[p2p-research] FreeNet

[Ted Smith]

On Sun, 2009-11-29 at 13:45 -0500, Ryan Lanham wrote:
> I think that most people want to think of P2P as advancing a commons
> constructed of goods that people share justly from their own
> value/labor.  
> 
If you consider bandwidth and disk space a "good", then Freenet is a
commons constructed of shared goods.

> Freenet strikes me as mostly an aim to avoid political persecution.
> If someone in Pakistan wants to read a banned book or see a
> pornographic video...or if someone in Burma wants to learn to make a
> bomb.  Hard to say what the morality of these things are.  Posting
> copyright materials simply for the sake of avoiding costs seems
> offensive.  But I may be more judgmental than most on that particular
> point.  

If we assume that things like free speech are axiomatically good, then
those things which protect free speech are also good, thus anything
Freenet does is good, because all it does is allow for anonymous (and
thus free) speech.

I assert that the morality in both situations is neutral, since no
action is taking place between agents. I find it hard to judge morality
when there is only a single autonomous being involved, doing nothing to
anything but itself. You could say that the network is committing a
moral action by transferring data to the requesting party, but since the
network is just transferring encrypted bytes, I don't think any moral
judgment could be made on it.
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