The Kopime Vector

http://halfcupofsugar.com/the-kopime-vector

by canadaduane • 14 years ago

22 33 14 years ago

The Kopime Vector is an interesting idea, but I don't think that we will see a widespread use of this technology over the next decade. $1200 is still a large amount of money, and I think that trading files from a single physical location will be inconvenient.

I think the use of tools like VPN and Tor that obfuscate location information are much more likely to be the future of piracy.

ianterrell2• 14 years ago

At $1200 or $400, no. But think a little further out, and remember it's not a single physical location.

Instead, think mobile phone + NFC.

sp332• 14 years ago

A bit off-topic, but NFC is really not the tech you'd use for this. It requires devices to be very close to each other, and has very low bandwidth. Even low-power Bluetooth would give you about twice the bandwidth, at much better range.

canadaduane5• 14 years ago

I kind of agree. There's a bit of specialization worth noting. For example, Tor will likely be used to find and download the newest and latest works of art. But if you want an archive of "art throughout history" it would make sense to just go sync with your local archivist.

pessimizer5• 14 years ago

We'd need a universally agreed on coding or tagging system in order to copy files that were actually different, rather than just different rips. Probably want to include quality in there too, so each person would be upgraded if the tag matched but one person had a quality higher than the other.

oskarth• 14 years ago

That's a nice-to-have but certainly no must-have. Even if each work of art had an average of say, ten rips - unlikely, given the cost of making a rip and the loss of utility for making the 10th rip - the cost for yet another petabyte is hardly a problem (consider the analogy with software performance and additional resources).

As for the "best rip problem" ad hoc meta-solutions like NFO aggregation sites will arise where tagging would be of most use. Good old regular expression can also do some good for those who wish to have a smaller and cheaper hard drive.

pessimizer5• 14 years ago

I'm not talking about scene ripping, where things are pretty much already perfect for that sort of thing - I'm talking about all of the other rips or original content that tend to start as personal use and come from (16mm, VHS or Laserdisk -> Various equipment ->) Numerous DVD editions -> Any number of programs -> Any number of formats.

Maybe a half-automated/half-manual registration of files and statistics into a somehow curated distributed database? Maybe magnet links could double as file fingerprints?

mistercow2• 14 years ago

You could narrow down the possible matches to just a handful by comparing movie lengths – say, within 10 seconds of the same length is a possible match. Maybe throw in some basic title comparison to narrow the search further, and then do a simple check to see if the audio tracks seem to line up (an exhaustive comparison isn't necessary) to rapidly detect and exclude duplicates with a more than adequate accuracy rate. It would require a bit more complexity in the Kopime device, but not so much as to make it impractical.

pessimizer5• 14 years ago

Are you aware of any (free or open) code out there that has implemented a reasonably efficient fingerprinting system? I'd love to take a look at it and/or use it for a project I'm working on.

flyhighplato• 14 years ago

Keeping actual files around, eh? What a quaint, old-timey idea.

paulsutter6• 14 years ago

Seriously. I don't have a single music or video on any media in my home. I stream music to my Sonos and listen to a more awesome range of incredible music than ever before (thanks Pandora and Rdio). This morning it was ethiopian jazz, romantic era piano, ska and early reggae.

True that streaming movies are a weak selection today. But dealing with media is such an annoyance, I'd rather just wait till the selection gets better than deal with all the file formats and wasted time copying files around. I have a more interesting life to lead than that.

irishcoffee• 14 years ago

Surely you're not implying people who copy files on occasion have uninteresting lives, worth more no more than a passing sneer? That would be a terribly absurd thing to imply.

Surely in this day and age, you can't actually have trouble with file types?

Surely you don't think everyone who copies files from one volume to another just sits around with baited breath waiting for the transfer to complete?

pessimizer5• 14 years ago

Aesthete file sharers frequently have access to movies and music that simply can't be purchased. In the case of movies, subtitles are made every day in a myriad of languages for movies that have never been subtitled. Things that have been lost to the mainstream due to lack of general marketability thrive in the niches that have been created by the maintenance and curation of digital files on hard drives.

DennisP3• 14 years ago

Streaming has always struck me as nothing more than a compromise with limited bandwidth and storage. If you can download a two-hour movie in two seconds, and it takes .001 percent of your storage device, why wouldn't you download?

Unless you're trying to appease the entertainment industry, of course.

paulsutter6• 14 years ago

Whether the data is displayed live off the wire, buffered in RAM, buffered on disk, cached on disk, or beamed into my skull by space aliens, it makes little difference to me.

I only care that the system is responsive with good quality.

benologist2• 14 years ago

It's far more likely in 2017 YouTube, NetFlix, Hulu, iTunes etc will have instant, global, legal, affordable access to massive catalogs - most of those pieces are already there.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Is a wizard coming in 2016 to magically make executives in the movie and music industries understand the shape of the modern world?

paulsutter6• 14 years ago

In 2016, any executives in the movie industry who prefer that people copy movies around manually on BitTorrent can easily make that happen by blocking their product from convenient streaming access.

canadaduane5• 14 years ago

I'd like that (and I'd like to pay reasonable prices). But would the movie studios like that? And cable companies? I think the last 90 years have given copyright behemoths a war chest that they will continue to use for some time, to the detriment of innovation and reasonable compromises.

benologist2• 14 years ago

It's a natural extension and obvious next step for what we already have right now, the only major missing piece is "global".

Jabbles• 14 years ago

What size have you assumed for each movie? Surely we expect this to increase with (if not be the driving force behind) the cost of storage?

canadaduane5• 14 years ago

1 GB per movie.

jacobr• 14 years ago

How about the Kopimi Vector? http://www.kopimi.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piratbyrån#Kopimi

canadaduane5• 14 years ago

Some inspiration was gathered there. :)

Seriously though, the word "vector" is used here in the sense of "What are the vectors that enable viral transmission?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector

anusinha• 14 years ago

Will I be carrying a flash drive around in five years? I use my current one (that lives on my keychain) no more than once a week, and that's only to interface with computers that are offline.

How about a system where I hold my phone up to someone else's and speak a semantic description of which files to send and then wait a few seconds. Then, later, when I go home and am near my computer, my phone talks to my computer and automatically uploads the content to my computer/home server, and catalogs/saves it in the correct location.

All of these individual pieces already essentially exist, modulo some of the semantic NLP--nobody's put together the entire package.

The Kopime Vector

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