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The Internet

Quickly Filling Up 150GB of Legal Media Files? 458

Posted by Cliff from the now-that's-a-challenge dept.
Fred Nowicki asks: "If you have ever used the P2P client Direct Connect (or DC++) to find media on the Internet, you know that the best hubs have ridiculous sharing requirements, i.e., over 100GB. It isn't too difficult to amass a collection of 100GB of illegal movies and MP3s with all the crap that's out there, but I'd like to play it straight: I want to collect 150GB of pure legal stuff. So here's my million dollar question: What is the best and fastest way for me achieve this? I want to offer interesting, neat stuff (movies, music, programs, etc.), not just Linux distros, mind you. One thing I've found so far is a mirror of the Prelinger Archives on archive.org, which offers over 37GB of wacky, interesting stuff on divx format (in MPEG-2, it's over 350GB, but that seems like cheating if I take that route). One downside of this site is that it's not a very fast connection (about 50KB/sec through their FTP via my cable modem -- I'd like a throughput of at least 100KB/sec). I've considered mirroring the Gutenberg project, but there are all sorts of redistribution issues with a bunch of their files, and I don't want to go through all that hassle. Come on, Slashdot. Give me some URLs!"
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Quickly Filling Up 150GB of Legal Media Files? More

Quickly Filling Up 150GB of Legal Media Files?

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  • The easy solution (Score:4, Funny)

    by nstrom ( 152310 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:35PM (#5205902)
    cat /dev/zero > file

  • 100gb, no problem! (Score:5, Funny)

    by DBordello ( 596751 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:36PM (#5205907)
    Doesn't EVERYBODY have 100gb of 'something special' or is that just me.

  • Best way (Score:3, Insightful)

    by unterderbrucke ( 628741 ) <unterderbrucke@yahoo.com> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:36PM (#5205911)
    Help your fellow P2Pers, do it right, and get real files everyone wants.
    • you're right. get some opensource software code on there
    • Help your fellow P2Pers, do it right, and get real files everyone wants.

    • Use FLAC [xiph.org] and make Perfect CD Quality copies of your CDs and make them available. File sizes are larger (get you to 100GB) and quality is perfect, so that anyone, can dload a some_album.flac, convert it to wav and recreate the CD. no more comprimise in audio quality.

      • In a band? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by yerricde ( 125198 )

        Use FLAC [xiph.org] and make Perfect CD Quality copies of your CDs and make them available.

        "Your CDs"? That only works if you're in a band. Even if the original poster is in a band whose members write their own songs, how many albums has that band released? Divide that by about 4 to see how many GBs that would make up.

        And if the original poster is in a band whose members write their own songs, how can they be sure that in writing the songs, they didn't accidentally infringe another songwriter's copyright [vwh.net]?

        • Re:In a band? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by fault0 ( 514452 )
          Uh, grandparent poster said that the person should share what people want on the p2p network (which is usually illegal)

  • See my URL... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jaysyn ( 203771 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:36PM (#5205913) Homepage Journal
    ... and ask Ken Baker if you can mirror all of the programs and user-made expansions for BG I & II, Icewind Dale etc.. Some of them are pretty large (300MB +)

    Jaysyn

  • What about 10.000 CD-ROMs? (Score:3, Funny)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:36PM (#5205914) Homepage Journal
    Something of this was posted in this [slashdot.org] recent slashdot story.

  • So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:37PM (#5205916) Journal
    So let me get this straight, you want to amass 150GB of free, public domain files, to access even larger repositories of copyrighted material to which you are not entitled ?

  • One word... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kaz Riprock ( 590115 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:37PM (#5205922)
    Genomes.

    Not quite as interesting a read as a Project Guttenberg book, though.

    • Re:One word... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by timeOday ( 582209 )
      Actually, the human genome isn't all that big by today's data storage standards - just three gigs [pbs.org] for the whole thing. And individuals are only 0.2% different, so maybe 10 megs per additional person.
      • Ok, so have a share named "Humanity" with files with this 3Gb+randomized that 0.2%. After 6 hundred millon of files, you have an interesting file collection, you can even generate random names for each file, and the ones that check your file collection will allucinate with this :)

    • Re:One word... (Score:3, Funny)

      by isorox ( 205688 )
      Damm, I thought you said Gnomes!
  • Be THE definitive source for legal shareware and
    freeware games and apps on P2P.

