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You're looking at the problem in the wrong way, I'm afraid. Copyright law is more interested in where you got the numbers (and function) from, rather than merely what they are. I would suggest reading the excellent essay here which gets into this.

Yeah. You can get into theoretical issues based on where the file was downloaded, etc. For instance, a certain copy of the program compiled under a more restrictive license, even if completely identical to a GPL'd version wouldn't be GPL'd. It's similar to the fact that downloading Radiohead's album from a P2P service is copyright infringement, but downloading it directly from their server isn't. It all depends on the "colour of your bits."

Who cares about the encoding? Remember, copyright law is a human construct. It does not matter whether it is encoded with one codec or another, lossy or lossless, compressed or uncompressed, digitally or analog -- if, at the end of the day, a human being (either with or without the aid of some device, such as music playing software) perceives it as being the same song, then it's the same song.

It's just like how it doesn't matter when you copy a book, if you change the typeface, or you write it in script instead of in print, or you use shorthand, or what. It's all the same thing so far as copyright law is concerned.

Based on previous experiences, I suspect that the follow-up comment will be something to the effect of, 'with the right software then, the number 1 could be the White Album, and the number 0 could be Smell The Glove, but surely the Beatles don't own the number 1.'

Well, they don't. First, because again, the specific format of the work is irrelevant so long as a person can somehow perceive it in its intended form. That is, you get a copyright on the White Album, not a specific compressed form of it. Second, because originality, and therefore provenance, are central to copyright. Originality, in this context, means that the work owes its origin to its creator. If you write down the number 1 and you didn't copy from the highly-compressed White Album, then you're fine. It doesn't matter that they are the same number, so long as there's no other connection between them. This is discussed at length in a very good essay here.

Furthermore, a work fixed in some form means nothing without knowledge of how to perceive it, whether directly, or with the aid of a machine or device. If you wrote down the number 1 and asserted that it was your work in a compressed form and that no one had better write down that number, then you'd lose unless you could show how it decompressed and that whoever you accused of infringement knew about that. For standards, this is easy: works encoded in mp3 form, for example, are easily decoded. But if you're using arbitrary techniques that no one else knew, then they couldn't've perceived the work, and thus never had a copy to begin with.

Finally, also note that the reproduction form of copyright infringement, 1) doesn't care about encoding (meaning that mp3's are straight copies, despite being lossy, and are not derivatives, not that it really matters), and; 2) doesn't care about how much was copied, particularly. Copy half of a song, and it's still infringing. Copy one note, and perhaps it is not, but copy many individual notes and reassemble them into the song again, and it's infringing because no one is so stupid as to fall for such an idiotic trick. This is because the law is applied by human beings, usually pretty smart ones who do not appreciate a wrongdoer's attempts at cleverness, who can see through this stuff, rather than mere machines that are easily duped.

The Reverend John Pickett and the damage done covered this seven years ago, when they were working on nicotine.

From Bonobo Conspiracy, something for the "let's deal with the basics before bringing them the Net" crowd:

Centauri: Hey, should we donate to this project? They're sending fusion reactors, atmospheric scrubbers, and medical nanobots to Earth.
Altair: That seems pretty frivolous when so many Terrans lack even the basics.

Altair: The age of consent is endemic on Earth, most regions have a sodomy law, and virginity is not unknown.
Altair: We should help solve their real problems instead of wasting money on technology that they wouldn't know how to use anyway.

Centauri: You're right. It's immoral to impose our cultural values on people who are struggling under those conditions.

...and if you read PimpMaster C's explanation, you'll never forget the difference again.

Many holes were picked in this scheme last time it appeared on Slashdot (in 2005), and Laszlo Kish responded to some of the criticisms in this Web log comment thread.

You cannot copyright a number. Good luck with that wild goose chase!

