offsystem.sourceforge.net — "If for some reason we were to allow 12 to be copyrighted by Brittney, she would still have no claim on the numbers 5, 7, 13 and 25. I could still copy these numbers and pass them around as I saw fit. As long as I didn’t copy the number 12, I should have no problems with the law."
Aug 15, 2006 View in Crawl 4
lane_montgomeryAug 15, 2006
That doesn't make sense to me. If that were true, then it would be illegal for you to share the sound of a copyrighted work and not the physical medium.It would be interesting to have some one print off a binary representation of a song and give it to some one else at a press conference or something. Technically it shouldn't matter if the person can use the information, if you shared the copyrighted information then you could be sued. I think a judge would throw it out.
san1tyAug 16, 2006
Sorry but this is an incredibly naive view of copyright law, typical of software engineers who think they can hack the law the same way they hack computers. It doesn't work like that, the law looks at the end result as well as the means and is generally much more pragmatic than a computer interpreting code.Its a bit like getting caught with a gun, and claiming that you don't have a weapon because without bullets it won't kill anyone. That kind of argument doesn't work.
anslaAug 17, 2006
Not quite, the gun still has a special meaning. The numbers that they talk about are completely irrelevant by their own. I think the naive ones are those who thought they can apply a old law created for material works to digital versions. In the digital world everything is just a number, and unless you know what to do with that number it's completely useless. A much better analogy is the one used by the authors: "Even if you were to create copyright infringing fan art, the pen and paper would still be legal to own, possess, and pass around with your friends." What the receiver of the numbers does with them is not my problem. I can not be sued for distributing them.
dareickforrealAug 19, 2006
This works in the sense that the authorities would have a hard time monitoring transmissions, as they have no real meaning. But, correct me if i'm wrong, they don't watch what you are downloading, they find what you've ALREADY downloaded. So if a program assembles these meaningless numbers into a binary code representing copyrighted material, that material is still illegal. The only possible benifactor of this technology is the creator/owner of brightnet, or any other company that uses this technology, because they don't have any files to get caught with. But the end user, with the song on his hard drive, can still be popped the same as anybody else (assuming he shares through p2p like everybody else).
lkbmAug 19, 2006
Is tomorrow's headline going to be about the discovery of an illegal prime number?I guess it's been five months since we had the story about reinvention of the Vigenere in the form of Monolith. Time to rerediscover these concepts, right?
mdshortAug 19, 2006
Damn timer cut me off... anyhow I wanted to add that it might be possible for authorized hosts to automatically generate a "random" key and then you'll end up with completely random and secure data. HOWEVER, unless you plan on publicly distributing your key, you'll never be able to effectively distribute files among anonymous clients since hosts sharing the same "file" have differently "munged" files due to the limitless possibility of different base files (or keys, essentially.)
armboAug 19, 2006
a lot of lawyers do hack the law. they find any technicality they can and milk the s**t out of it to win their case.