  • SHN Audio of Live Bands (Score:5, Informative)

    by owsla ( 78381 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:39PM (#5205945) Homepage
    Many bands allow taping of their concerts and the redistribution of audience recordings. Lately, the most popular method of distributing these recordings is as .shn files which are a type of lossless audio. A two hour show can be about 1.0 GB so that's one way to fill a lot of space quickly. You can get started at http://www.etree.org [etree.org]. There are many other sites out there that will allow to download SHN shows right from their servers including, for Dave Matthews, http://www.antsmarching.org [antsmarching.org].

  • Don't give him ANY URLS!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gorjusborg ( 603799 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:40PM (#5205953) Journal
    Don't take part in a tainting of a perfectly illegal p2p network. :)
  • #include <stdlib.h>
    void main(int argc, char **argv) {
    while(1) { printf("%d",rand()); }
    }
    gcc getdata.c
    a.out > /mnt/bigvolume/data.out

    That should fill it up pretty fast.

    -Sean (fp?)

  • Download... (Score:2, Informative)

    by phaln ( 579585 )
    ...every possible game and app demo you can. Then you'll most definitely have your 150GB.
    • Thing is, you aren't allowed to redistribute most of those. Also, did the original poster not ask for multimedia files, or am I mistaken?

      Don't know the best way to do this. My suggestion would be free mp3s/oggs, reencode them to higher bitrates if need be. If you have a video game system with games you're decent at and a video capture card, you could capture gameplay and post it, although that may have a few minor legal implications (character trademarks, etc). There may also be some public domain movies you could search for, although frankly, good luck in finding them. I have a feeling you'll be hard pressed to get 150gigs of legal media files.

  • wget!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jiminim ( 104910 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:40PM (#5205966) Homepage


    wget -r http://*

    Yeah, I know it won't really work...

  • There are a lot of free remix sites and whatnot out there. I'd recommend grabbing all you can from some of those, ex: overclocked [remix.com] (seems down atm) has a lot of game music remixes. I know there are also a lot of techno dj sites as well (google for them)

  • mysql dump of the slashdot database (Score:5, Funny)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:42PM (#5205981)
    slashdot.sql that should do it, just imagine the social value of all that data.
  • This guy wants to gather together over 100 GB of legal media files for the sole purpose of gaining access to a system whose primary practical purpose is the distribution of illegal media? What's the point? He obviously wants access so he can download movies and such anyway. Why go through the charade of accumulating this large stash of legal stuff first? If I'm wrong about the general content of this network, somebody please correct me as I've never used it personally.

  • Or.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sawilson ( 317999 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:43PM (#5206002) Homepage
    Mods for first person shooters can be enormous.

    http://ns-co.net/ as an example.

    You could also have the linux binaries for them.
    You could carry Tenebrae, quakeforge, etc. It would
    add up eventually.
  • Fetch everything from ibiblio.org and some other nice large mirrors. (SuSE used to have a CD set with some mirrors, perhaps sometime like this still exists) - i.e. fetch every Linux distribution. Software. Sources and binaries, for every platform. ...

    But please don't just download the whole ibiblio.org with a fat pipe - please ask the ftpmaster before doing it, s/he'll appreciate it!
  • For those of you saying "share illegal stuff like you're supposed to", think about it like this. He's being smart because when the RIAA or MPAA or whatnot goes to bust people, they won't find anything being served by him that he would have to pay a fine for [slashdot.org]. Yet at the same time, he's able to get on the networks and download the illegal stuff just the same.
    • And if you think for one second that the RIAA/MPAA is going to just stop at prosecuting the people on DC that are sharing illegal files, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.

      Just as soon as they find all the people that are sharing illegally, then they are just going to say that the people doing all the legal sharing were just doing it to access the illegal content. Not that they can really prosecute without having it on your HDD, but they get what they want in the end. The destruction of the filesharing network.

      IIRC, there is a famous old saying by a German about not speaking up when they came for the gypsies and Jews, but when they came for him, there was no one left to speak up. Well, when the legal sharers won't speak up for the others using the network, who will speak up for them when their time comes?

      • Re:think about this... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I don't think you understand the point... if they say that he's only distributing legal stuff so that he can access illegal stuff (which we know to be true), and on that basis, even legal filesharing should be banned, anyone with more than two functional braincells can see the stupidity in that. It absurd to ban specific legal behaviour on the basis that certain illegal behaviour always follows it.

