Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Now, one of the most (in)famous names in the pirate world is going to set up a world wide Cloud storage with automatic, inherent, strong encryption on the upload. Only the uploader will have the key. (How strong the encryption will be remains to be seen.) However, the file can be downloaded by anybody who know it's there, and anybody with the decryption key can decrypt it. It would be perfect for friend-to-friend, small sale piracy.
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This system already exists, in password-locked files loaded to things like MegaUpload, in Googledocs that are shared with a select few or "only those who have the link," in shared-with-a-few folders on Dropbox, SkyDrive or SugarSync. Setting it up for ease of selective sharing (for which none of those are optimized) and good encryption are enhancements, but they're building on features that are already available.
So I don't think this will be a game-changer, although I do think it'll get a lot of press about "changing the way filesharing works on the internet." It won't, though; anything designed to optimize small-scale sharing won't change much at all. It'll be incredibly convenient for people who want to do small-scale sharing and were struggling to make the other sites work for that, but those who actively want to distribute widely will continue to use other methods--torrents, open file uploads, newsgroups, and the occasional website hosted outside the US or EU with files available until someone sorts through the paperwork to get the thing shut down.
Media companies will make big noise about it, but will be even less effective at tackling it in court than the RIAA has been against music downloads & torrenting. The targets are even smaller and more scattered, and the obvious legit uses (share kid's photos with relatives; share master's thesis drafts with study group; share small business documents with all six employees) means there'd be no useful case against the site itself.
Prediction: Much noise and drama; no change in the internet nor copyright law.