Of course you can copyright a number. I, for instance, hold the copyright on 672bce014a8ade862701d036a03b24b9 (a number that is generated by taking a novel I wrote and feeding it through an MD5 calculation program -- the number is therefore a derivitive work of my novel). Of course, if somebody else finds a way of generating that number without needing something that I own the copyright to then I can't claim copyright over it: copyrights don't protect against independent recreation. This is pretty unlikely though, so I think I can claim exclusive rights to that number. (Don't worry, I'll license it under the GFDL if you like).

There are two important things to note:

- There was creative work involved in generating the number; it wasn't a purely automatic process
- I can't prevent other people using the number if they have their own way of generating it, unless I can show that their way of generating it is in some way a derivitive work of either my original novel or the number itself.

For a better explanation of this than I can write, see this page.

It's not complete directions that's so important, though that would do it, it's the intention and context. You might want to read the excellent essay What colour are your bits which does a good job of explaining how the perspective of a lawyer can differ from that of a programmer in looking at the same information.

There's a long and better article about it here but in short, to the law it matters where the bits came from. If you have a CD and Bob somewhere on the Internet has a CD, and Bob has made an MP3 of his, and you download his MP3 it won't be legal. It doesn't matter that you own the CD, he had no right to distribute it, and so the illegal status of your copy still taints it. To use the terms of the article, the "color" of the bits would be different than the one you could make yourself, even if they're bit for bit identical.

Read this. Law and math behave in very different ways, and I've found that this is a great essay for helping to bridge the gap.

Why is it unwise? Rational people lived for several thousand years without copyright. Yeah, people who support copyright term extension are doing so for good reasons -- which would make them rational in a sense -- but not because they care about artists or culture. The US needs to copy DVDs to compensate for its massive trade deficit. No wonder so many people credulously accept this ideology -- their lives depend on it. See http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/finance/ip-vs-inf lation.php

No, the key doesn't matter per se. It's what's done with it and how it became available that is relevant. Otherwise your argument would be akin to saying that if someone loses their house key by accident, it's not illegal for you to use it to go into their house; obviously, that's a loser of an argument.

The copyright holders authorized DVDCCA to sub-authorize decryption. DVDCCA has sub-authorized certain manufacturers to make decryption devices, if they conform to certain criteria DVDCCA has set forth (e.g. respect UOP instructions on the disc), and users who use those devices in their stock configurations, with all the DRM turned on, etc.

Use anything else, or use those things in the wrong ways, and you're circumventing. It doesn't matter whether you use the same key the authorized player uses; you aren't authorized to use it that way.

I would suggest reading the excellent essay What Colour Are Your Bits? for some illumination into kinds of distinctions the law typically makes.

Am I "infringing" now?

Yes, given the current law.

wouldn't it be illegal to play a CD using any device with any buffering capacity, ever, even if the CD were legally purchased?

No. The fair use analysis is different under those circumstances, and there's an implied license argument that's pretty strong as well. But neither of these are likely to work with unlawfully made copies.

And if such buffering is legal, why would it make a difference whether you got the file from iTunes or Limewire as to whether a resident copy in RAM is alright?

Well, fair use is totally dependant on the circumstances involved. If you're using a copy that originates from Limewire, then that's very bad for your fair use argument since one factor is the effect of the use on the actual value or potential market for the work. Whereas, if it's from iTMS (and you're the one who paid for it), then even if the implied license argument wouldn't work for some odd reason, you're still not trying to avoid paying for a legitimately made copy.

At this point you might be interested in reading the very good essay What Colour Are Your Bits?.

It really seemed the court was biased against Napster and wanted 'em shut down

Well, duh. In fairness, the 9th Cir. was not biased against Napster, but they did perceive Napster to have very unclean hands. That being the case, there's nothing unfair about the court not being lenient to Napster where it has an option to be. And that -- and the fact that Napster really was flagrantly breaking the law for the most part -- is what happened.

In any case, that Napster didn't break every law it came across doesn't mean much. A mugger who doesn't jaywalk isn't going to get off lightly because he waits for the walk signal at the intersection.

