What is Digg?15 Comments
- spoooon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is really an interesting thought...
- san1ty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sorry 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. - blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Copyright doesn't cover the way a work is represented but rather the expression of it.
- armbo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2a lot of lawyers do hack the law. they find any technicality they can and milk the ***** out of it to win their case.
- Kilroy2004, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2First thing I thought of while I was reading this was Monolith: http://monolith.sourceforge.net/
Very interesting article, with a LOT more detail. By the same guy who codes MUTE. - troydoogle7, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3some people need to take a step away from their computers... at least once a month.. Will stop this sort of junk appearing on Digg.
This is Diggs equivalent to a slow news day? - ansla, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Not 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.
- Djerrid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It is, but through this argument all media that can be digitized is just a big number, including all patents. It would be fun to see some slick lawyer try to slip this past the Supreme Court, though.
- lane.montgomery, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2That 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. - mdshort, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yea, but the point is they won't have a reason/ability to track you, and therefore there will be no reason to search your computer in the first place.
All the RIAA/MPIAA do is go after high-traffic users who are originally found by downloading select files which they were monitoring. If they don't know what to look for they can't even begin to start incriminating you. However its only a matter of time before they implement a way to scan for this data, since it's essentially just an encryption with a public key, and since everyone's using the same damn key it will be simple to catch. - LKBM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Is 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? - mdshort, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Damn 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.)
- Koppie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Blapierre has it right. It's not the digitization of the song that is copywritten. It is the song itself (or movie or whatever). Another band could take one of Britney's songs and re-sing it themselves, and it would be a totally new "number," but it would still be copyright infringement.
- DareickForReal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This 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).
- axlenormand, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0is the formula for which numbers to XOR where the copyright lies?
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