The media control barons have spent the past decade building legal strategies for taking down promising services. Personally I also feel like this is the future, but only in a future where we dismantle their stranglehold on culture.
Anyone who shares content (whether a file or a byte) exposes themselves in one way or another and can be targeted. Anyone else remember the “good old days” when torrent sites stood up in the face of the law and yelled “we host nothing illegal because we host nothing!” and they were right. Then the law firms started joining the swarms to collect IP addresses of everyone that shared with them.
Now they rarely bother trying to sue IP addresses. The legal ability is still there, it just turns out it’s not worth the cost to sometimes collect a few hundred dollars from someone who can’t afford it.
When we talk about transformative tech, we have to immediately consider the “standard scenarios” because being blind to them is how most technology trips and falls. Pirating (especially live PPV events), illegal porn, utterly violent videos, information on making weapons, letting children access same and/or mixing them in with adults in unsafe and unsupervised spaces, openly anti-government statements in countries where they make people disappear, and so-on.
These things happen. And they happen faster and more intensely than most programmers can handle. The only way to keep tools like this viable is to build the tech with those in mind.
Anyone who shares content (whether a file or a byte) exposes themselves in one way or another and can be targeted. Anyone else remember the “good old days” when torrent sites stood up in the face of the law and yelled “we host nothing illegal because we host nothing!” and they were right. Then the law firms started joining the swarms to collect IP addresses of everyone that shared with them.
Now they rarely bother trying to sue IP addresses. The legal ability is still there, it just turns out it’s not worth the cost to sometimes collect a few hundred dollars from someone who can’t afford it.
When we talk about transformative tech, we have to immediately consider the “standard scenarios” because being blind to them is how most technology trips and falls. Pirating (especially live PPV events), illegal porn, utterly violent videos, information on making weapons, letting children access same and/or mixing them in with adults in unsafe and unsupervised spaces, openly anti-government statements in countries where they make people disappear, and so-on.
These things happen. And they happen faster and more intensely than most programmers can handle. The only way to keep tools like this viable is to build the tech with those in mind.