You can still be jailed for contempt of the order, though.

"I've found a clever workaround for court orders" doesn't work around that bit.

OK, now tell me how you can remove this file from BitTorrent (it's Fedora 18 KDE)

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:14f146cdfaef83951ca9d3ac647e18e1977d1367

I'll wait

It's not about whether the removal is logistically possible, it's about whether a court can punish someone for failing to carry out the removal.

Even when the former is actually impossible, a court could still punish for the latter. "Ha ha ha I use technology to cleverly show how futile your orders are" is not the kind of thing you want to say to a court with broad contempt powers.

The court can't punish you for not being able to do the impossible. That's ludicrous. "We have shut down all of our servers, yes. We can't stop people from downloading this, no"

That's because all laws make sense and all people who enforce and judge them are understand this.

Pay damages, then.

Pay damages because someone else uploaded something by accident and you can't fix it? It doesn't work like that.

It only doesn't work like that in the context of safe harbor laws.

If the safe harbor law protection doesn't apply, and the defendant is responsible for the illegal behavior, the defendant can absolutely be held legally liable and pay the legally-appropriate punishment.

Why should you pay the damages for something that's not on your server?

If the "forbidden" action was previous to proceedings and carried out in good faith by unknown parties, it would be very hard to sanction anyone.

Just live outside of the United States, and you'll be fine.

Yeah, there's literally no other courts outside the USA.

Yeah, because the US doesn't have treaties with most of the world...

Would that work if you did it before the court order?

No.

that's why we'll kurtzweill ourselves into the computers that can't be shut down!

Or something like http://ipfs.io/

IFPS is cool, however pretty far away from being usable as a package management system... Some package management system could use it as a backend, though.

In fact, gx[0] is such a package management system.

[0]: https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx

Huh NPM already handles git?

http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsNTn2aDxdX...

Yep, but someone should implement that first. Package repositories have pretty much centralized control still, and will have for foreseeable future.

npm already replicates to hundreds of other servers. Right now, it is practically infeasible to actually remove packages permanently.