I've been thinking about sharing legitimate content through gnutella, but wonder if there's much point. Most of the stuff I see is either spam, pirated or porn. I like the idea of open sharing, open source, and an open community.

I like taking weather photos, and would like to share them. I'd be angry to see them used in a commercial way (arrogant assumption, eh?). Is there an equivalent of the open source license for content?

I can just just share through the .Mac homepage service (it's well set up for that sort of thing), but wondered if anyone in this community can see much realistic hope for gnutella as a legitimate medium for sharing original material.

If anyone can see any realistic value in such an attempt, any ideas on practical concerns like naming the files ("sasx-winter 001.jpg"?), annotating them for meta-data (exif2), and licensing would be appreciated.

Frost in Saskatchewan, anyone? Or just back to "Please share Britney awesome".

Not only is it possible, it is being done by many people. Not in the same scale, of course. However, this depends on people sharing non-pirated software on the one hand, and people willing to download it on the other hand.

Ivan
"In the dark we make a brighter light"

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So true.

Any thoughts on the "open licensing" for photos?

Wallpaper! Thanks for the tip. I did find one called Autumn (one of the few without a provocative/spam title), remarkably nice, but the IPTC info was all blank--especially the copyright field.

Would IPTC info be considered searchable "metadata"? There are lots of Audio and Video search options in LW, but none for images.

For what it's worth, I've managed to gather a collection of ~10000 fine art images, all legit content all more than old enough to avoid any copyright claims. Problems serving a fileset of this size aside, it generates ~1GB/day (~1000 downloads/day) of interest

Other types of legit content that might be interesting could be:

• Abandonware - web sites hosting abandonware often have problems paying for bandwidth.
• Movie trailers - distribution is generally encouraged, although many web sites insist on playing in browsers rather than allowing a clean download.
• Demo tracks from new bands - lots of these on the web, distribution is welcome, but they can be hard to locate.
• Gutenberg documents - This project aims to preserve 'classic' works of literature (ie, ex copyright) in standard ASCII format.

I annotate all my files as [xyz-xyz] Author (if avaible) - title.xyz

So you could share your photos as

[wallpapers-weather photos] Your name - title.jpg

and everyone would know exactly where he/she is, when seeing them.

Else make them avaible via a bitzi ticket on your webpage.

Or personally PGP-signed BitTorrent files (as soon as they are supported by gnutella).

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Thanks for the suggestions and info guys. I'm off to do some more reading.
Cheers

I've been doing this for a while visit my site

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Lee Evans, President
LeeWare Development
http://www.leeware.com

Deviantart is quite cool:
www.deviantart.com

Thanks Lee--I haven't visited your site for a few months, so I'll go back this week.

The devian site is bookmarked! Probably not my style, but I've sent that link on to a couple of my artist friends--thanks Paradog. Lots more reading to do.

So much to know, so little time and brain!