News Taking OFF the copyrights

A couple further points, but it's getting hard to quote.

Emberline,
1) welcome to the forums,
2) Thank you for that discussion! Incredibly insightful. I see where you're coming from, though I'm not totally sure if I could agree on a basis of law, due to what I'll say down below with G.
3) The derivative work clause you mention is actually handled due to the first encryption. That is "derivative work" because it's a math equation based on the file. It's the SECOND encryption that gets complex, because now you're already dealing with something once removed from its original structure. At what point is a door no longer a door, but a table or a chair? They're all made of wood...the idea is to break things down to building blocks too small to be copyrighted because their purpose becomes unclear, and then transform them. The piece is no a more part of the original media than the numbers 1 or 0, and therefore no longer subject to the same ownership requirements. That, I believe, is the angle they're hoping for, though I welcome further discussion as to your views on this.

G,
The only thing I'll add to what I said before is that we're missing one key element here - the way that this particular cypher works, the underlying file can be translated to any number of different things, none of which would have to be an MP3. So, in essense, every bit of data on the entire network could be every OTHER bit of data legally. It's not just that it's encrypted, it's that the encryption is a one to many relationship. One piece or even one coherent string of files can be translated to many, many outcomes depending on what "key" you use to decrypt it. The same file could be an MP3, a piece of software, or your grandmother's recipe for chocolate chip cookies - and without the right key, nobody would ever know.

I stress that there still is no legality in the reconstructed media files once on your hard drive - but previously the RIAA has used the transfer of the files to determine the violators. This has the potential to remove that ability, as there is no way to know what files are on there and no clear ownership of the pieces themselves.

However, as Emberline mentions, it will have a hard time standing up in court...still, the theory is fascinating. And just as lawyers can obfuscate common sense (no offense intended, Emberline) with sections, paragraphs, subsections, etc., this stands a chance to baffle some attorneys for a while who can't quite grasp the math. After all, you can't argue the illegality until you understand what they're doing with it - and the more you can understand the crypto, the less it looks like you can prove what's in the file to begin with.

 

Da Dego, I think you have made just made the most salient point. Given the RIAA's current tactics, the legality of a method is less relevant than the lead time it gives the public before the RIAA finds a way to either use current law against the method in question or successfully lobbies congress/parlaiment/etc to change the law to their favor. Regardless of whether OFF's method is legal, its fundamental complexity will introduce novel questions and confound those wishing to find legal ways to curb it while at the same time forcing courts to embark on time consuming legal analysis of a new P2P paradigm. If OFF even manages to stay ahead of the RIAA's legal onslaught for a year or so, I would call it a success.

 

Just what I suddenly realised, too. I think we're all in agreement that this scheme is still infringing copyright, I just had not appreciated enough of the history to realise that it avoided the specific rule of law that has previously been used to stop file sharers.

As Emberline says, this could well lead to some more high-profile court cases, getting the issue back in the public eye and maybe getting some new (more favourable?) laws introduced.

Not that I condone or perform file-sharing, or course! No, really!

 

It seems to me that this little snippet puts Xerox (and every manufacturer of an image or audio recording device) in a bit of legal trouble. Did you forget to include the amendment that makes their copiers legal or am I missing something?

 

If I may answer for Gerontius, in the US we have a famous case (colloquially known as the Sony Betamax decision) where our Supreme Court held that devices specifically designed to make copies of works (like VCRs, Xerox machines, etc) do not violate the US version of this UK law so long as they have "significant non-infringing uses". Thus, since Xerox machines and VCRs etc are significantly useful for making legal copies of non-copyrighted material, they do not violate the US version of this law (which is substantially identical to the section Gerontius has posted).

I'd be interested to hear how it works in the UK.

 

Look stop wasting time with the chin flapping, lets get this up and running. Then everyone encrypt and host every single bit of data on you computer.

RIAA and there chums would disapear if a puff of orange smoke, as they tried to figure out who the hell was sharing what. Doing the world, and all of humanity a really big favour.

