LokiTorrent war chest
p2pnet.net News:- Regular p2pnet contributor Guillaume Champeau, founder of France’s Ratiatum.com, wrote an opinion piece on LokiTorrent’s efforts to raise money to take the Not-So-Magnificent Seven major movie studios on in a legal battle, and his article sparked a mini Readers Writes debate.
One of the postees was Nani.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I have a solution so that a site can’t be sued for hosting torrents, since it doesn’t host a torrent in entirety, but stores it with a “twin torrent site”.
Step 0. The torrent clients should be able to retreive “twin torrent” site pairs from SITE0 like this:
SITE1 TWIN SITE2
SITE3 TWIN SITE4
Step 1. you select a twin torrent pair from the list in your client (e.g. SITE1 TWIN SITE2)
Step 2. your client uploads the torrent to SITE1
Step 3. SITE1 generates a hash from the torrent
Step 4. SITE1 stores only the first half of the torrent and displays the download URL for this first half like this
http://www.site1.com?id=hash
Step5. your client uploads the torrent to SITE2
Step6. SITE2 generates a hash from the torrent based on the same algorithm as SITE1
Step7. SITE2 stores only the second half of the torrent and displays the download URL for this second half like this http://www.site2.com?id=hash
Step 8. when a user clicks a SITE1 link the client realizes that SITE1 is a twin of SITE2 so it downloads the one half first from SITE1, then it merges the other half from SITE2, so the full torrent is assembled.
The conclusion: neither SITE1 nor SITE2 can be sued because they don’t have the full information to commit the “infringment”. (Neither one has the full torrent).
Furthermore SITE1 knows nothing about SITE2, and vice versa.
It’s SITE0 that knows about SITE1 being the twin of SITE2, but SITE0 can’t be sued since it doesn’t have a torrent on it at all.
There can be variations of how sites store the torrent (e.g. SITE1 stores the odd index bytes, and SITE2 stores the even index bytes etc.)
Cheers,
Nani
Another reader saw it like this >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Fighting a legal fight against a bunch of lawyers is a mug’s game. Only the lawyers win. Fight the battle on your own ground.
This is one area where we should take a lesson from spammers (yes, spammers – hold your nose and listen for a minute). Don’t fight an expensive legal battle to keep a site running. Shut it down and open a different site, preferably hosted by a different ISP in a different country. Keep changing the p2p network, the algorithms, the search and distribution methods. It takes time to identify each new variation, time to launch a legal offensive, time to get results – and then it just starts over again because the laywers are chasing a moving target.
And lawyers cost *a lot* of money.
Eventually even idiots like the RIAA and the MPAA will get the message that they’re making a lot of lawyers rich at their expense and accomplishing nothing. Then it will be time to have a productive discussion about copyright, business models, fair compensation and fair use.
And hopefully the discussion won’t be conducted by lawyers with a vested interest in promoting disputes that never get settled.
At the time of writing (7:13 am, Pacific) LokiTorrent had $36,744 in the war chest.
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See:-
legal battle – URLs, URIs and LokiTorrent, p2pnet, January 5, 2005
