I have given this subject quite a bit of thought, and I believe the solution is to fulfill this objective:
Make filesharing simple and intuitive.
The article states that the girl ultimately failed to download what she wanted, which I don't doubt is due to the complexity of navigating a torrent index and installing and running a torrent client.
For most computer users, torrenting is too sophisticated, and it doesn't help that most torrent websites seem to be focused on scamming their users (including the venerable ThePirateBay). Other protocols for file-sharing are usually no better.
What if a technologically ignorant user can find, download, and play a work of video or music in just a few mouse clicks? I think this would have huge ramifications. Simply exposing file-sharing to a wider audience will increase political support and help counter the content industry's anti-filesharing propaganda.
Improving the user experience of file-sharing will not only reduce the first three costs to near zero, but after file-sharing becomes easy and accessible to everyone, it will become more normalized in society. In turn, this will gradually decrease the last cost, integrity, to zero.
The endgame is increased tolerance and political support of file-sharing, and disrupting the revenue of the content industry.
So how can we achieve this vision? I am thinking of a high quality package manager application similar to iTunes or Steam. The biggest usability improvement would be the concept of a repository, in that there is a curated database of files rather than whatever users want to upload, which is the standard right now for most forms of file-sharing.
As a consequence, there will be a canonical version of a title, removing the choice of picking between 10 different torrents and looking at seeders/trackers. Because there is now one destination when searching for a specific title, we can leverage existing and user-generated content to include things like graphics, videos, reviews, etc. on the landing page.
There are definitely huge technical challenges involved. For example, an application like this probably can't rely on a central server. So without a reliable server, how can we maintain a repository and support an easy one-click one-download feature? Moreover, we want to protect our users and implement some sort of private information retrieval.
This is an idea I've been thinking about for quite a while, and when I have time (not enough these days it seems), I have been tinkering around and trying to implement solutions to some of the technical problems involved.
I like that strain of thought with making it more easy for users to download stuff. But the problem with repositories is, that they are requiring a specific intent of the user to do something.
Let me try to contribute to the discussion with a few unrelated thoughts with the hope that some others are willing to share their own too.
I would love to see is for example an in-browser plug in, that is based on the torrenting idea. Similar to streaming, but just that the cached data is redistributed among those who stream a particular video. It somehow should reach a level, where users have a plausible deniability to not be able to differentiate between legal/illegal anymore and at the same time an implementation that is ideally only depending on an existing widespread standard/plugin.
Another idea would be a physical device that handles torrent downloads, i.e. the VPN connection, encryption of external HDs, and has a super simple and stupid interface to use. There would be lots of opportunities to cooperate with existing VPN providers plus advertising on trackers should be relatively cheap.
I like the steganographic approach, and it could also work with a repository. Consider the following:
-Let Pc be a copyrighted package in the repository
-Let Pd be a public domain package in the repository
-Let Kc be the "key" of Pc
-Let Kd be the "key" of Pd
The keys are stored in the metadata of the packages, so we don't need to break any copyright laws to get them.
Suppose we have the following operations:
-E(Pc,Pd,Kc,Kd) = X
-D(X, Kc) = Pc
-D(X, Kd) = Pd
With this infrastructure, if we want to get Pc or Pd, we simply ask for X and then decode our desired file. This also gives plausible deniability, but I'm not sure how this will hold up in court.
This is analogous to downloading some thing after encrypting it. Or a zip file with a password.
Its a clever hack though. Because you can always argue, that File you downloaded has meaningless contents and that some algorithm at your end is re arranging it as a meaningful form.
But the copyright enforcers can always argue this is a clever way of stealing something. More like smuggling a big thing by dividing into pieces and transporting them in surrogate objects.
Therefore it is key that the legitimate vs questionable content ratio is not getting too much out of balance.
I am sure it helped a lot for Megaupload's public perception that regular people actually used the service for sending files and were screaming about the government stealing their holiday videos. The narrative of the Torrentfreak story is awesome as it humanizes the subject and creates sympathy for the cause.
In an ideal case an approach would fill a minor existing need in a way that is impossible to separate from "other" content. I was trying to do this in the comment above by suggesting some form of torrent driven YouTube alternative (i.e. video embedding witin a browser), but contravert's encryption idea could really make this even more awesome.
The article states that the girl ultimately failed to download what she wanted, which I don't doubt is due to the complexity of navigating a torrent index and installing and running a torrent client.
For most computer users, torrenting is too sophisticated, and it doesn't help that most torrent websites seem to be focused on scamming their users (including the venerable ThePirateBay). Other protocols for file-sharing are usually no better.
What if a technologically ignorant user can find, download, and play a work of video or music in just a few mouse clicks? I think this would have huge ramifications. Simply exposing file-sharing to a wider audience will increase political support and help counter the content industry's anti-filesharing propaganda.
I really like the analogy of 4 currencies when thinking about filesharing: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20120222/91144/Pir...
Improving the user experience of file-sharing will not only reduce the first three costs to near zero, but after file-sharing becomes easy and accessible to everyone, it will become more normalized in society. In turn, this will gradually decrease the last cost, integrity, to zero.
The endgame is increased tolerance and political support of file-sharing, and disrupting the revenue of the content industry.
So how can we achieve this vision? I am thinking of a high quality package manager application similar to iTunes or Steam. The biggest usability improvement would be the concept of a repository, in that there is a curated database of files rather than whatever users want to upload, which is the standard right now for most forms of file-sharing.
As a consequence, there will be a canonical version of a title, removing the choice of picking between 10 different torrents and looking at seeders/trackers. Because there is now one destination when searching for a specific title, we can leverage existing and user-generated content to include things like graphics, videos, reviews, etc. on the landing page.
There are definitely huge technical challenges involved. For example, an application like this probably can't rely on a central server. So without a reliable server, how can we maintain a repository and support an easy one-click one-download feature? Moreover, we want to protect our users and implement some sort of private information retrieval.
This is an idea I've been thinking about for quite a while, and when I have time (not enough these days it seems), I have been tinkering around and trying to implement solutions to some of the technical problems involved.