The point is editorial selection. It's the same reason that reading Slashdot once made sense - out of all the thousands of things that happen in a day, only some of them are interesting, and those are supposed to be the ones that end up on Slashdot. Similarly, there are roughly 10,000 Web comics in existence today, and roughly 99% of them suck. If Ellis picks and chooses just the ones that he likes, then the result will maybe only be 90% suck... and that would definitely be worth reading.

I have a Web comic of my own, by the way - it's called Bonobo Conspiracy. But most Slashdot readers today probably won't get the jokes.

Note that format shifting from a digital format to an analog one (CD => Tape), or analog to analog (record => tape) was considered to be fair use. Same with making a backup tape for the car (tape=>tape). The rule used to be it was fair use as long as only 1 copy could be in use at a time - IE one tape in the car, another in the house - you can't be using both at the same time - it was fair use.

None of that is true.

Fair use is something that is determined on a case by case basis. If Alice makes a copy of a CD it might be fair use, while if Bob makes a copy, it might not be a fair use. The circumstances are everything. There is no rule for all backups or all conversions. And there is certainly no rule about how many copies are in use. And it is totally irrelevant whether the copy is digital or analogue.

Now, there is 17 USC 1008, which allows people to -- under very certain circumstances that usually don't apply -- make any number of copies, with no concern for how many are simultaneously in use, of certain types of works. But this is not fair use, and it's so difficult to comply with that it usually isn't used. (N.b. that if you try to read it, while that's commendable, you're certain to misinterpret it if you don't look at the rest of the AHRA and the other relevant parts of the law)

, it seems as if DVD copying for backup is legal

No, not really. Under some circumstances it can be, but those are quite rare. They'll probably get shut down under the inducement theory in the near future.

So if it's legal to make a copy, how can it not be legal to download a copy instead?

That's a good question, but you might want to read the excellent essay What Colour Are Your Bits? when you think about it. And remember that courts generally won't do any favors for people that they think are bad. Some 1201 arguments might be possible as well. It's not as though the statute requires that circumvention be direct.

QUESTIONS:

Is the resulting numeric value copyrighted?

Values are not copyrighted.

A new copyright originates in an act of creative authorship. The rights are granted to the author, and they attach to the copy of his work. Copyright is invoked in the act of copying a protected work, and the rights attach to the product of that act of copying.

If I write a poem, and you independantly write an identical poem, then I have a copyright in my poem and in any copies copied from mine, and you have a copyright in your identical poem and in any copies copied from your copy. You can have two idential sheets of paper with the idential words printed on them, but the rights attached to them can be entirely different depending upon the source. If I release my work to the public domain, and someone goes into business selling copies of the poem, the absolutely identical book being sold can either be entirely legal if he copied it from my page or an infringment of copyright if he copied it from your page.

It sounds absurd, but that is in fact how the law works.
You can read an excellent discussion of this bizzare legal issue in What Color Are Your Bits? Absolutely identical bits can have different "legal color" with different legalalities attached depending where those bits came from.

If I engage in an act of copying from that Microsoft Windows XP Professional cd, or I copy from your hexadecimal string derived from that Microsoft Windows XP Professional cd, then copyright infringment issues arise. If by some astronomical improbability I create or come by that identical hexadecimal string by genuinely independant means, then no, Microsoft has no copyrights in that particular copy of that string.

So back to the original issue, you are not an author when you copy a fact from the physical universe. You do not and cannot obtain a copyright when you merely copy a fact, and you obtain no special right to sue other people who copy that same fact. You cannot sue them when they independantly copy that same fact from the universe, and you cannot sue them when they copy your published report of that fact.

