Since I started working for 3 years on PIDs in ExPaNDS project (see Zenodo community for the deliverables we had made for the European Commission), I have an inspiration that the reproducibility is essential for true persistency and findability in the PID ecosystem. From this point of view, the IPFS technology that offers:
- Hash-based identification,
- Reproducibility out-of-the-box,
- Persistence over the redundancy,
- Total openness,
always seemed very promising. In the ExPaNDS project, several presentations and mentions were made about IPFS as a potential PID backend:
- Vukolov, A. Openly reproducible Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) as a factor of FAIRness in data sharing practices EOSC Symposium 2021
- Bunakov, V., Krahl, R., Matthews, B., Vizcaino, N., & Vukolov, A. (2022). Advanced infrastructure for PIDs in Photon and Neutron RIs
There were several experiments to involve IPFS in the PID ecosystem. For example, DeSci Foundation developed DPID - the PID system based on IPFS and Ceramic blockchain ledger to obtain almost the same functionality as DOI has, but at reduced costs and relatively independently from the nature of the platform-based implementations like DOI and Handle.
22 May 2025, the European Commission published Counterfeight and Piracy Watch List that implicitly mentions IPFS as a suspicious technology used to propagate copyrighted materials and to violate anti-piracy laws. The IPFS discussion post about this is written by me, and it lives here:
As Hector, one of the leading IPFS developers, said in the dicsussion:
The document published by European Commission keeps the tone that could only be considered as a declaration of IPFS technology as a piracy tool. The legal prevention practices existing in most countries leave no doubts about the exact working mode the authorities would select: the preventive bans or explicit declaration of the whole technology with its ecosystem suspicious.
However, the data producers and distributors are actively using IPFS to share their datasets, as David from dClimate.net said in the discussion. Thus the prospective technology that offers significant advantages for the data producers, is put under the legal pressure.
I want to kindly ask all the people here who has a connection with the industry or governance stakeholders over the data, to propose the constructive and convenient way to cope with the situation and to prevent a generalized legal declaration of IPFS as a technology as a piracy tool (that is obviously not true).
Please share your opinions, insights and suggestions!