Legal P2P, part 1

A few months ago I had written about the interesting notion that P2P isn't sharing because both people get to keep a copy of the same thing, therefore doubling an item more than sharing it.

This got me thinking... why not do something different that follows the concept of sharing more closely.

Here's my idea. Imagine ITunes or the earlier versions of Napster. When you download a file, instead of actually simply making a copy, what I would do is to have the host machine encrypt the file that it has to prevent the host user from using it. The key to decrypt it would be then passed to the destination machine, along with the file in some encrypted format that would only be playable through that P2P. After the two weeks have elapsed, the destination machine would now attempt to return the "key" to the host machine. If it couldn't do that, the host machine would not be able to decrypt the original file, hence making it unusable to the host user. When the application could connect, the original file would be decrypted, the version on the destination machine encrypted (with the key sent back to the host machine), and everything would now be fine. This way, the concept of sharing would be respected. Only one person would be able to use the file at the same time.

Next week I will go into more details about this, I will answer some questions such as, what would happen if the destination computer dies, what happens if the host user wants to suddenly listen to his music, whether to use DRM, etc...