        Thus, since filesharing cannot be banned, they must concede the point that we've been trying to make for the past several years, that illegal filesharing is a social problem and not a technological one.

  • scene.org (Score:5, Informative)

    by dknight ( 202308 ) <damen AT knightspeed DOT com> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:46PM (#5206015) Homepage Journal
    You can mirror them, they host demos. Those are really interesting, and not too many people have them. Admittedly, I dont think that it would be the whole 100+ gig you're after, but you could get a good 20-30 that way.

    • Re:scene.org (Score:4, Informative)

      by BenV666 ( 620052 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:14PM (#5206240) Homepage
      Not only demos, but entire parties with movies (animation/wild compos), music (mp3/tracked) and more :)
      Of course the 32 Kb game and 64 Kb intro compos wouldn't really fill up those 150 Gb but at least they're worth every bit they take.

      These days a decent party has about 5 Gb of stuff so that'll fill up your space quite nicely...

  • Homemade Pornography (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:47PM (#5206031)
    Simple. Homemade pornography is the answer. Film yourself, friends or other consenting adults engaging in wholesome sexual fun. Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect. That's 2.8 gigs per movie. Now you just need to make 36 such movies and you'll be over the 100 gig sharing restriction.

    • Re:Homemade Pornography (Score:5, Funny)

      by debrain ( 29228 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @07:28PM (#5206709) Journal
      Simple. Homemade pornography is the answer. Film yourself, friends or other consenting adults engaging in wholesome sexual fun. Encode your porn into SVCD format (the most popular format for getting porn and being able to watch it in a standalone player). Pick a suitable quality level for both the audio and video and you'll quickly see that a 1 hour high quality porn should need approximately 4 700MB CD-Rs for distribution over Direct Connect. That's 2.8 gigs per movie. Now you just need to make 36 such movies and you'll be over the 100 gig sharing restriction.

      You've thought about that way too much, and it shows. :)
  • MP3.com has zillions of legally downloadable MP3s.

    (however, redistributing them or spidering the website to gather the files might violate their TOS)
  • Many people who are involved in sports, motorcycling, jetskiing, or whatever else involves fun with groups of people take their camcorders along to share on usenet. The newsgroups make an efficient delivery system for spreading the word how to have fun without buying into the entertainment industry cartel.

    alt.binaries on usenet news may be the death of usenet in terms of bandwidth, but there is plenty of grassroots entertainment that is not the likes of warez or commercial pr0n. Its not too hard to avoid the commercial junk and find normal people like you and me, despite the spam.

  • Find someone with the data and fedex a hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deranged unix nut ( 20524 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:51PM (#5206065) Homepage

    What is the best and fastest way for me achieve this?

    Welll...
    It is vastly faster and cheaper to fed-ex a couple large hard drives across the country than to download files over a wire. Just find an archive, send your drives and a case of beer to the maintainers and ask them to copy their archive and send the hard drives back to you.

    If you send it priority, you could have your archive in a couple days.
  • Make your own pr0n. It's easy. It's fun. It fills up 100 GB pretty quick. Check for legality in your jurisdiction.

  • Live Concerts (Score:4, Informative)

    by estoll ( 443779 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @05:56PM (#5206118) Homepage
    Furthur [furthurnet.com]

  • Gutenberg... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 )
    Does anyone else think the Gutenberg project is being incredibly hypocritical with their redistribution rules and stuff? I mean, the whole idea is to create a public domain archive, yet they want to restrict people from redistribution unless they do it 'their' way. It especially irritates me when they require you stick their 3 page license on documents that are half a page long! I would say, redistribute the stuff. I doubt they would have any legal ground to sue you.

  • ideas... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by psych031337 ( 449156 ) <{psych0} {at} {wtnet.de}> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:00PM (#5206143)

    look up some DJ Demo Tapes - most of these guys will prolly cherish the thought of lightening theirbandwidth load with further distribution - give attribution in filename

    movie trailers which are downloadable will prolly not (C)-free but are gray zone - no one will honesty try to subpoena you because of it, their case would be kinda weak (not sure about that)

    look for serious abandonware sites - sites that specialize i software/emulator images that are indeed released by their former makers (mostly inexistant now)

    host linux distros (not sure about that)

    watch /. and wget/archive the referenced web sites with a distinctive name, then posting a link in the /. discussion with the filename (would be coolest if you had it on several p2p networks)

