Would you be willing to let me mail a package to your house, to hold for me? It would be placed in your house at night, while you're sleeping.
Would you be willing to let me mail a package to your house, to hold for me? It would be placed in your house at night, while you're sleeping.
These are beautiful analogies, but I'd appreciate an answer my original question. Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware). If you want to send me a CD to store at my house, feel free to email me.
> Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware).
Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile:
1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box.
2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else)
This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers.
Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own.
Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all.
You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2:
> “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.”
> “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand]
If you end up torrenting very illegal or malicious content, who is responsible? Will it be you, the app creator?
Assuming you are referring to non-books kind of content: I assume that if this happens to anyone, we'd learn about it and all stop seeding AA's content until they explain what happened and how they're making sure it doesn't happen again. The poor person this happened to will have to explain that this wasn't at all what they thought the software was doing.
As I said in other comments - yes, this requires some kind of trust in the AA project. Personally, I tend to have more trust in this kind of projects than in big corporations, of which people are happily running their binaries without blinking. However, I'm not trying to convince people to trust AA - this project is simply meant for those who want support them.
AA has plenty of illegal and gray content. It's not something laypeople should help to seed. You need to go in eyes wide open and protect yourself if you're participating, which I do not feel you are sufficiently emphasizing in this pitch.
Yeah it has a lot of content that violates copyright! That's illegal!
What is an example of illegal content that is distributed by AA?
To clarify your question, are you asking if "AA actually distributes stolen content" (one could argue no, since it is only available by Torrent) or "the stolen contents of AA" (essentially every published book in existance)?
Honestly, in these HN discussions, I am disappointed that people seem very casual about mass piracy of copyrighted works.
Neither of those. It's generally violating the law to distribute that copyrighted content, but the content itself isn't illegal. They're asking about what's in there where the actual content is the problem.
As far as being casual about mass piracy, I think the preservation outweighs the damage, and on top of that copyright is too restrictive in the first place. If we could massively boost the internet archive and have dozens of similar institutions, and didn't paywall science articles, and brought copyright down to a reasonable duration, then after that I would be much easier to convince that instances of piracy are bad.
copyright (in the capital D Disney sense) is an abomination that should not exist. Information wants to be free.
Many creators also want to eat.
You could say that cameras want to be free. A camera left unattended is likely to walk away.
Some rules are about adjusting incentives and disincentives to maximize value for everyone.
There is a lot of room to argue where that balance is. But the "its easy to copy stuff" argument isn't even grappling the kinds of context that result in more creations.
Most copyrighted material doesn't hurt you in any way if you can't have a copy. So someone creating something and not sharing with you should not be something to complain about.
Nor should it be a problem if they are willing to share with you, if you do something for them.
You are also completely unfettered to create anything for yourself that you feel you are missing.
People don't owe other people their work.
Why do none of you understand that this is for Anna's archives official torrents only?
> Why do none of you understand that this is for Anna's archives official torrents only?
Because you are on the site where people who have no understanding of the domain or the problem still feel it necessary to share their opinion on things they don't understand.
It is first time I see name of that project. I don't know anyone who is involved in that project. On Wikipedia I see it "shadow library launched by pseudonymous Anna".
"Anna's archives official torrents only" - doesn't put me at ease and it is far far from SETI@Home that was ran by highly regarded university and it wasn't storing any torrents on people hard drive.
Random people should not "just try it out because it is as easy as SETI@Home" - it should be, people who already know the project and would like to contribute but it was a hassle for them to set it up.
Only people who already know and trust AA are going to use it - that is the point of this project
By that logic no app should allow you to store any data whatsoever on their servers. Because your data might explode.
Yes, if I know who you are and you have a list of what you might send. Anna’s Archive’s (who) content is well defined (what).