's not against the law to simply proxy a connection for someone else, that would not be grounds to subpoena the user D3's identity. And D3 would be able to see the IP address of D1 and D2, but if the D1 and D2 are communicating using a shared encryption key, then D3 would have no idea what content is flowing between D1 and D2, even as it proxies the connection between them. So even if one of D1, D2 or D3 were an "adversary" (i.e. a copyright holder intent on suing illegal file sharers), none of the three would be able to see the IP address of another user that they knew was either downloading particular content, or serving it out.
Of course you could also argue that if D3 is among the users that server S is making available to others as an anonymizing proxy, then that constitutes proof that D3 must be downloading something else from S (otherwise, D3 wouldn't need to earn credits by acting as an anonymizing proxy), and if either D1 or D2 is an adversary, they can see D3's IP address and reason that D3 must be guilty of some copyright violation. Similarly, if D3 is the adversary, they can see D1 and D2's IP addresses and reason that both of them are probably guilty of some copyright infraction, even if D3 can't actually see what they're trading. Basically, anybody could be considered "guilty by association" simply by virtue of being in the community of users being coordinated by server S. But (1) that accusation could be deflected if some of the files being served by S were in fact legal and being distributed with the copyright holder's permission; and (2) in any case, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires you to claim that your specific copyrighted content is being distributed by a user, before you can unmask that user's identity; it's not enough to claim that the user is part of a network that distributes "some" copyrighted content illegally. D3 may be proxying a connection between D1 and D2 in order to earn credits so that D3 can download some content for themselves, but even though D1 and D2 can both see D3's IP address, there's no way for them to know what D3 could be downloading.
Unfortunately, this three-user-chain idea is not secure, because an adversary could still create a large number of users co-ordinated through server S, and sooner or later, a chain would arise where both the proxy and the downloader controlled by the adversary, and at that point, they would know the IP address of the user serving out the copyrighted content. In other words, eventually you'll get a situation where D2 is downloading content from D1 by going through proxy D3 -- but where D2 and D3 are both controlled by the adversary. So D2 knows the content that's being downloaded via D3, and D3 knows the IP address of D1 that's actually serving out the content -- at which point they can subpoena the identity of user D1, and sue them.
So consider this idea instead: When user D1 sends a request to server S to download a file, server S gives them the IP address of another user, D2, from which they can download the file. Now, 40% of the time, user D2 actually does have the file on their hard drive and is serving it to user D1, with no proxying. The other 60% of the time, user D2 is told by S to proxy the connection from D1 and connect to a third user, D3. Now in 40% of these cases, D3 actually does have the file and is serving it out directly; the other 60% of the time, D3 is proxying the connection for yet another user, D4...
So you end up with chains of varying length, with longer chains having a progressively smaller probability of forming:
40% of chains will be of length 1 (one user downloads directly from another)
60% x 40% of chains (24%) will be of length 2
60% x 60% x 40% of chains (14.4%) will be of length 3
60% x 60% x 60% x 40% of chains (8.64%) will be of length 4 etc.
These proportions of course sum to 1, and a little math shows that the length of the average chain is 3.5 nodes. The number of downloads in a chain -- the connections between users -- is one less than the number of nodes in the chain, so this means that to complete one download, the content will have to be transferred an average of 2.5 times -- compared to being transferred only once, when one user downloads from another directly. In order to ensure that users contribute enough to the system as they take from it, that means that in order to download a file, users would be required to provide enough "proxying" to support the equivalent of 2.5 full downloads of that same file.
These chains have a useful property: any time you're downloading content "from" another user, there's only a 40% chance that user is serving content off of their own hard drive, and a 60% chance that they're proxying the connection from somewhere else (another node that may in turn be proxying the connection from yet another node, etc.). So even if the adversary controls three nodes D1, D2, and D3, and D1 is downloading from D2 who is downloading from D3 who is downloading from D4 (and D4 is not controlled by the adversary), from the adversary's point of view there's only a 40% chance that D4 is actually originating the content. This is always true no matter how many nodes in the chain the adversary controls -- in the end, if they want to nail someone for serving out copyrighted content, they have to download the content from some node that they don't control, and there will only be a 40% that user is actually serving the content from their hard drive.
And the 40% number was deliberately chosen in order to weaken the adversary's legal grounds for subpoenaing the identity of the user they're downloading from -- even if they can show that they downloaded content from another user's IP address, it's more likely than not that the other user was not actually hosting the content. (Of course, there might be other details in context that render that probability calculation useless. For example, if the server S only links to one downloadable file, then all users coordinated by that server S are presumably downloading that same file, and anybody that server S connects you to, can be presumed guilty of downloading and sharing that file, 40% figure be damned.)
At this point you might also wonder: Why not just connect over a protocol like Tor, which provides secure anonymity for all transactions, and then use BitTorrent or some other file-sharing system on top of that? The answer is that Tor's connection is likely to be much slower, for at least two reasons. First, Tor servers are a limited resource, and the more people use them (especially for large file trading), the slower they are likely to become. (By contrast, in the peer-to-peer proxying model outlined above, every new downloader can also be made to act as a proxy for other users, so additional users don't slow down the system because they contribute as much as they take out of it.) Second, Tor always routes your connection through multiple servers to guarantee secure anonymity, which means it would be slower on average than the variable-length chains described above, where only about 20% of chains are of length 4 or more.
The key difference is that Tor provides true anonymity whereas the protocol above only provides plausible deniability. In high-risk settings where Tor is often used, it would not be acceptable if there were a 40% chance of your IP address being revealed to your adversary. But for file sharing, the 40% figure might be acceptable if it's just low enough to stave off a subpoena. This trade-off makes it possible to use shorter chains, resulting in faster downloads and less total bandwidth consumption.
You also already have the option today of using a VPN service to download files through an anonymous third-party connection, which renders the rest of these issues moot. But users have to jump through several hoops (and pay some money) to set this up as an option, which means that most users will not be using VPNs any time soon, leaving plenty of naive users for the RIAA and MPAA to go after. The use of peer-proxying links would mean that all users downloading through the system would be protected.
