I know we can't do this with any copyrighted materials. But a lot of books, music, art, knowledge is in the creative commons. Is it possible to create one massive torrent that includes all that can be legally included and then have people only download what they actually want to enjoy?
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Ok.. well now we're getting crazy :)
A much better approach to what you're talking about with that one is probably to approach the problem from the other end of the snake.
Torrents work at keeping files intact communally specifically because they're popular files, and the more popular, the more "healthy" a torrent is, because it's transitting more often and being stored in chunks in a bunch of places.
If you're trying to keep an archive of everything (and frankly, what I'm about to suggest could literally store the whole ass internet), you need to focus on the obscure crap nobody is likely to ever look for... The stuff that can't survive over torrent because it's obscure.
You can do that by share, similar to a torrent, but you wouldn't want a setup that encouraged users to share files, you'd want a setup that encourages users to share storage.
Like you provide a hypothetical tnerrot network (made up just now, torrent backwards) and as a condition of using this tnerrot network you allow say 20GB (or more, as internet gets bigger, drives get bigger, games get bigger, this allocation can get bigger as that happens...) on your hard drive that it uses to store the actual files, and in exchange you can pull any file stored in the tnerrot network. Instead of marvel movies (or whatever legal file has that kind of oomph) having a billion seeds and obscure science report having one, everything would have 2 or 3 dedicated seeds because every file would be seeded by whatever computers (2 or 3 separate ones, for redundancy) tnerrot stores it at.
You'd need a few commercial servers, because hosting a file that gets thousands of download requests a day wouldn't be friendly for random guy in Ohio or wherever, but for the vast vast majority of the files, you shouldn't have major issues.
Space sharing, not file sharing, is what you'd need to do what you're thinking. You'd need to invent the tnerrot...