This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact.
Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article).
But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?
You can't really put huge amounts of data on a Blockchain. That being said, I've wanted to start a distributed YouTube project, where every video you watch gets downloaded/cached and then reserved up. People running a browser plugin could stream movies off each other rather than from Google.
This would keep movies alive after take-down requests, but you'd need to ensure the video wasn't poisoned (someone broadcasting they have a video when it's actually something entirely different). You would need to hash the video and store the hash on the blockchain. If Youtube changes the video (removes audio) you'd need to keep multiple versions of that video on the chain and clients would vote to confirm that those hashes were legit for when that version was up.
You'd also want to have some system to let you know if videos you have are no longer on YouTube (incase you want to delete them or if they have illegal content) and videos could still disappear, but only after everyone who has a copy decides to stop hosting them.
It would totally violate YouTube's TOS, but it would be the start to a more robust, distributed and democratic video hosting ecosystem.
Bittorrent is already a distributed method of file sharing. How would a blockchain work any differently? You would still need people to run software on their computers that host the file.
The blockchain itself would be too expensive to store a large amount of data, so they would only be storing magnet links much like most tracker sites currently do.
Why can't goverment DMCA requests work for blockchains? How is your suggestion much different than bittorrent? The goverment could just as easily take down links to the blockchain as they could takedown links to a torrent.
Exchanging trackers for pow isn't a real advantage. Especially for large datasets (Youtube) where a third party will have to index the blockchain for reasonable to access it.
Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article).
But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?