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New P2P Torrent Site 'Play' Has No Single Point of Failure (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Play, a new peer-to-peer (P2P) site for downloading torrents, is practically impossible to shut down and promises to be the latest technology to revolutionise online downloads. The platform has appeared recently across ZeroNet, a Budapest-based open source site which is looking to offer a home to decentralised platforms which employ Bitcoin-crypto and BitTorrent technologies. As no central server exists, every additional user is a further point of connection inside the network, helping to avoid potential failures. As the first torrent site to appear on the network, Play can be accessed directly through a ZeroNet URL (only available with the tool installed). The site serves magnetic links sourced from RARBG, with which users can download films, series and other media files, in varying qualities. While ZeroNet itself is not an illegal platform, Play is identical to any other P2P download site in that it could face legal challenges over violating copyright.
That might have been true 15 years ago.
Nowadays, if a user can click something on your website and at the end of some process, be watching a movie, then whatever your website did that kicked that process off is contributory copyright infringement. Doesn't matter if you don't host the movie or copyrighted data yourself, or you're just pointing to a link, or a hash, or a picture containing some cunningly steganographied data that can be decoded into a pointer to a torrent. Whatever informatical version of a Rube Goldberg device you try to make, it counts as infringement.
It's new, so the media hasn't had time to scream "PEDOPHILES! PEDOPHILES!" yet in order to drive people back to the "safer"(snooped) internet.
No, not quite.
Your response implies that ZeroNet provides a layer of anonymity. With traditional P2P, it is still quite easy to detect who is downloading/uploading the content. ZeroNet makes it harder to shutdown the catalog/index/directory/metadata, since everyone shares it. As soon as someone requests the actual data, it is feasible for certain parties to de-anonymize them.
Freenet, OTOH, provides some anonymity since each node hosts a portion of the actual content. Furthermore, it is not possible to control what kind of content flows in and out of each node, or to even discern what the content is.