scott wrote:
> Wasn't Google/YouTube forced to actually search for illegal material and 
> remove it from search results? 

Not to my knowledge. I think they did that because their business model made 
it worthwhile. E.g., it's unlikely the studios would let youtube serve music 
videos if the studios didn't convince youtube to look for copyrighted 
material also.

It's not like google obeys copyright laws, let alone "illegal" material. 
It's just that few people call them on it.

> What's to stop the same being enforced 
> on any bitTorrent search site with your scheme?

As far as I know, the DMCA in the USA doesn't require someone to actively 
look for copyrighted material. You just have to take it down when you get a 
letter.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone didn't try to sue the folks who 
implemented the DHT subsystem of bittorrent also. It seems to me that was 
clearly done to get around the problem of trackers being taken offline by 
legal means.

> It seems to me the technicalities of how the search is done is not going 
> to matter, if it seems like any site is returning lots of links to 
> illegal files (no matter how contrived the link process is) then they 
> will be forced to remove the links or shut down.

Possibly. You'd have a far harder time proving it, tho, if the site itself 
didn't serve up the descriptions of what the links point to.

Decentralized searching will take care of that, I think. There's no reason 
why the .torrent files themselves can't be distributed across all the peers 
in the DHT for searching. Then you would actually have to prosecute those 
actually doing the sharing. If you have a decentralized repository of bloom 
filters migrating around a DHT as machines come and go, I think it would be 
difficult to blame someone for serving up links to copyrighted information 
they literally can't know about.

Plus, if your encryption is good, you'd have a hard time looking at even a 
peer's machine and finding the copyrighted information.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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