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Old August 6th, 2003
sdsalsero sdsalsero is offline
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Join Date: December 19th, 2001
Posts: 173
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just because you are sharing automatically and Freenet doesn't allow you to look at what you are sharing, it doesn't mean that you can't be sued for whatever material you are sharing. I wouldn't feel too safe using Freenet if I were you.
With FreeNet, Yes, you could search for a file and then accuse your proxies of 'distributing' it. But I don't think you'd be able to hold them liable for any legal responsibilities, not unless there's a sea change in the law. And it's certainly more defensible than traditional P2P, where you must manually select what files to share/re-distribute.

True, one judge has ruled that Aimster is liable for contributory copyright-infringement despite it's use of encrypted communications to shield it from knowledge of the contents. But, by that logic, phone companies would be liable for contributory damages anytime a criminal used their phone to plan a crime.

What's unique here (aside from the 'distributor' being a community of FreeNet/P2P users) is that the 'source' of a file can't be tracked beyond your immediate proxies. So, I wouldn't worry about legal liability when running a FreeNet node.

On the other hand, FreeNet is terrible at distributing large numbers of files, since they have to be cached/proxied by lots of Nodes (most of which will have limited disk-space allocated to caching).
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Better might be the "UDPp2p" project, if they ever post any code...
http://udpp2p.sourceforge.net/
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