 

Or finding out/framing the RIAA for piracy themselves, and getting the artists to sue them.

 

there would be something interesting, start profiling every single family that works for the RIAA and see how many family members of the workers / workers themselves file share via torrents, ftp, etc etc...

then post away!!!

 

It's pretty much exactly the same in the UK. That case was probably brought in every country in the world! The law has not been modified or amended to take such devices into account, the case law developed instead. Maybe OFF are hoping to do something similar here.

The question for OFF is: what purpose OTHER than to be able to distribute infringing copies could you possibly have for their complicated scheme? None whatsoever in my view, so they don't have a leg to stand on.

 

Sings; "How do you solve a problem like the RIAA". Oops, did I just plant a tune in your head. *waits anxiously for the fuzz.

 

i think the idea is just to make it impossoble for the riaa to see if your actualy breaking the law with their current methods then saying yeh its probably legal cos of this too

i dont really see any other way for them to see if your shairing anything copyrighted without illegal things like spyware then they wouldnt be able to do that so this basically stops the riaa from sueing anyone cos even if everyone was doing it they would have no proof, short from making their own police force and raiding peoples houses, but i dont want to give them ideas now.

anyway didnt the mpaa illegaly copy and distribute that guys documentry about the mpaa, he should have sued.

maybe we should start a hitman fund to get rid of them all

 

we will have to wait and see until this theory gets tested in a court

 

Here's another way of looking at it:

An entire song, is obviously a song, it can't be mistaken for anything else. Even in binary form.

However, once you start chopping that song up into smaller and smaller parts, it becomes less and less like the original song, and more and more like many other things. Ie. If we split the binary form of the song into single bit chunks, you are essentially sharing individual 1 and 0's at a single time.

Can you have a copyright on a 1? Or a single 0? It can be any number of things. The number one, the number negative one, etc. It's just as much the song, as it is anything else, any other peice of data flying across the internet. It's indistinguishable.

Now pump that up a bit, eg, into 128K chunks, and then double encrypt it, and you have a string of bits indistinguishable from random noise. It has just as much resemblence to any other piece of information that goes through this process. It has lost it's uniqueness.

So at this point, you are no longer sharing a copyrighted work. You are sharing chunks of random digital noise. Can random chunks of digital noise, which are quite often identical to other random chunks, be copyrighted? If my rough math is correct, you will see at least one duplicate 128KB chunk every 16GB of data's. Compared to all the data going across the network, that is very often.

Basically this is a game of semantics. If you manipulate the song's data enough, into an unrecognizable form, one that is indistinguishable from everything else, one that is essentially meaningless random data, and then share it, are you still sharing the song? Is the other guy, who is sharing his daily appointments, when those chunks happen to match, also sharing the song? I mean, the info is identical.

This smacks very much of literal vs symbolic interpretations. However legal loopholes, the one's that usually disgust us common people as the wealthy elite and corporations use them for their own personal gain, often consist of such things. The letter of the law, and not the spirit, etc.

Are you sharing the song (a copyrighted work), or merely the instructions on how to reproduce it? What if I could somehow encode the song in a picture of the Mona Lisa, that is bitwise identical to a regular ole Jpeg. Is one the song, while the other isn't, even though the two are bitwise, digitally, identicall?

Basically: this isn't so much as hiding the fact that you downloaded the song, but arguing that the song, the copyrighted work, was not actually transmitted. What was transmitted was something else.

Who knows how that will "go over" in a court though.

Aggies

 

Having just read the full paper and the contents of this thread, I don't think that this tactic is truly intended to protect prolific, illegal downloaders.

It looks more like he's saying that it only allows for the storage of such data (under existing laws) as it can't be argued as a derivative work without making the rest of the copyright law collapse. But once you download the data and reconstitute it back into whatever you actually wanted, then what CrackerJack terms the "arbitrary application of copyright" kicks back in, and a judge can put your arse in jail.

That's how it reads to me, anyway. I'm not sure where this whole "two-copyrights-equals-no-copyrights" nonsense came from; It's not in the paper that I can see.

