Decentralyze

Here are some things I want to do:

• Put my pictures of my latest family vacation on the web, where my friends and family can see them. Let my mother put her pictures of the same events there, too. Let me select some for my friends to see, and her select some for her friends to see. Know that the pictures will be there, safe, for as long as anyone in the family wants them to be.
• Put my movie collection on the web, so I can watch my movies wherever I happen to be, and so can my kids. If one of them is at a friend’s house, why should it matter if she remembered to bring the DVD, if the house has a good network connection?
• Borrow my friends’ movies and music from time to time. If I want to watch some old college favorite (let’s say Heathers), and I know my friend Keith has a copy, must I drive 20 minutes to his house to borrow his DVD? No, I want him to have it on his server, and let me borrow it. (Note that I’m not asking to make my own copy. What I want might or might not break some laws, but it seems to me that if I can legally borrow his physical DVD for a few days, I should also be able to legally borrow the bits on his DVD. As long as there’s still only one working copy at any point in time, I expect the MPAA wont be quite so furious with me.
• I want this copy-protection to be only advisory; if Greg borrows my copy, and somehow loses it or it breaks, I can just reclaim it. If he finds it again, his copy is an illegal one. There’s no need for security here (someone would just crack it anyway); I just want to make it easy for people who want to follow the rules to do so, and I hope the system would usually make it easier to follow the rules than to break them.
• I want this to be private. I’m talking about sharing with my friends here, not sharing with the world. I may not want the world looking through the family vacation pictures, and I don’t want strangers borrowing my movies if it’s going to prevent me from watching them. I certainly don’t want strangers copying movies I paid for if it’s going to make the MPAA apoplectic (as I’m sure it would).

I know: youtube, myspace, flickr and their less-popular but more-exciting rivals offer something like this. But I want it decentralyzed. When I say private, I mean private from everyone, including Google and News Corp and Yahoo/Microsoft. And when I say I want the pictures to be there, “safe”, more-or-less forever, I don’t just mean until some corporation decides to change its terms of service, or capriciously enforce some clause I never noticed.

I think we can do this.

Servers

The heart of any system like this is the servers, of course. I suggest that a few people in each cluster of friends would be willing to pay a few dollars a month for some managed web space. Imagine it as a locker, and they tell their friends the combination. Or a private island, and they give their friends the right to land, in their private jets. (Virtual private jets are free in this modern world.) It’s a web location where they and their friends can store their digital media, where it’s easy to access. (When users access these storage sites, I picture them generally not caring about location; I look for “Healthers” and it finds all the copies all my friends are willing to share — no need to specifically ask Keith. With this, redundancy should be convenient and encouraged.)

I picture the server software being pretty simple (web+db), and something any web hosting provider could offer with one-click installation. Like wordpress, etc, but even simpler. The point is that if you want your own locker/island, you could rent one for $5/mo (low end) to $50/mo (high end), from commodity providers.

The data would be stored encrypted, so the host computers and hosting services never get to see what bits are really stored. They can’t see the family pictures or hollywood movies, even if they want to, no matter their terms of service or pressure from the government.

(These secure network volumes already exist, in various forms, most famously Amazon S3. There’s no magic here, but we might want a few tweaks to the API, and there’s definitely a need to package it differently so that my mother can comfortable sign up for hers. Also, I think this would support a market for cheaper and less-reliable storage, since reliability could be provided by other means.)

Clients

The clients would be more than just browsers. They have to understand the media tagging and indexing, and handle the crypto. They’d probably offer discussion boards, and such, as part of the media metadata.

I’m imagining three different kinds of clients:

1. A purely web-based client would allow users an experience very much like flickr and youtube. It could show ads, and it would know your encryption keys, but at least it wouldn’t be hosting the media data, so you could move from one to another without risk of losing your photos, music, and movies.
2. A plug-in for a media player like VLC.
3. A command-line, virtual-file-system client. This is the kind of thing I might hack together as a prototype, using fuse. All the lockers to which I have keys would appear as a big filesystem, and there would be some tools for searching and manipulating it. I could use my existing media players, unmodified.

That’s the gist of it. I have lots more details floating around in my
head. Does it exist already? Shall I go ahead and make a prototype
(in my copious free after-hours time)?