At the moment, the major impediment to a peer-proxying system like this would be that the chained downloads would still consume an average of 2.5 as much bandwidth as direct peer-to-peer downloads. Even with today's high-speed connections, this increase in inconvenience is great enough that some users might just prefer to use plain old BitTorrent to download files directly from peers, and run the (admittedly small) risk of getting in trouble. But as bandwidth speeds continue to grow literally exponentially, eventually the difference in inconvenience will be so small, that users would be foolish not to use proxified downloads if it provided free legal protection.
Note that the viability of this system does depend on the ISP's attitude towards it. In particular, if your ISP only goes after pirates because of legal pressure from content holders, then if the ISP's users are using this peer-proxying protocol instead of a direct download protocol like BitTorrent, then the ISP can quite truthfully claim that they don't have any hard evidence to disconnect any particular users or turn over their identities (because the ISP doesn't know which users are actually storing pirated files and which users are just acting as proxies). On the other hand, if your ISP sincerely wants to stop piracy because your ISP is also a content company (Comcast, for example), then they might also try to squelch the use of any protocol that enables piracy, even if they can't prove that any particular users are using it for anything illegal. Thus Comcast might try to slow the use of the peer-proxy protocol. But in that case they could be forced by Net Neutrality regulations to stop throttling it, in the same way that the FCC ordered Comcast to stop throttling BitTorrent.
As long as those conditions hold true -- content owners continue cracking down on file sharers, but proxying remains legal and bandwidth keeps getting cheaper, and ISPs are restrained from blocking the protocols themselves -- I think that p2p will have to evolve into something like the chained-download system described above, to provide plausible deniability to users, without resorting to the long chains (and subsequently slower downloads) provided by full-anonymity systems like Tor.
But again, I'm just saying it's inevitable, not that it's right. I actually do wish that people would pay the studios' prices for the movies that they watch; part of it is that I think most blockbusters are actually pretty good and deserve to make money. When you refuse to pay for movies, you're casting a vote against fun, big-budget movies that are made for the purpose of getting lots of people to come see them and enjoy them, and instead voting in favor of excruciatingly boring low-budget films that are made primarily so that the director could whine that the cheese-puff-snarfing American public wouldn't know great art if it bit them on their big bloated behind and subsequently didn't even buy enough tickets for the director to pay off the lien he took out on his Honda Civic to get the movie produced. Forget prosecution and civil suits; just make movie pirates sit through The Brown Bunny.
I'd love to see the studios asses handed to them by something like this.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
Retro share: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/ friend to friend private open source file sharing.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Why you're posting information about breaking the law. Are you not ashamed of yourself? Have you no dignity or self-respect?
How would you like it if people stole all of your stuff and left you destitute, raw, and living in a VAN down by the RIVER!?!?!!!
No - you wouldn't like it. So if you would quit it with the criminal thoughts and play by the rules like any other decent human being would you won't have to resign yourself to that fate.
If you are "proxying" connection, then you are downloading from user D1 and uploading to D2. It does not matter if you are not retaining that data, you are still copying stuff illegally. So in the end if content owners are unable to determine identity of actual downloaders, they can go for proxying users and hit them with exactly the same lawsuit.
Didn't they already try to sue the proxy user for something like this. You aren't off the hook legally just because you disguise who you are dealing with. All I see this doing is having them shifting from suing the download'er to the proxy'er.
Use this set of 10,000 users to proxy and reproxy and re re re proxy the 0's.... And this set of 10,000 users to proxy and reproxy and re re re proxy the 1's...
Prove i assembled them into some sort of file.
1's and 0's are not special. I don't care what pattern they eventually make. It's not aginst the law to move them around.
Or it shouldn't be... BECAUSE THAT IS FUCKING STUPID!
I have a feeling this is a nuclear option.
If this is implemented, then pro-copyright extremists will argue that running or using a proxy is prima facae evidence of criminality and then lobby hard to make it illegal. Result? Anybody with a legitimate (or illegal but ethically necessary) reason to use a proxy will lose out.
The OPs' hope that the pro-copyright extremists won't fight back hard, with legislation to ban proxies, or force China-style "real ID" laws on Internet users, is naive at best, and ultimately, dangerous.
This sounds like anomos: http://anomos.info/
I was researching this weekend, I can't seem to find out if the project is still alive. It looked well designed in 2010, and I'm not sure if it's using the Tor network (bad), or just the Tor protocol for its own network( good).
Seedboxes have been around for years, they solve this problem too.
What'll happen is the studios will continue to sue and subpoena the information for the machines that they see connecting to the torrent. They'll argue that it's the owners of those machines responsible for any use of their machines by others. They'll continue to use these tactics as long as the courts make it cheap for them to file and lose. That won't end until the courts start ruling that the studios know they don't have grounds for these suits and start dismissing them with prejudice and sanctioning the plaintiffs without a defendant having to do anything. Maybe the courts starting to refuse to let the plaintiffs withdraw their claims after a defendant's responded, forcing the plaintiffs to face an adverse judgement and sanctions, might stop them too, but my money's on the studios in that case betting that too few defendants will have the resources to gamble on winning that show-down.
And I have a gun in an unlocked box, loaded of course, in my front yard with proper signage if I ever need to use it. No one would ever touch someone else's gun with ill-intent would they?
All the studios need to do to quash this idea is to successfully argue in court that volunteering to act as a proxy host is comparable to hosting the file yourself. That does not seem like a hard argument to make. Don't the copyrighted bits have to pass through the proxy host's machine? That sounds like "distribution" to me.
Yet another half-baked idea from frequent contributed Bennett Hasselton.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Pedos are already using Tor and Freenet to exchange their filth online. I suppose they might take advantage of it, but I don't think it's nearly as safe as Tor or Freenet are for staying anonymous.
What I would worry about is having my IP associated with child pornography, terrorism, or whatever due to proxied content being chained through my home connection. People have been raided for hosting Tor exit nodes before.
Torrenting is good for the net though
This just seems like a great way to have 3.5 times more people sued for being 'accessories to copyright infringement'.
Maybe someone creates a malicious software targeted @ Verizon customers.
It would download RIAA monitored torrents at very low bandwidth in order to be unnoticeable to the average user.
It could download at least 6 torrents in 1 month which would result in disconnection of service.