    Most of these are still gray area to some extent. Hard question actually...:)

    • look up some DJ Demo Tapes

      DJ demo tapes usually contain continuous mixes of copyrighted recordings of copyrighted songs, and because there's not as much of an "open source" community in songwriting as in programming, most songs ("song" in copyright law refers to the melody independent of any recording thereof) are not published under a license allowing free redistribution of recordings.

      movie trailers

      This could work. I'd assume that at least one of the seven major American motion picture studios [mpaa.org] would be happy to let you mirror advertisements for its movies. Just ask first.

      look for serious abandonware sites

      Strictly, copyright lasts ninety-five years, but the fact that the copyright owner has allowed the program to fall out of print may constitute an admission that the work has negligible market value, and market value is one of the four primary factors of fair use.

      host linux distros

      This should work. However, you should look closely at the license for the distribution; some distributions of free operating systems (such as Theo de Raadt's official OpenBSD) copyright the directory structure of the distro CD and do not license it for free redistribution.

      watch /. and wget/archive the referenced web sites with a distinctive name, then posting a link in the /. discussion with the filename (would be coolest if you had it on several p2p networks)

      This can actually be legal in the USA under the proxy and caching exemptions passed as riders to the DMCA.

    • Re:ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DoorFrame ( 22108 )
      movie trailers

      I was sent a cease and desist order for selling 16mm (not even 35mm) movie trailers on Ebay. Selling them on Ebay wasn't the same as giving them away via P2P, but I've got a feeling they won't go much easier on you because of it... at least I wasn't giving away digital copies. They really hate that.

  • Grateful Dead (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wotsrovert ( 539077 )
    The Dead (and several other bands) freely allow the trading of mp3's. Check out www.gdlive.com, if you want. One or two of their monster jams should just about reach 150GB.
  • You want to collect stuff that is allready easy to get to to make it available to people in what I believe is generally a slower download medium.

    Mind you it could future proof this stuff disappearing I guess.

  • Archive.org (Score:4, Insightful)

    by breon.halling ( 235909 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:03PM (#5206163)

    I recommened the old "educational" movies [archive.org], but there's a lot more stuff to be found at archive.org [archive.org].

  • Get some movies from archive.org (Score:3, Interesting)

    by golo ( 95789 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:05PM (#5206179) Homepage Journal
    Get some of those 50's movies from archive.org [archive.org]'s Prelinger Collection [archive.org]
    The "Are you popular" [archive.org] MPEG is 260 MB+

    From their terms of use [archive.org]:"Access to the Archive's Collections is provided at no cost to you and is granted for scholarship and research purposesonly."

  • MP3.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:06PM (#5206188) Homepage
    I share files over p2p, but all i share are music by local artis whos stuff i downloaded from mp3.com, that seems pretty legal to me. The only other stuff i share is some animated shorts that you cant really find anywhere, and some install files for a couple of freeware games.
  • At least in Europe there is a law that protects collections. Forinstance, if you downloaded all of download.com - the'd have a case.

  • Perfect solution (Score:2, Informative)

    by W2k ( 540424 )
    Anime. Unlicensed episodes which are not illegal to distribute because there are no licensees outside of Asia. At 150-200 megs per episode, you'd be able to fit quite a few series into 150GB.

    An excellent source for unlicensed anime epsiodes, subtitled in English, is AnimeSuki [animesuki.com], where they're downloadable via BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] - you know, the P2P App with Brains [slashdot.org]. Downloads are usually quite snappy.

    As an added advantage to collecting unlicensed anime, it's usually quite fun to watch. The downside is that once a series becomes licensed, you have to stop sharing it. Right now, there are several good series being released. I recommend Naruto [animenfo.com], Mahoromatic [animenfo.com] and Wolf's Rain [animenfo.com].

  • Ask Slashdot: My Question (Score:5, Funny)

    by rh2600 ( 530311 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:11PM (#5206222) Homepage
    Instead of actually asking a serious, important or thought provoking question that actually contributes something to this universe.I will ask what has become the standard type of Ask Slashdot Question.

    What is the most pointless geeky question I can ask slashdot that will serve no other purpose but get people talking about the banal and irrelevant. My goal is to spend a lot of time and money, hacking something together that really has no purpose other than to amuse my own sad little life, and hopefully impress fellow slashdotters and provide them with funny anecdotes to share around the lunch table - "Hey some guy on slashdot is building a beowulf cluster out of 3000 gameboy advances, and he wanted to know the best colour to get!"

