Any thoughts on sharing legitimate content?

[Zack]

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".

[Markoes]

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"

[Lola Goose]

We left the Gnutella Community several months ago in an effort to support some of the other FileSharing Communities. We were waiting for things at LimeWire to stabalize a bit. It looked like they're having a lot of problem but many of them seem to be resolved now.

We purchased the pro edition of their latest offering version 3.2.1 and put online some content servers and we will see how things go over the next few weeks.

[Levon]

So true.

Any thoughts on the "open licensing" for photos?

[Jimmi Dizza]

There is already an excellent peer to peer network available for copyright free music. Lots of goodstuff depending on your taste.
The trend is toward the .shn format. I'm sure you could build up quite a collection and share it on gnutella as well. You can learn about it at www.etree.org or www.furthurnet.net

I don't know if I'm anxious to be embroiled in a lawsuit and counter sue for false allegations, but it seems like it would be very gratifying to offer up titles that are legal but might be assumed to be illegal bt the RIAA. Just to mess with them.

[guavagirl]

That's a great idea, please do!
The more legitimate content that is shared on Gnutella the harder it is to shut down.

I try to share as much legitimate content as I can. I just takes a while to figure out what legitimate content people like and what name works the best to help people find it, but still accurately represents the content.

Wallpaper, pictures, fonts, books, documents, open source, etc. There are lots of popular things that are not copyrighted or are copyrighted but ok for non-business use.

[nerdy_boyluv]

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.

[DSiRoxx]

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.

[kkluvsninjas]

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).

[karamella]

You can simply share your download folder.
I got one dl: AudioHijack, which the Website offered with only 0.5kB/s with 7kB/s (ISDN) from Gnutella.

When you do that, smaller sites will have less bandwidth problems, or might circumvent them with a magnet link.

I share all downloads and an archive of most of my past downloads.

For example it is possible like this to find an old version of a program, when it is no longer avaible on the web.