I've bugged lugh about the vanished forum data a number of times... he obviously still has a copy because he can fetch old posts on request.

Yes! Why hasn't there been a release of the entire place? I"m sure its due to some extremely valuable synths that they want to protect. But I thought the whole point of the Hive was its collaborative nature.

With respect to copyright. Why don't you just encrypt all PDFs stored, use a numbering system for the PDFs, and keep the index separate from the PDF archive. This would provide an extra hoop for anyone who sought to determine copyright infringement.

Oops.

Sorry lugh, from the way you can pull useful old posts out of a hat, and how you've talked of bringing the Hive back before, I believed that you and probably other ex-staff of the Hive had full backups that you were keeping private for unknown reasons. If you just had a partial collection of threads saved on your own initiative, I'm sorry for making unwarranted assumptions.

The death of the Hive was very mysterious though and has never been well-illuminated by those in a place to know. Was the Swedish hosting company change of management a real thing? I forget the name of the host now; I think it was posted on SM at one point but censored at Rhodium's request, back when we thought the outage was temporary. Even if that really explained the initial downtime, why has the Hive remained offline for 6 years? It can't have been that hard to find another web host, even for a site as large and controversial as Hive/Rhodium. By now you're probably as sick of these questions as the old "where can I get red phosphorus?" but unlike the phosphorus question I don't think it's really been answered.

I don't know if you are even capable of answering these questions. For all I know a small subset of Hive staff saved the database, pulled the site, and left you in the dark as the rest of us...

There are "seedbox" hosts that cater specifically to high-volume copyright infringement, primarily via bittorrent (hence the name). They might still respond to takedown requests from copyright holders but it is definitely not in their business interests to proactively monitor for infringement, unlike most web hosts. This host, for example, offers unlimited bandwidth at 100 megabit/s and 155 GB disk space for only 16 pounds (about $24 US) per month. And it's not just a torrent-hosting platform, but a full VPS with root access. That's a great price for the resources offered, though it might still be too much depending on your budget.

I don't think Freenet is a good choice for this application. From the Freenet FAQ:

Why can't Freenet store data permanently?

Because we can't find a way to do this without compromising Freenet's other goals. For example, people often suggest that someone's node could just never drop data they want to cache permanently. This, however, won't work because even if the data is still available on their node, there is no way to ensure that requests for that data will be routed to that node. We have considered many other ways that Freenet could store data permanently, but they either won't work, or compromise Freenet's core goals of anonymity, and scalability. However, if you simply reinsert your data regularly, or if it is regularly downloaded (not by the same person as it would be cached on their node and the path to their node), it should remain available indefinitely.

A large library that is always available, and that has very infrequent downloads for most files, is running against the grain of Freenet's design to prioritize popular content.