    My end goal is to have wasted everybody's time because I probably won't start on the idea, and if I do it will wind up being an unfinished project on my personal website featuring pictures of my cat.

  • Legal 'bootlegs' (Score:2, Informative)

    by Kruid ( 646582 )
    Good & Legal music... http://www.furthurnet.com/
  • I'm sure most people know someone with an extensive CD and/or DVD collection. For people interested in having digital copies readily available while still preserving quality, ripping their CD's and DVD's into highest-possible quality can use up HD space very quickly. A 2-hour movie encoded at 2200 kbps (not to mention the audio bitrate) can easily go over 2 GB for that one movie. I know at _least_ one person who owns over 50 DVD's, and many of those are a good bit more than 2 hours long ;).

    Throw in ripping all your audio with lossless codecs and another 50GB isn't hard to come up with for anyone with a lot of CD's.

    So it _is_ possible to have 150GB of legal media (assuming fair use rights). Just unlikely ;).

    -A
  • Get yourself a mini-DV or digital-8 camcorder and start shooting some interesting video. Each 60 minute tape is around 11 gigabytes. You'll fill up 137 GB in no time.

  • Beyondunreal.com (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Neophytus ( 642863 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:28PM (#5206341)
    BeyondUnreal.com [beyondunreal.com] will be happy to let you mirror all their files (currently 20GB, always growing) so long as you sacrafice your upload bandwidth to the rabid BU visitors (they get alot) and allow them updates whenever necessary.

  • Gamespy has made downloading maps, mods, sdks, and the like a serious chore.

    I don't hate GSI, but they are on my "don't bother" list alongside mydrive, angelcities, ispace, and the like. You could set up a distribution with reasonable naming conventions, links from review sites, and so on.

  • Think about where you're posting from (Score:5, Funny)

    by 42forty-two42 ( 532340 ) <bdonlan.gmail@com> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @06:39PM (#5206422) Homepage Journal
    Mirror slashdotted webpages!

  • driving video (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 )
    every ameture wheel to wheel racer owns a camcorder and each race produces about 100 megs of video. corner-carvers.com usually spits out about 100 megs of unique video each day, and there's links to gigs of good race footage from inside the car on famous tracks (leguna seca, for example). these videos usually get pretty low traffic so it's not uncommon to get > 1 megabit/s off of multiple files.

    that's how i spent my last saturday morning

  • Open Music Registry (Score:4, Funny)

    by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @07:52PM (#5206931) Homepage
    This site [openmusicregistry.org] provides a database of music and other audio works published under the terms of the Open Audio License. Artists may register their works for free, and music fans may browse the database for free.

    Redistribution seems to be OK just by including the 'Open Audio statement'. About like including the GPL when you restribute source code.

  • Mirror Independent Movies? (Score:3, Funny)

    by localman ( 111171 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @08:26PM (#5207150) Homepage
    You can mirror my movie Vendetta: A Christmas Story [crazyeddy.com]. Mirror all the QuickTime content and you'll have 378 MB. It's under a creative commons license, so knock yourself out :)

    I imagine there are many mucisians who would enjoy the free bandwidth as well, although movies will get you bulked up with less inode usage ;)

  • open music! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by abe ferlman ( 205607 ) <bgtrio@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @08:35PM (#5207204) Homepage Journal
    Check out openmusicregistry.org.

    You can find lots of free content from the links at the registry.

  • ADUni has about 150 Gigs of data (Score:4, Interesting)

    by abe ferlman ( 205607 ) <bgtrio@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @08:54PM (#5207314) Homepage Journal
    How could I forget this? You could mirror an entire computer science education - a whole year's worth of the ArsDigita University lectures. They are under a sharing-friendly license.

    The details are here:
    http://aduni.org/donate/

    If you were to offer to mirror all these files, I'm sure the folks who are currently maintaining them would be most grateful.

  • Fast URLs from Slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)

    by iapetus ( 24050 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @09:05PM (#5207385) Homepage
    One downside of this site is that it's not a very fast connection (about 50KB/sec through their FTP via my cable modem -- I'd like a throughput of at least 100KB/sec). [...] Come on, Slashdot. Give me some URLs!

    You want to find a site which has had its URL posted to Slashdot and still manages to give 100KB/sec throughput?

    You must be new around here...