Lets say the attackers have a database of Verizon customer e-mails and a good method for exploitation of Windows O.S.
Seems like one could put Verizon out of business if they are so keen on upholding their 'Six Strikes' plan.
The only thing that's going to do is make the industry sue internet users for simply running p2p software, regardless of what they download with it.
That, or they'll have an internet tax created, so every ISP needs to pay the media industry protection money for each user.
You mean make everyone responsible for everyone's downloading. You wouldn't be eliminating the lawsuits, you'd just enable them to sue everyone who was in the proxy pool, for much higher amounts than they can even now.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
or play the game or listen to the music you downloaded. It's the making and distribution of copies that is the "problem".
So they'll just go after the proxy runner who has both downloaded and uploaded the copyrighted content.
Congrats on dumbest idea for the day though!
Then it will be against the law soon enough.
This sounds too much like, "it's OK to rob a bank, because you're just taking the bank's money. You're not stealing from any people."
the ISP can quite truthfully claim that they don't have any hard evidence to disconnect any particular users or turn over their identities
Does it work that way? I mean, my ISP can tell I'm sharing something that under current law I do not have a right to share. Is my 'get out of jail' card really as simple as, yes, but I don't know who I'm sharing it with?
On the other end, my ISP can tell I'm downloading something that under current law I do not have a right to download, but it's all good, because no one can say for sure who I'm downloading from?
To go back to the bank robbing analogy--and I don't mean to equate copyright infringement with stealing,but--let's say I bust my way in to a bank, crack open the safe, and the next day money is missing. Would I feel comfortable going to court with the defense, "yes, I got in to the bank, and in to the safe, and the money is missing, but you can't prove I took the money?" I don't think I like that defense.
So in this case, "yes, I uploaded your movie, but you can't prove who I uploaded it to." I don't think so. I also don't think not being able to prove who received the bits I sent is the same as not being able to prove that someone received those bits.
> All the studios need to do to quash this idea is to successfully argue in court that volunteering to act as a proxy host is comparable to hosting the file yourself.
Proving a message is part of a larger coordinated effort is not a solved cryptographic problem. Intent to proxy simply hasn't been attacked in court to show how futile that effort is. The problem space is wide, so don't worry your little head about it.
a little math shows that the length of the average chain is 3.5 nodes
The average length of such a chain is 2.5, not 3.5
(defun p (n)
(let ((p 0.4)
(l 1)
(tot 0))
(dotimes (ii n)
(setf tot (+ tot (* p l)))
(setf p (* 0.6 p))
(setf l (+ 1 l)))
tot))
(p 100)
This is the kind of talk that will spur DMCA2. Where only authorized computers with sufficient limitations, forced ISP activity reporting and government backdoors will be allowed to connect to the internet.
Because the current markets and business models developed around our old IP laws are more sacred than the natural development of technological innovation.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
When you refuse to pay for movies, you're casting a vote against fun, big-budget movies that are made for the purpose of getting lots of people to come see them and enjoy them, and instead voting in favor of excruciatingly boring low-budget films that are made primarily so that the director could whine that the cheese-puff-snarfing American public wouldn't know great art if it bit them on their big bloated behind and subsequently didn't even buy enough tickets for the director to pay off the lien he took out on his Honda Civic to get the movie produced.
Firstly, this.
Secondly, I'm casting a vote against not being able to use the media I purchased in the manner I want, on whatever device I want for as long as I want.
I buy DVDs (okay, usually on sale) and rip them, because all of the legal digital versions available suck lame sauce in terms of DRM crap. If I'm feeling too lazy to rip it myself, I have no compunctions about grabbing a torrent.
In conclusion, I would like to refer you to this handy illustrated guide.
Oh, and this one too.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
This is useless because the big guys have at their disposal a nearly 100% effective method for converting even the purest forms of "plausible deniability" into "overwhelmingly costly deniability"
Look, it's illegal to distribute copyright material. The ISPs can get away without liability as they have some kind of common carrier status, but USERS DO NOT. If users have copyright material flowing through their machine as part of a new Pirate Bay, they will be held liable for distributing it.
First let me say that I legitimately use Bit torrent and similar programs to download (and reshare) perfectly legal things like Knoppix and other open sores software. I have had to limit my use, being a victim of the AT&T monopoly I'm subject to the data caps even for my DSL land line, so no more leaving the torrent up for a month to help share new software after it is released.
I sure don't want my IP address associated in any way with crap like copies of the latest jar-jar movie from the hack who lied to us about Lost (illegal or legal copies). And I don't want my traffic to skyrocket to move that junk even when I didn't download it myself, just so some warez freaks can try to hide from the entertainment mafia. And if I chose to run software that knowingly routed such traffic through my computer, then I completely expect that the courts owned by the entertainment mafia would decide that I acted in collusion with the people who uploaded and downloaded the questionable files and that I was an accomplice.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
would make it impossible for third parties to identify the source or destination of the file transfer.
Not even Tor can guarantee that unless other dozens of requirements are met. So, no.
would hopefully put an end to the era of movie studios subpoenaing ISPs
Erm.. no.
none
Before we go ahead with any of this, could we please not "verbify" all the nouns? In other words, feel free to implement a proxy based p2p protocol or network, as long as you don't "proxify" it.
Near-100% sure does stop those physical copies, amirite?
Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out the whole file at least once, to the first downloader -- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's permission, then the operators of server S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.
This shows a basic misunderstanding of how BitTorrent works.
TPB never had any copyrighted content files on their servers ever. They served up .torrent files which were files that pointed to trackers for the content files being shared.
Now they use magnet files, which allows users to get .torrent files from other users instead of from TPB.
Wax on, wax off baby!
You're going to deploy a technology that will threaten the profits of the corporations that can can get statutes enacted definining "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors" as "the entire life of the author plus 75 frikkin' years to an estate" - and you expect the government they own won't come down on you like a ton of bricks? You expect technical merit and plausible deniability to even be a factor here?
Please donate to the guy who's being prosecuted for kiddie porn for running a Tor exit node while you think about it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Then you want everything in the same encrypted network and the lion's share of the usage of that network to be legitimate. Although BitTorrent over TOR is currently abusive of the TOR network, it would be better to find a means of making BitTorrent tolerable to TOR (or vice-versa) than to create a separate encrypted filesharing network.
