Where next for piracy ?

posted on 2020-10-04

As an intellectual property abolitionist, I'm often thinking of how we can keep improving media piracy.

The raw file-sharing has is mostly solved: the BitTorrent protocol works pretty well, and IPFS is probably a reasonable successor. The main issue right now is where to find those torrents: apart from mouth-to-ear friend groups, public torrent websites, public direct-download websites and even private trackers keep getting taken down, often resulting in some pieces of rare media getting even harder for anyone to access (some works just aren't legally available at all!).

So, what we need, is some form of distributed fact-checking database. This could come in the form of a peer-to-peer data-based wikipedia-ish style network, except that facts which can be checked and verified (with user reviews, reputation, networks of trust, etc) would include "this IPFS address is an instance of this piece of media"; in that sense, the knowledge of which hashes correspond to which pieces of media is merely a piece of factuality like any other.

posted on 2020-10-04