  • leech.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 ) <slashdot@s[ ]afly.net ['upp' in gap]> on Saturday February 01, 2003 @10:10PM (#5207792)
    No p2p network that is primarily interested in legal filesharing is going to put min share limits on the clients. This sounds like this guy wants to be able to download illegal stuff, but in return share legal stuff to dismiss his fears of being arrested for sharing all illegal stuff.

  • furhturnet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phork ( 74706 ) on Saturday February 01, 2003 @11:57PM (#5208311) Homepage
    check out furthurnet, http://furthurnet.org it is a p2p network meant just for legal live recordings of taper friendly artists. And they main format traded is shn, so single show can easily be 1 gigabyte.

  • Let the government work for you (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MickLinux ( 579158 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @04:18AM (#5209152) Journal
    Okay, here's my idea: lots and lots of government documents.

    First, any law archives you can get. Any commentary. You should be able to find tons of stuff out there, and it would be useful.

    Second, all FOIA info that is online, which you can get.

    Third, all government publications: "Statistics of Income", for example, is a huge archive.

    Fourth, -- and here's a techie POV: see if you could get NASA docs online. There's all kinds of useful stuff out there, from such things as the low-speed GA-W-1 or Clark-Y standard wing sections, to hypersonic data, to investigation results from the Challenger, to -- you know what's coming now, because of Columbia.

    Fifth, anything from any of the engineering societies that you can distribute online, do. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of them have books that are out of publication and will not be republished. You may be able to get them in PDF format. Chapter by chapter, that could be a great P2P download.

    If you do this, I'm willing to bet you'll get a ton of downloads. Lawyers, engineers, do-it-yourselfers, and so on would all be using your service.

    BTW: Thanks for trying to go P2P the legal route, and respecting law.

  • Mirroring Gutenberg (Score:4, Informative)

    by gbnewby ( 74175 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:04PM (#5210997) Homepage
    For servers based in the US not trying to profit, there is no restriction on mirroring Project Gutenberg. In fact, we'll even list you in our official mirrors list (http://www.gutenberg.net/list.html) if you'd like!

    If you're outside of the US, you might be mirroring some stuff that is under copyright in your country. But many mirrors still do this, prefering to mirror the whole collection rather than try to select items based on copyright rules. For commercial redistribution, the "small print" applies (basically, you need to pay a trademark fee -- details are in each eBook).

    Here is the skinny:

    The Project Gutenberg etext collection is distributed primarily by
    FTP, although you can have your Web server point to the same directory
    and distribute by HTTP. For example, these addresses point to the
    same content:

    ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg
    an d http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg

    (though ftp or rsync is best for mirroring; see below)

    The collection is over 16GB (January 2003), and expected to grow another
    few GB this year. New etexts are added almost every day, so it's best
    to mirror nightly.

    Our experience has been that a static IP address and T1 (~1.5Mb
    symmetric) or better permanent network connection is desirable for
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  • Here's 700 MB (Score:3, Informative)

    by fugue ( 4373 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @03:15PM (#5211031) Homepage
    I have a site dedicated to providing free classical music recordings. The recordings are performances that I've been part of (some are not great, but there are a few real gems), and I'd cleared the legality with the other members of the groups, sound engineers, etc. I'd like to see more people do this, and in the interest of encouraging this, please check out my Free Classical Music archive [mit.edu].

    -Ben

  • Free music (in the sense of freedom) (Score:3, Informative)

    by juhtolv ( 2181 ) on Sunday February 02, 2003 @09:31PM (#5212723) Homepage
    There exist many musicians, that think about music in more or less same way as Free Software Foundation thinks about software: It must be free as a bird. Some of them are against a notion of "copyright" and "intellectual property".

    So, get some free music. It will fill at least few gigabytes. Some of that music has such licence, that forbids selling that music, but for your purpose even that kind of music is good.

    Here are my URLs:

    http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/fma. ht ml
    http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.ht ml
    http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/co pyin g_primer.html
    http://www.twisted-helices.com/th/t wisted_helices. html

    http://www.negativland.com/

    http://logosfoundation.org/
    http://logosfoundat ion.org/copyleft/copyrigh.html

    http://www.janisian.com/

    http://kotisivu.mtv3.fi/hipit/

    http://www.vorbis.com/
    http://www.vorbis.com/mu sic.psp
    http://www.vorbis.com/musicsites.psp

    http://www.creativecommons.org/

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