Free Culture Torrent CMS

We are planning to create a specialized torrent site and release the CMS that powers it under a FOSS license. This page is purely a convenient way for us to explain the plans and invite the community to suggest appropriate names. After the names have been selected, we will set up the relevant sites and get started to bring the concept to life.

We're looking for name suggestions for the following:

  • The project name - the brand of the project ie Mozilla, Status.net etc
  • The CMS name - the application name that people will download and install on their servers ie Firefox
  • The naming scheme - every piece of software has a naming or numbering scheme ie Debian uses Toy Story
  • The instance name - our own official instance of our software; ie Status.net have Identi.ca
  • The audiocast name - it will be used to promote the concept of sharing, as well as current affairs discussions

Why the obsession with names? We don't want to dwell on them, we want to allow the community to choose them. At which point we put that down as "solved" and move on to the important parts of the project. If you have suggestions, please feel free to submit them and a brief explanation of idea behind them if you like. We'll keep this process open for a month and select what we feel are the top suggestions. We'll then create polls with these suggestions and allow people to vote on their favorite.

There are a lot of details to discuss and decide on such as the best language to be written in, the location of the non-profit for legal purposes, the version control system, bug triaging setup etc. All of that will take place after we have the names out of the way and a project site setup.

Part 1 - The Project

We want to set up the project in an open and transparent way, as well as in a way that will protect it and it's users from any corporate takeover. The thinking right now is to create a non-profit organization. We will have to explore the options before commit to an exact plan, but the intent is a protective organization of some description. We want to tie in to other FOSS and civil liberties projects like the EFF, Creative Commons, GNU, SFLC etc.

Just as drupal.org hosts the drupal code, the modules, themes etc it also hosts all of the discussions around Drupal. We plan to implement the same idea.

Part 2 - The CMS

Drupal is fantastic, it's what this site is built with, it's a general purpose CMS (Content Management System). It's incredibly versatile but is seriously lacking as a single purpose CMS. If your site is primarily a forum, then you'd be much better served by using specific forum software, the same applies to any specific use case. There is nothing practical, scalable and user friendly for the specific use case of a torrent site. This is where we fit in.

All of the web software CMS's have things in common that we will be adapting. They all install from browser UI's with a simple script which requires some basic information and a connection to a database. They all work out of the box with some bare bones features, and allow plugins, modules, or themes to be installed, to add in extra functionality or layouts. Our CMS will be a fully functional torrent site out of the box, with extras like a blog functionality as an addon for those who require it.

Our software, it's addons and themes will be fully FOSS under a license like the GPL. We believe in freedom.

Part 3 - Our Free Culture Torrent Site Instance

When the CMS is ready we will be running a central instance of it with one specific niche in mind; exclusive free to share content. Right now you can search for Creative Commons images or clipart on Google. Going beyond that is patchy at best. We aim to solve that.

We want our torrent site to be a central hub for screencasts, audiocasts, podiobooks, ebooks, Linux and BSD distros and much more. The key part is that they must be under a license that allows them to be legally shared. We want to run this site along a maintainers ideology, whereby anonymous people can download but can't just sign up and upload content. We'll be looking for maintainers who will keep an eye on the releases of projects they're passionate about, create the torrents for them and upload them to the site.

This has a few of advantages:

  1. It prevents malicious parties uploading known copyrighted or malware altered material
  2. It avoids multiple uploads of something that are all different and all claim to be genuine
  3. It controls tags so searches are going to be incredibly accurate
  4. It allows us to filter out NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content for those who don't want to hear that type of content

We'd be happy to include community members from projects as trusted uploaders. In the case of distros we want to have searches return only one result per query. If you want Fedora 15 Gnome, there is only one Fedora 15 Gnome. It will also have the md5sum listed in the description.

Every file uploaded to the site will have the license it's under clearly marked, in addition to a link back to the content creators as accurately as possible. This may need some flexibility in some cases.

We want to have an incentive scheme for rewarding uploaders, which takes into account their bandwidth, how long they seed for etc. We hope to be able to offer monthly prizes of some description for the top seeders. We are open to offers of sponsorship but only from companies or organizations we deem appropriate. Those who have proved themselves hostile to user freedom and choice in the past need not apply.

We want to be an additional tracker when people create torrents for things like distros. We have no problem with those torrents also being uploaded to other sites in addition to ours.

Often the cost of hosting or streaming media is a barrier to entry for those with ideas and a voice. The bit torrent protocols help even that out. We don't demand any exclusivity, we're an additional delivery method to what you already do. For those who can't afford to do the traditional hosting solution torrents offer an easy option.

While we do promote free culture, free software and free file formats, we would like to ensure that the common formats are available in the torrents at least. If your show is ogg only for regular downloaders this is fine, but we'd like to torrent to include the ogg and mp3.

We will be a donation only set up. We aim to put part of the donations to hosting the sites themselves, as well as a few seedboxes to ensure that no matter what, there's at least one seed for every registered file on the site.

Part 4 - The Audiocast

The whole concept of content creators and fans sharing their work is alien to the standard business models favored by the legacy industries. This opens up opportunities for us.

We want to do a fortnightly or monthly round table call-in audiocast with various members of our community discussing current events around copyright, laws being proposed, what tactics companies are trying to hold back time to a time when they were required. Part of this would be a round up of all the new shows, distros authors etc who have been added to our instance of our CMS.

We want to use it as a platform to promote both the concept of sharing in terms of software and culture, and those individuals who have chosen that path. How many cool bands, audiocasts etc are out there that you stumble on by accident and love? We want to increase that rate which in turn rewards the creators with more fans.

In the meantime the discussions are ongoing about the actual "how" of the project in our IRC channel #cctracker on irc.freenode.net; feel free to join us. If this project has sparked your imagination, we need name suggestions. Some ideas of what we're looking for:

  • Family friendly
  • Positive
  • Inclusive
  • Free culture in all it's forms

By all means, be funky, funny, sarcastic, witty, philosophical, political, edgy but keep it clean. Who knows you could have your name attached to a project that will shake the traditional legacy industries to it's knees. The final selections of suggestions will have the names of who submitted them hidden to avoid any bias.