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bluesky - Re: deployment vectors

bluesky AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: hal AT finney.org
  • To: bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: deployment vectors
  • Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 08:35:24 -0800


Adam writes:
> But either way, users can always make minor changes to the document
> and republish it. This would lead to some kind of race as the
> identification is human and manual, and may even involve a court
> determination, and the service and distribution is lots of comptuers
> acting very quickly.

The problem with this, and with the idea of publishing the content
encrypted so the servers don't know what it is (as Freenet does) is that
for the system to be useful there must be a public way for users to find
out what the new hash/address of the document is. And this way must be
relatively automated and widespread, otherwise you're never going to
get widespread access to the data (by which I mean millions of people
being able to access the file).

Sure, you could leak the secret code on IRC to a few dozen other people,
but there are plenty of systems in existence today which let you share
files secretly on that small scale. The challenge is to come up with
something that can be as large as Napster or, ultimately, the web,
sharing files just as easily.

Any system for widespread publication can be used by the censors as easily
as by the users. If we respond to bans by republishing data with minor
changes or a new encryption key, then once it goes into the index under
the same "friendly name" as the already-banned version, the censor bots
will send out the new ban message. Again, you could argue that there
might be a small window of opportunity there, a few hours before the file
has to be changed again, but I can't see this as being the foundation
for a widely used, stable, large-scale file sharing service.

With the DMCA there is no court determination initially; the presumption
is that the copyright holder is correct, and the server must comply with
the withdrawal order. Later, if it turns out that the content owner was
wrong, he can get in trouble in court. But the law as written favors
content owners. So they can respond very quickly. I don't think the
law says how fast the server must respond; they are not required to set
up an automated file-removal service and can rely on human intervention.

There is also a provision in DMCA that links to bad data are infringing
as well. This means that the address lookup service, where we start
with a friendly name like a song title and get the latest address on
the net, can be forced to remove the entry for the infringing song.
This will further hamper attempts to republish data and still somehow
get the new address out to the world.

This issue arises to some extent with the Napster injunction. The appeals
court noted that Napster's server does not have access to the song
data. That means that the record companies can't just publish a hash.
What Napster has is song titles. But these are user described and have
a number of variations, with artist, album, track number and song title
sometimes present in various orders, sometimes with misspellings.

Can the record companies lay down a blanket ban and say, "you have to
remove any song with the word 'Metallica' in it, in any of the following
spelling variations?" Probably not. Instead my guess is that they'll
use a bot to search the Napster DB for all songs by all of their artists
and send Napster a list of all of the variations they found, probably
hundreds of thousands of entries.

If Napster were to choose to continue to operate and alter their
software to comply with such orders, users could respond by a strategy of
resubmitting songs under altered names. Perhaps an informal convention
could arise and be spread by the grapevine of some specific alterations,
like removing the last letter of the artist's name, or adding "RIAA
SUX" in the middle of the word. Then the record industry would catch
on and send a new ban list to Napster, and we'd have the kind of race
you describe. Then we could see how well it works.

BTW this suggests another strategy with regard to Napster: if the RIAA
casts such a wide net, they will undoubtedly get some false matches -
songs which have some of the same words as their artists and titles,
but are actually completely different. Someone could compose a tone
poem homage to the Virgin Mary and call it "Madonna as a Virgin", and
if the RIAA claimed this as one of their songs they would be violating
the DMCA and in for penalties.

Hal




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