Nezuji

 

well Nezuji they wouldnt know if you had once bought a cd with X songs on it that are now on your hard drive, they may have proof that you used the OFF system but not what you downloaded so they would be rather buggered as you could say you bought X dvd or X cd and youve lost it or whatever.

but i doubt they could take you to court by saying that guy used a p2p system! he must therefore have illegal files on his hard drive! omgzzz SUE!

this is how i see it anyway, it doesnt matter if the copyright laws are in action after unpacking because they have no idea if you downloaded a song or some random data whereas now they know if you download a song kind of thing.

i think we all know shairing music is illegal but if they cant catch the people shairing then there will deffinatly be no more sueing without some even more extreme tactics. like using types of spyware to monitor your use but then i doubt that would be useable in court as it in its self is illegal.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong though, but with torrents (which from my reading of this thread, seems to be the transmission used, just with a nice blending of random and semi-random ciphers included), don't the RIAA or MPAA currently just connect to a tracker for a particular torrent, get the IP listing from the tracker for that torrent, then say "Well, that torrent is an illegal rip of Citizen Kane (or whatever), these IP's are accessing it" and then squeeze the ISP's for details of who to file suit on?

So regardless of the fact that what's actually being received through your network socket, you're still getting it from a tracker that's saying IP x.x.x.x is connected to Citizen Kane.avi. You could argue that no, you were downloading a random slush of data that someone simply called Citizen Kane, but the RIAA or MPAA could simply start downloading the torrents as well (as I'm sure they'd have no problem getting blanket statements from many producers of copyrighted works giving them permission to make copies of any work that the producer holds rights to), and showing that what they got from that tracker was copyrighted, and all these IP's were downloading it too, from the lists that they get from the tracker.

Course, then people could put up fake torrents of stuff they personally hold copyright to, and wait for an IP that belongs to the RIAA or MPAA to download it and file suit against them, which could be interesting. They couldn't tell what it was til they can decrypt it, which means they'd have to get a complete copy (depending on how this encryption is implemented) so they'd have violated copyright just as surely as they're always whinging about.

 

i dont think it will use torrents because as you said they would have a list of ip's. but then the only way for them to legaly get info from the isp is with a court order i believe, without it they are illegaly shairing your info thus allowing you to sue the isp then take on the riaa with the millions you just won

i dont think it will use the torrent system but a p2p system like kazaa or whatever but with all the files ether being encryped then shaired or encrypted then sent perhaps, but im just guessing this as i dont know.

but just because a program is listing names of songs or videos or games or whatever, when downloading it the data is just totaly random. so untill its decrypted its just random code so if you have the random info on your pc they cant sue you for having x game, because they would have to modify that data to say you had a game but then couldnt you say no, it was just some encrypted data then they changed it so they could press charges.

if the files being sent arnt the origional song or whatever they cant prove your shairing the data without downloading the files then modifying it, but then its not the thing that was shaired in the first place.
i know it doesnt count with rar files as they just compress the illegal data and thats easy to get out. but if the data is mixed up with loads of random code then they use a key to clear up all the random code to be left with the game code its nothing like what has been sent, because if you used another key you would get a totaly diffrent file like a spice girls song. they cant exactly say what your shairing they just know your sending parts of random code that can be deciphered into somthing else that could be copyrighted.

but we will have to wait for it to be challenged in court before we know if this system is truley legal or illegal, but it will stop them from going after the user, for now.

 

I actually just read up on how the RIAA conduct their suits. And tbh, this wouldn't do a whole lot to stop their tactics, assuming you've still got the filename of "new release cd double-encrypted.rar", since they only go by filenames. Now if you want to risk trying it in court (as if they could prove it was you in the first place, let alone that you did something wrong), go for it.

 

however, how do you track people then, current methodology means that they wouldn't be able to track you

the random 1's and 0's you transfer would not be able to incriminate you, and without scanning your computer, they wouldn't have any evidence

 

and IIRC scanning someones computer is ilegal (invasion of private property), correct? so the evidence can not be used in court or to get a warant.