When this all gets tested in a courtroom, it is far better for an encrypted network to appear to be protecting privacy than to enable lawbreaking. The difference between the two is just how closely the type of data over the encrypted network matches the type of data sent over the unencrypted Internet. Better to encourage the use of TOR to everybody than to have one encrypted network for privacy advocates and another made 99% of pirates -- the latter service lowers the bar for legal decisions and laws to be made that can then ruin all encrypted networks in general.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
This idea, all down to the length of chain and statistical calculation is described in my Master Thesis from 2004.
(sorry, the thesis is in russian)
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1wRgj1VChUsbcdkQJcrEweW6ZsYtZJZVLelhejBhEL9Y#
--
Moshe Vainer
And here is the listing of the thesis in the university's site http://mocnit.miet.ru/do/2004.html
This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.
The Pirate Bay still serves torrents.
For a file with few seeders, the torrent is linked on the website.
Once the # of seeders reaches a certain threshold, the torrent link is removed.
BUT, the torrent is still on the server and can still be accessed if you take 30 seconds to figure out the formatting of the torrent names.
The top 200 torrents on TPB: https://thepiratebay.se/top/all .torrent for the most popular file. It has 15,093 seeders and 22,038 leechers.
Here's the the TPB
https://torrents.thepiratebay.se/8074715/WWE_Royal_Rumble_2013_PPV_HDTV_x264-FreaK.8074715.TPB.torrent
Seems like lazy coding on TPB's part.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I think someone just reinvented Tor.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Freenet is safe from that: It's got no connectivity outside the network, so anyone able to connect to your node has to be familiar enough with the network not to make such an easy mistake. Tor exit nodes are the really risky things to run.
May I be the first to say, fuck the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA. And, the ISP's they rode in on.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Is rational to penalize people for sharing some of the digits of an irrational number? It could even be a known one, like e or pi.
Note that this still means that in order to initiate the download, the server S has to serve out the whole file at least once, to the first downloader -- and if the file is being distributed without the copyright owner's permission, then the operators of server S can be taken to court. This legal pressure was the reason that the Pirate Bay switched from serving BitTorrent files to serving magnet links, which enable users to download content purely from each other, without the Pirate Bay ever actually serving the content themselves.
Not at all. The person you're labeling as "server S" here would be more appropriately called the "initial seeder". Every individual that is participating in a swarm but has the entire torrent being shared is a seeder. The initial seeder is, generally, the person first making the file available. BitTorrent doesn't treat them any differently from any other seeder, though.
There are two kinds of servers in a BitTorrent network: a tracker and an index. The trackers are actually part of the BitTorrent protocol. They maintain a list of connected peers for each torrent. That is all. The indexes are not strictly part of the BitTorrent protocol. They are websites that are sources for metainfo files (".torrent files") and/or magnet links. Confusingly, The Pirate Bay runs both. The Pirate Bay website is an index. They also run trackers. However, neither indexes nor trackers ever possess or share any part of the actual data being shared. They store and transmit only metadata.
D1 is required at this point to share out the file for download, in order to earn enough "credits" to continue downloading from S.D1 is required at this point to share out the file for download, in order to earn enough "credits" to continue downloading from S.
This is often how it's described, but it's not true. BitTorrent's decision-making is local-only. A particular peer P1 will tend to deprioritize another peer P2 if does not receive pieces from that peer. (This is a "tit-for-tat" priority approach.) Peers don't communicate with each other about who's been sharing what. They don't communicate with the tracker about who's been sharing what. They receive no explicit instructions from other peers or from the tracker.
As for your overall idea, it seems like you're trying to out-clever the legal system. That's a dangerous path. It's more effective to have a system where the protects you want are guaranteed by the design of the system.
In other words, all P2P systems are doomed to reinvent Freenet, badly.
In theory this works, in practice, with average home user being lucky to have 5-10mbps down 1-5mbps up, this won't be worth it. I do see people talking about fiber to home, once we have and 100mbps internet connections, they we can possible revisit this solution.
Add to this crappy monthly bandwidth restrictions and you will be able to download one movie a month as rest of the bandwidth will go for proxying torrents for others.
When you are downloading multiple torrent files, you can simply say how a packet of file is computationally related to other. :-) like, i'm sending you XOR(Torrent X , Torrent Y). It's entirely possible that Torrent Y is an Ubuntu ISO torrent. :-) This is an excellent way to couple the proxy idea, and it works nicely as an Onion layer as well.
We can safely assume that our adversary will control a number of servers, as such, a regression analysis based on the frequency with which a peer is reached will make the system vulnerable to legal attack.
If D1 (adversary) sees D0 (us) as a peer, D1 can only prove 40% chance that D0 is hosting the file. This is good, as it falls below the balance of probabilities needed in civil law.
If D1 through D20 (coordinated adversaries) see D0 significantly frequently than C1 through C20 do (adversary control systems not downloading the file), the adversary can probably reach the level of legal proof (hosting the file on balance of probabilities) from the statistical improbability of having a non-hosting D0 appear that frequently. This is bad.
Fortunately, as the number of users hosting the file and using the system increases, the number of adversary controlled machines needed increases. (I haven't done statistics in a very long time, but I suspect the rate of increase is logarithmic and related to the 40% number.)
Unfortunately, the adversary has nearly unlimited resources. A 40% direct transfer rate is a good starting number, but I'm not convinced it's low enough; but I think we can all agree that software like this is coming. Careful analysis will be needed to maximize 'legal anonymity' while retaining download performance.
you lose a lot of your ability to catch certain elements of "crime" when you introduce any form of anonymity. Anonymity will be used by people that want privacy, people that are paranoid, people that want to whistleblow, harass, defraud, threaten, etc. You will get the good with the bad.
Unfortunately, we seem to be headed in the direction that NO bad is allowed, so we are supposed to be OK with giving up all the good.
As a basic example, you can't punish or prevent all slander while allowing whistleblowing. The concept of allowing truly anonymous good behavior while preventing anonymous bad behavior is an impossible goal.
