Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
Exactly.
The only change cloud based/encryption may make, is that the scale of small may be able to grow a little larger.
For example, 5 people send their public keys to an uploader they trust. From then on any new addition to the group only occurs if one of the existing members wants to admit a friend. This could be done by anonymously posting a signed copy of their friends key encrypted using the uploaders private key. The uploader will never know who the new friend is and the new friend will never know who the uploader is (only the original trusted 5 know), however the uploader knows one of the existing core 5 (or several other existing members trust this new member) and starts including their public key in future releases.
It's a piracy spin on the web of trust.
At some point the group may grow too large and a member of a company enforcing copyright manages to be admitted. They can then decrypt all the latest posts and issue take down requests. However, if the group doesn't grow too big, that's less likely to happen and it will only impact that groups releases.
If any members in that group are taking the downloads and re-encrypting them to distribute to another group they're a member of, then a takedown might only impact a handful of people at a time.
However, for this to work on a large scale and replace torrents etc it will need software that makes the process trivial. That could be the weak point if the software is deemed to only be used for copyright infringement (e.g napster) it may be easier to restrict access to that, although that may be easier said than done.
Either way, I don't think it will be any better or worse than the current situation.
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Sounds a bit like how they say terrorist cells work as well. One person knows who the top five people are say and they in turn each know a few names and someone in those groups knows a few names and so on. The idea being that as no one knows the whole list of who is who in the group no one person can be forced to reveal the whole group to the authorities. Of course most governments have procedures I imagine that they follow to track down who is who. That said I imagine it's not always easy to track down who uploaded what file to where. I mean say you upload a file to a given server and someone downloads it then uploads it to a different server where a third person finds it and does the same and so forth. It's got to be a real headache tracking the file to its original source I would imagine. And that's without someone renaming it to hide what it is and encrypting it besides. It sounds like a real headache waiting to happen.