Boxee to Boxee streaming/trading

[dustyny]

In the process of following a suggestion to break up my ideas in to different threads (please don't mind the reposting)

I am so impressed with Boxee that I'm planning on putting it on to my family and friends Macs.. When that day comes it would be really awesome if we could view each others media. Boxee seems perfectly position for it with the "Friends" feature.

My suggestion would be that once you're both logged in, have the two (or more) machines connect in a private peer to peer network. I would prefer that the traffic be encrypted so that my ISP doesn't muck around with it. Streaming would be nice but I'm sure a lot of user's upstream traffic wouldn't be able to handle it and since torrent is built in how about just using torrents to trade the files. That way if more of my "friends" want the file we can all contribute bandwidth. Ideally it would prioritize the beginning of the file so people could start watching/listening before the transfer is complete.

Ideally it would be seamless to the end user (I'm planning on putting this on no technical people's computers). No messing with creating torrent's, just a check box saying share this file/folder/etc. Maybe using RSS feeds to pass the torrents back and forth..

Thanks guys, your doing an excellent job!

[Gamester17]

Would it not to say the least be risky for Boxee to enter the legal gray-zone of enabling peer-to-peer sharing?

PS! Remember that Boxee is a commercial company who want to provide the means for legal content providers.

[dustyny]

Well I'm not a lawyer, nor do I know what Boxee's business plan is, so I won't speak to that.

I think you have a great point but forgive me for playing devils advocate.

Would it not to say the least be risky for Boxee to enter the legal gray-zone of enabling peer-to-peer sharing?

You make an excellent point and it's a very complicated issue. But I'd say you've already enabled peer-to-peer file sharing just by having a torrent client. While it will undoubtedly be used by nice people who obey the law, there will be those who use it to violate the law as well. So do we assume all users will violate the law? That is the central argument with P2P, is it not? Do we destroy a useful tool because there are those who will miss use it? I say no but not everyone agrees.

So here is my counter point. If you are to put out a product that supports so many different media formats, you have to know that many of your users will use the product to play illegally obtained media files. Does that stop the Boxee project from moving forward? No, of course not. The team has to assume that the product will be used for it's intended purpose, the legal consumption of media. Now you may say that the program is to be used to consume legally "ripped" content but that's not really true now is it? Sure it may be the case for CD ripping but when it comes to DVD's, Blu-ray and HD-DVD's, these media forms all are protected by encryption and legally by the DMCA. So that would imply that Boxee encourages the violation of law already. So then, we have to say that Boxee is intended for the consumption of legally available content (like the ones already found in the Boxee menus), if we are to assume that the content will be legally acquired then can't we assume that redistribution is also legal (non-copyrighted, user generated, or open license).

Then again why deal with potential lawsuits if you don't have to.

How about giving the community an API, so some enterprising programmer can create their own solution. According to what I've seen with other products, I believe that should absolve the company from any legal obligations. But like I said I'm no lawyer (I have a soul).

That all said, I think it would be a great feature but it certainly wont stop me from using the application. I'm sure it won't make or break the product one way or another..

I'd love to find out a little more about what Boxee is looking to achieve commercially, is there a info out there?

[NPerez]

How about giving the community an API, so some enterprising programmer can create their own solution. According to what I've seen with other products, I believe that should absolve the company from any legal obligations. But like I said I'm no lawyer (I have a soul).

it's already absolutely possible for a third-party to implement new features.

scripts can be created in python, which provides a lot of possibilities. for all that isn't possible with python, boxee provides source code which can be messed around with to no end. i think there's only one boxee lib that isn't available in source code. all of the code relevant for simply adding on new features to the client app is available as far as i know

[dustyny]

I didn't even consider python in this, I've mostly thought of it for scripting & web stuff.

It's true that someone may grab the source and start creating something like this with it (if I was a programmer, maybe I'd consider it myself) but I'd rather not use another app.. I'm 100% a Boxee fanboy!

[Sniperking]

This is a great idea although the boxee team may choose not to implement it them selves due to copyright issues. Unless users would be sharing home movies and images. etc.. anything else would more then likely fall under, illegal.