Normally one would expect "innocent until proven guilty" to take precedence and allow anonymous behavior while tolerating difficulty in catching criminals, but there are currently just too many well-funded groups with a stake that push the legislation in the other direction.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...when you mean fair usage? most people i know just watch series and movies that have been already aired on TV, which makes it fair usage and the equivalent of having a friend record something for you on an old VHS recorder. i understand the movie industry gets pissed when people share movies recorded at the theater but seriously how many people watch screeners nowadays? we have to stop calling it piracy when what we really mean is fair usage, which btw is legal in most countries
I think you're right about this. You *might* manage to defend yourself in court *if* you can convince a judge or jury both that the software was proxying someone else's connection, and that you're not a monster for enabling pedos in this way.
Even if you win, you will have already lost your career and all of your friends based on being accused of being a pedophile.
If you act as a proxy, you enable people who are doing terrible things to present themselves as you.
Anyone else noticed that movies are getting smaller? From 4.4GB for all 720p movies, 3GB-ish files are now increasingly common. Games too are abandoning the relic of the pile-o-rars in favor of more space-efficient schemes. It's the pressure of bandwidth quotas and the need to get back underground: Pirates are investing more time in compression.
Think larger guys... There's two aspects at play:
a) minimizing expensive links (eg JPAU, JPUS, USEU), where having one or more of the intermediate anonymous nodes being closer to the file requester would result in less data having to go over the expensive and slower international pipes
b) killing off "region locking", which is hobbling the "web"
TPB never served up content, not ever, when it was serving up torrent links and has been pointed out they DO still serve LINKS. The "S" in his summary is typified incorrectly. In his example "S" is characterized as TPB, it's not. Instead "S" is the first USER who has submitted a torrent link to the TRACKER. The tracker never, not ever, not even once, passes any of the actual content information thru it. The Tracker simply tells the first person that asks for it how to contact the USER who has offered up the content - that's "S". This is a critical misunderstanding on the part of the person who wrote this IMO. What's weird is that the writer almost seems to understand it later in his writing but stating the TPB served up content pretty much screwed the pooch concerning his understanding torrents I think.
In addition, if I were a movie studio and a connection were proxied through a user's machine in the manner that he appears to be advocating rather than directly to a consuming user I'd still sue the proxy. My argument would be that the proxy did indeed download the content - and I'd be right. Never mind that the data was "just" passed along, I think an argument could be made that the proxy requested and received content and that no matter what was done afterwards I'd prosecute the proxy for having downloaded content. I might also attempt to find out who the originating user was who requested the content but I'd be happy prosecuting proxies because sure as hell after a few of them were coughing up tons of cash no one would be allowing their machines to knowingly proxy. It's for this reason that I won't become a TOR exit node or allow my WiFi to run wide open. Perhaps in those cases I could claim innocence, just as I might running this proxy idea, but the end result would be the same - financial ruin which is the example that the MAFIAA wishes to make in order to chill uses of this kind of technology. I happen to not be willing to take that risk with my current place in life. A very large part of his scheme rests upon the idea that a proxy isn't responsible for the data that passes through it, is that really solid legal ground? I'd argue not and proving yourself a proxy without declaring it openly, which would likely violate ISP TOS for most home connections, could be financially painful in any case. Does anyone REALLY want the Govt. kicking in a door and rooting through everything they own searching for this? Perhaps you're completely legal but I'd hazard to guess not everything they look at could be declared so once placed under a microscope, I'd prefer they stay out of home just in case.
That said, let's imagine a place where this was actually created. ISP already scream that Torrents take up a hugely disproportionate amount of bandwidth. What is proposed is a doubling or trebling (++) of that usage as the SAME bits get shuffled place to place in a bit of a shell game. Does this benefit the 'net?
IMO, there has to be a better way and I don't think that this is it. I wish I had a solution but from where I sit this sure doesn't look like a good one...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Tor allows users to act as clients only which is good for them but not the network. There's other network models out there like I2P and Freenet. I2P (like Tor) allows for access to the hidden web and also allows for anonymous servers. However, I2P is better designed for services. There's also Freenet which is 100% decentralized and offers private networks and public networks at the same time. It's also has redundancy built in to allow the user to upload a file once and drop off. However, it is very slow and practically unusable for file sharing due to speed. However, it's designed around anonymity first.
All of Hasselton's "ideas" have been around for years prior to BitTorrent and they were explicty rejected when BT was created. Not just because Bram Cohen couldn't give two shits about pirating stuff but because untraceability kills performance and BitTorrent is all about performance.
This isn't news. There is no article linked to nor is there one summarized. This is some guy (Bennett Haselton) writing from the cuff... just writing whatever comes out of his head as it comes out... every little bit of it apparently... just typing away and posting it... here ... to slashdot... which he must have mistaken for his personal blog.
For those of you who obviously don't know and don't have a clue... this has already been done.
And I don't mean some weak *share app of the day either.
I mean cryptographically strong data networks.
It's called I2P, Tor, and Phantom. No, not Freenet, it's not a transport network.
With these nets, which can all speak to each other btw if you know what you're doing,
you simply load up all your torrents, connect to whatever tracker or index you want
and share away. No fear, no pain, pure freedom.
Yes, they are slower than clearnet, but with that comes the best security against
being tracked. And you cannot connect to the regular net. But when you look at all the
lawsuits and penalties and everything else, and then see that everything you want
is already internal to the secret nets, that is a very good tradeoff to make.
And finally, yes, you must give free bandwidth back to the network for it all to work
by running a internal node, no exit risk required.
I laugh at all of you impatient morons who, because you feel you have to have
some stupid file RIGHT NOW, continue to use clearnet and get busted instead
of waiting a little bit to be safe.
If you think this will stop anything, you haven't been paying attention to the litigation. Copyright trolls don't care if you did the downloading or not. Already, wihtout proxies they cannot identify who it was who did the downloading, as it could have been a friend, spouse, child, neighbor, or hacker... anyone who had access to the Internet connection accused of doing the downloading.
This proxy business changes nothing. The subpoenas and settlement letters are worded such that they scare you into settling. They say "Illegal downloads have been traced to YOU, the account holder" even when they have no evidence. And they say "We will name YOU, the account holder, in a lawsuit if you don't pay $X thousand dollars by next week." Nothing about finding the true perpetrator and executing justice. It's all about making a quick and easy settlement. Does it matter that there's at least a 30% (admitted by trolls) error rate with the current methodology? No. They accuse 100% of account holders anyway.
The bottom line is with the way clueless judges are granting out ex parte discovery requests from copyright trolls, if you pay the bills, and your name is on record by your ISP, if your IP shows up in a tracker that some troll is watching (or seeded himself), your name and address will be subpoenaed, proxies or not.
Hi. There is an OpenTracker on I2P. You are all welcome to join us there. Download and run I2P, read some docs and things, get your node running and set up to donate bandwidth to I2P. Then add the tracker to all your torrents and share away in perpetuity :-)
In addition, if I were a movie studio and a connection were proxied through a user's machine in the manner that he appears to be advocating rather than directly to a consuming user I'd still sue the proxy. My argument would be that the proxy did indeed download the content - and I'd be right. Never mind that the data was "just" passed along,
That "never mind" doesn't apply, as copyright law says that if you are just a transit, you aren't infringing. Otherwise, the MPAA could just sue everyone who has any sort of router, switch, firewall, or other network equipment. There is nothing special about being an "ISP" that prevents them from being sued for this...it's the fact that the transient nature of the data (even if temporarily cached) makes it by definition not infringing.
And, if this scheme was applied, you would see programs that do the proxy part without being a true torrent client, and they would be installed on virtual private servers all over the world. The only difference between this and a "real" proxy is that the exact proxy IP address isn't determined until you run the software and it queries the distributed database of available proxies.
.
Part of the whole point of the notice/counternotice aspect of DMCA, was to eliminate that very argument. ISPs didn't want for passing-the-packets to be legally equivalent to being the origin of the packets, so they lobbied for this and got it.
If the argument that you propose were to work, then nobody could ever safely host for others. e.g. no more geocities. ;-) Or Youtube. Or Amazon Cloud Services...
As has already been pointed out, the submitter doesn't seem to understand the bittorrent protocol. Three minutes with google would have sufficed for such understanding.
The scheme is not fundamentally different from Tor or I2p or ANts P2P in concept. The reason Tor/I2p/ANtsP2P BT swarms have not caught on and become dominant already is not because no one has bothered to write such an application or because they do not provide sufficient plausible deniability, but because all such schemes are inherently slow. Generally orders of magnitude slower.
For me and probably for many others the herd itself is sufficient defense against the copyright cartels. Those unlucky few at the edge of the herd will be taken, but the vast majority of the herd will go on torrenting. Since herd protection seems adequate for most people, any anonymizing swarm system will have to be sufficiently fast as to be able to at least compete with the swarms relying only on herd protection.
In order for that to have any chance of happening you would want to be able to match the upload and download bandwidth of every peer in a given chain as much as possible. All it takes is one dialup or badly asymmetric DSL peer to essentially sever the chain. Perhaps a small test file could be downloaded from each peer in the chain before assembling it. These speed tests would obviously introduce even more overhead, but I see them as a necessary first step in creating a usable anonymizing network. Another useful idea might be to be certain that at least one peer in every chain is outside the borders of the US before sending any data along it. Of course the best protection is an offshore VPN.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
This solves nothing.
A judge can dismiss all of these carefully-constructed technological workarounds with a quick wave of the hand. Judges care about intent, not about the technology in your tools.
People have been found legally liable when running a Tor exit node. This idea is nothing more than trying to make BT more like Tor. It might make BT a bit more resilient against liability in the short term, but it certainly isn't a final solution.
Anonymity is impossible in IP communications, by design. All you can do is try to obfuscate. In the best case, you might achieve an infrastructure where legal liability is statistically unlikely.
The problem is laziness not the particulars of technology. If everything is too global and too easy to find for those looking then it must also follow the same is ususally true of those looking to punish seeker/distributors or said warez.
If you want to avoid getting cought get a small set of friends and share your favorite stuff amoungst yourselves *directly* on this wonderful network of peers we call the Internet or god forbid hang out in "RL" and sneakernet.
If each of you have your own small list of friends the good stuff will percolate down to you and media companies will have no visibility into your actions. Contrasted with now where they and various TLAs and LEAs have pretty much 100% visibility into ALL torrent activity globally.
This is creating huge negative legislative pressures with Internet itself becoming collateral damage.
Non DRM music is available dirt cheap from amazon and other outfits, Netflixs and others are cheap or free and have everything.. it is increasingly easier to just go and buy what you want so I have less sympathy.
This proposal will just get you sued as an accomplice of other people's thefts. There's no way I'm going to run a proxy for other people's misbehavior. If you're interested in doing that, I suggest that you run an open http proxy first. The principle is about the same. Have fun! Please update your post with which prison you ended up in.
Seems simple to me - did the computer (aka exit node in TOR speak) request the file? Yes? Sue them into the ground. "Proxy" you say? Well, we'll sue you until broke anyway. This isn't the same as a router or switch, proxies are not infrastructure in the mechanical sense but are programs which in this case could be argued were being used to skirt the law. That is how a lawyer would likely attack this and truthfully they wouldn't be far off the mark. You want to risk your home, savings, and future income on a bunch of "peers" understanding your very thin point on this? That they wouldn't also pile on a metric crapton of other charges based on additional files on your computer "discovered" while looking for this content? That the warrant would be wide enough to snare that and more? Goforit dude! I'll watch from the sidelines on this one.
From the standpoint of the node they lay out there to snare others it will look like your computer, despite acting as a "proxy" requested the files and for that reason they will attack you just as they attack users now. From their standpoint you're guilty and in reality you will have asked for the file even if it was for someone else. Kind of like holding drugs for someone else, how well does that work out these days? When the smoke clears, even if found "innocent" somehow, I'm betting you won't be willing to cheer the victory too much. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt I'm sad to say...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
For this to work, systems would have to be proxies to files they don't own. Therefore, the 40/60% thing wouldn't work. How could there be a 40% chance that I'd be a proxy for a file that isn't on my computer? If I only had one file hosted, I could easily summarize that all computers connecting to me were in fact downloading that single file, even if they didn't get it from me.
I came up with this basic idea, like, 5-6 years ago. A little different with the details:
Each user makes available one or more 'proxy connections' of a given speed (1Mb/sec, for instance). Then, when they want to DL a file, their software connects both to a 'file tracker', AND a 'proxy tracker' (Which might be the same or different machines). The file tracker works like it does now, and the proxy tracker offers to the client as many proxies as the client offers it- the more you offer, the more you get, just like DL'ing- if you throttle your UPload, your DOWNload suffers for it.
The protocol you describe is very similar to OneSwarm which is a peer-to-peer protocol based on BitTorrent in which you only ever connect to friends (with an option to grab a list of semi-trusted users from a server for worse privacy but so it will work without needing to know people who use the protocol). Their research covers most of the questions you discuss in your post.
Wouldn't that put pretty much any hosting company out of business?
The peering network proposed in this article was created more than a decade ago by Slashdot user Meridun. Built at a time of slow home internet connections and ISP interference with networks like napster and gnutella, his ELF (extreme low frequency) peering software was designed to be anonymous and untraceable by encryption and proxying of the entire peering infrastructure - including file indexes. The ELF reference was due to intentional throttling of each connection to avoid swamping the user's connection or the ISP. Since each user was proxying several connections while downloading from several other connections, overall performance was slow compared to Bittorrent when it arrived on the scene - but it was much better at preserving anonymity. And you could set your bandwidth usage to as high or low as you desired, so it wasn't really obligate low frequency.
It was an exceptionally cool idea. It didn't take off though. As far as I know it was only frequented by fans of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside Japan at the time. Not being a fan of obscure Anime that wasn't available outside of Japan at the time, I never used it myself.
Boring low budget movies? Really? If I hadn't been dead drunk when I saw the 2nd Underworld movie, I would have been out - either passed out, or walked out.
If piracy makes studios stop making Waterworld's battleship and the furious movies, I'll buy a parrot and an eyepatch.
I don't suppose the author has read any of the articles or studies purporting pirates to be the largest [i]purchasers[/i] of content. Whether that is actually causal or just an unrelated correlation is irrelevant. Pirates do indeed buy more crap than the rest of us.
If someone developed a botnet of proxying servers. As long as users voluntarily install tools that provide proxying services, the responsibility for its use falls on that user. However, if the proxying were the result of an infection by a recognized virus, then there's an argument that the user had no intention or idea that they were proxying material. Not that I'm advocating such an idea, but I believe that if proxied torrents become standard, someone will make such a virus.
Fun ideas, but knowing how obstinate the adversaries have been regarding this type of thing, how long do you think it will be before they start accusing anyone connected to a particular server of conspiracy and racketeering thus incriminating and subpoenaing anyone that volunteers to act as proxy ALONG with the primary suspect. Sure the optimists will argue that guilty by association is not a fair measure of innocence, but can't it be argued that no-one (or at least a very small sample) would enable such a feature without the intent for mischief? And given that you only need to be guilty of a single charge to be bundled in with the acts of someone you have facilitated, wam bam RICO ma'am, everyone with the proxy feature enabled is an object of the court's scrutiny not only for downloading 1 infringing file but willfully enabling, participating, or facilitating the distribution of hundreds of files thousands of times by the entire swarm.
I have not downloaded a movie in over 3 years. I watch EVERYTHING via streaming content. And this time of year is great with all of the DVD screeners coming out! HA HA!
Stop pissing about what might be, just write the damn software. Shit or get off the pot.
Also, you could slightly decrease that risk by only allowing HTTPS traffic through your exit node.
This is a wonderful argument: With the crackdown on piracy, what other activities will society make harder to detect, punish, or prevent?
Sounds like TOR to me.
We can safely assume that our adversary will control a number of servers, as such, a regression analysis based on the frequency with which a peer is reached will make the system vulnerable to legal attack.
If D1 (adversary) sees D0 (us) as a peer, D1 can only prove 40% chance that D0 is hosting the file. This is good, as it falls below the balance of probabilities needed in civil law.
If D1 through D20 (coordinated adversaries) see D0 significantly frequently than C1 through C20 do (adversary control systems not downloading the file), the adversary can probably reach the level of legal proof (hosting the file on balance of probabilities) from the statistical improbability of having a non-hosting D0 appear that frequently. This bad.
Fortunately, as the number of users hosting the file and using the system increases, the number of adversary controlled machines needed increases. (I haven't done statistics in a very long time, but I suspect the rate of increase is logarithmic and related to the 40% number.)
Unfortunately, the adversary has nearly unlimited resources. A 40% direct transfer rate is a good starting number, but I'm not convinced it's low enough; but I think we can all agree that software like this is coming. Careful analysis will be needed to maximize 'legal anonymity' while retaining download performance.
Isn't encryption enough?
Why do you need to go through a proxy too?
/. discussed this back in Nov. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/11/23/2312205/anonymous-file-sharing-darknet-ruled-illegal-by-german-court "A court in Hamburg, Germany, has granted an injunction against a user of the anonymous and encrypted file-sharing network RetroShare. RetroShare users exchange data through encrypted transfers and the network setup ensures that the true sender of the file is always obfuscated. The court, however, has now ruled that RetroShare users who act as an exit node are liable for the encrypted traffic that's sent by others."
It just occurred to me that if you make sure each proxy only downloads/uploads a tiny portion of the file, then it'll be harder to sue any individual proxy for the whole amount of damages, and they'll have to pursue a large number of defendents for a small amount each. This could help unite people against unreasonable RIAA actions.
Then it wont matter where its going/coming from. You are a member, you violated ( "aided" ). Bye bye Internet for you, and hello suit.
An interesting rebuttal to TFA.
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Can't believe nobody mentioned it. http://www.oneswarm.org/
Simple solution - extend the Tor protocol to allow directly addressing and reporting Tor Onion addresses, then include a TOR router set to relay with the main windows-based torrent apps (obviously linux based ones people can configure their own for), particularly uTorrent.
Then everyone wins - we reduce the load on exit points by torrenters, and we increase the number of internal relay servers, and all tor access gets auto-magically anonymized.
After years of lurking on Slashdot, I finally was compelled to make a log in. Dear Mr Bennett, what you describe has been done before, by me, in my master thesis, and i even implemented such network as part of the master. I am stopping short of accusing you of plagiarism, but the similarities are striking, all the way down to the different length of chains occurring at different statistical probabilities. I unfortunately only have the thesis in Russian (in which it was written), but here is the link for those with Google translate skills: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1wRgj1VChUsbcdkQJcrEweW6ZsYtZJZVLelhejBhEL9Y# I probably still have the prototype implementation laying around somewhere. I posted this comment as anonymous, but i guess being at 0 with a link to a non english page doesn't help get people's notice. The similarities of this idea to my thesis are so striking, that it sounds more like an executive summary.
how about people just stop illegally downloading shit? no?
The server could host multiple files and only it would know which one you were downloading. So the swarm could have 9 movies and 1 linux distro. Only the server would know who is downloading the movies and who is downloading Ubuntu. The users would also have no idea what content they are a proxy for. The copyright holders would not be able to tell that a given user was actually downloading or uploading their content. The can guess that they were uploading/downloading someones copyrighted content but that is not good enough to sue and win.
What's the non-infringing use of such an architecture? Without a "legitimate" use, this method could be argued as prima facie evidence of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, and considerably raises the risk of criminal charges and government investigations. Not a good trade-off, especially for the owners of the proxy gateways.
We are the 198 proof..
According to Holle he was drunk and thought his friends were joking and apparently had lent his car
to them dozens of times. The felony murder rule never really made sense. Murder under common law "the taking of a human life with malice aforethought.
Even a drunk driver has some reckless intent. Its such a convoluted logic that most other common law jurisdictions have repealed the felony murder rule.
Canada and the UK no longer have that rule and the model penal code doesnt have it.
The Freenet Project has been around long enough and provides anonymity in masses and secure data transfer. Maybe it's time to switch?
has a concept called "Störerhaftung" which essentially says if you operate something which poses a legal risk, you are responsible for ensuring that the risk doesn't manifest itself. This is used widely to go after people running open Wifi networks, they're not liable for someone else's downloads, they are however rrsponsible for ensuring it doesn't happen again, meaning they have to sign a cease and desist contract (!) or an order by the court will be issued and they have to pay the copyright owner's legal fees (which is where, by illegal sharing models, how money is made with copyright violations in germany).
that they will just attack any proxy providing users who happen to be on their networks until they don't see them anymore.
I know we're about 10 years beind the times here (South Africa) but most people here are on ADSL (max 20mbit, mode 2Mbit). While the speeds may be higher elsewhere in the world, it seems from other similar discussions that ADSL or Async cable is still the primary method of connection. So the quote above isn't true, every downloader is contributing only as much upload bandwidth as they have, which is a lot less than their download bandwidth, unless the protocol allows a difference in proportion, e.g. 1kb up gives you credit for 10kb down; either that, or its one-for-one, but that means your download speed is effectively limited to your upload speed.
The method being presented here would only have you proxying the actual files you are downloading yourself, not just any random thing.
Is thread posting not working or do people just hit reply and type whatever is on their mind without looking at the post they are responding to?
I know that has always happened so that people can get to post closer to the top, but it seems to be much more frequent and less down modded.
That's what it comes down to, really. None of the downloaded files have the same value as the originals. They're like taped albums.
USA prevented Antigua from selling gambling, so they are going to sell movies/music online in effort to recoup their costs. Again, using VPN prob best way to go for downloading, RIAA and movie industry cannot fight every citizen on planet doing it and every other government. Its always been and always will be if people do not want to pay for something, they won't, concentrate on people that will pay. Been like this since software piracy days. For someone to issue a legal lawsuit against someone for downloading movie out of their house , someone invaded that person's privacy rights in order to do that in first place, the real lawsuit should be file against ISP that released that customer's information to a third party, a complete breach of trust.
you don't own the contents of a DVD. You own the right to play it for yourself. The physical media is your license.
This obsession with piracy is stupid. The cost of most content is so low these days that you could not possibly watch what you can afford. So, STFU and pay the $2
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
This idea has been implemented several times over the years. The earliest and most successful anonymous network that I'm aware of is Ian Clarke's Freenet (freenet.org), which has been around since at least 2001. It implements an "uncensorable" distributed datastore, with all content encrypted and all node-node connections encrypted as well. All of the encrypted data traffic is proxied through a number of nodes. No individual node can decrypt the actual data that is being proxied, which is what provides node operators with plausible deniability. I don't know what the current state of that network is, but it used to be quite popular.
1) Anonymizing torrent clients are not inevitable, and they will be treated just as share requirements were by users and programmers. They will write programs that LIE about what they are/have shared/sharing and who they've shared it with. And the MPAA/RIAA will continue to provide bad seeds and false packets, all of which will be harder to filter out because the sharers are anonymous.
2) If you think that creating a system that anonymously shares downloads creates plausible deniability for the downloaders, you haven't been paying attention. Creating anonymizing torrent networks will, in fact, create a whole new huge (and lucrative) group of co-conspirators for the RIAA and MPAA to sue for not just enabling the pirates to hide out in the crowd, but also actively participating in piracy regardless of what they've personally downloaded, simply because they've passed on packets of copyrighted materials. This isn't just raising your hand as a group when asked, "Who is Guy Fawkes?" This is helping to carry the dynamite to Parliament.
And the RIAA and MPAA will see this as simply another (though potentially much larger) revenue stream and tap it. Suing THOUSANDS of people for each file shared, since they were ALL involved in a 'razzel-dazzel', now you see it, now you don't, conspiracy to hide piracy.
Of course, the way the lawmakers have kowtowed to the RIAA/MPAA in the past, I don't see why they wouldn't be happy to assume that receipt of a single packet of copyrighted material as proof of membership in a "conspiracy to pirate / enable piracy". I also foresee the claim that simply having an anonymizing download client installed, or even simply in your possession, as proof of membership in a conspiracy to pirate. Remember, in the DMCA they made it illegal to CREATE tools that were simply capable of being used to circumvent DRM and / or copy-protection. Which brings up another, smaller, group of people to prosecute, developers.
Far from the piracy panacea the author sees, anonymizing clients will create more convicted criminals, and increase MPAA / RIAA revenues.
THINK! It's patriotic