The Supreme Court ruling on this subject addresses the insanity and economic damage of people needing to engage in wasteful duplication independantly recollecting the identical facts in order to avoid some other person's copyright-on-facts and establishing your own independant ownership of identical rights on identical facts. However the economic positive or negative of imposing such a system is really an irrelevant side comment to the ruling. The ruling is resolved on the basis that the Constitution simply prohibits the government from granting copyright on facts. If someone is of the oppinion that it would be an economic benefit to grant copyright-like protection on facts... well ok. So long as they acknowledge that other people (including the Supreme Court) have signifigant arguments that it would be economically damaging, and they acknowledge that the Constitution currently prohibits granting copyrights on facts, and they aknowledge that facts are not intellectual property and that what they want is to change the law and invent an entirely new catagory of intellectual property. There can be reasonable argument weather it would be a good thing to do or a disasterous thing to do, but no reasonable way to say it is how things are.

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You should publish a link to Captain Copyright! Of course, you definitely don't want to link to the blog of the guy who exposed the various copyright infringements that Captain Copyright was partaking in, or the EFF's DRM counter force: The Corruptables!

Is that a positive statement ("I think the law says X") or a normative statement ("The law should say X")? Because, as a positive statement, o rly? gunzip kiddieporn.jpg.zip "What do you mean officer, I didn't actually create/possess the kiddie porn. That was all the computer's doing! I only interacted with the results of an automated algorithm!" Yeah, that will fly exactly never. The law treats data very differently than computer professionals do. There is a really excellent discussion of that here, which frames it as talking about the "colour" (he's Canadian, its OK) of bits: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001 .php . Its more applicable to, say, various specious defenses of copyright infringement than it is to my kiddie porn hypothetical.

Now, if its a normative statement: o rly? Thats like saying "guns don't kill people, people call people, ergo no use of a gun can be illegal". Come again? I mean, I can understand "technology is a tool, criminalize abusives uses of the tool rather than the tool itself". So I could buy "Google has no intention to promote warez here, go after the people who do", but certainly that can't extend to "People trying to find warez are doing nothing wrong by searching, downloading, and installing it -- these are all just computer-generated results, after all".

There is no software ever written that can distinguish one blank slate from another.

Yet the Copyright Lobby continues to insist on magic DRM software that can distinguish a copyright infringing copy of John Cage's 4'33 from an independant non copyright infringing independant creation and recording of silence.

Legally they are right. A copy dupicated from John Cage's recording is indeed copyright infringment because legally the bits are a different color than an independantly created identical file of zeros of the same length. Technologically, they are fucking morons wanting and expecting computers to see two different colors on two identical bits.

Sorry for the compltely offtopic tangent there, but the fit to your comment about software trying to distinguish one blank slate from another was just too powerful to resist. Heh.

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They market the device as a handheld media box which can do video/audio/text and gaming including emulation.

Video/audio/text are thought to be adequately covered by existing widespread rippers and existing fair use laws.

If you have a stack of NES carts - is it illegal to use a ROM image?

If you make the backup yourself using a tool such as Kevin Horton's CopyNES mod, then it likely falls under the necessary modification exemption of 17 USC 117 and foreign counterparts. But if you download the ROM from (say) Edge Emulation, it's not (except in the rare case of commercial ROMs that have become freely distributable, such as Elite for NES). What color are your bits?

Do you think everyone just rips their own CDs for use in an iPod? Or uses iTunes?

A trademark such as "iTunes" is an adjective and must be used with a generic noun such as "music store" or "software" to avoid confusion. If by "iTunes" you meant "iTunes software": You don't need to use iTunes to rip a CD; you can rip .wav using any app and encode to .mp3 or .m4a using iTunes, or if you live in an area that does not recognize Fraunhofer's MP3 patent, you can rip .wav using any app and encode to .mp3 using LAME. If by "iTunes" you meant "iTunes Music Store": You don't even need to buy music through iTMS. Other music stores are available, such as mp3tunes and (if you live in Russia) allofmp3.

What facade, exactly?

Why should a person who may have a vested interest in a company have less rights as a private individual than anyone else?

They don't, but you seem to be forgetting that one's state of mind is a factor.

If Alice, the CEO of a company that is competing against Bob, relies on the proposed exception for her own personal use, then that would be allowable. However, if she engaged in the sort of behavior that would be unlawful if not for the exception, in order to facilitate the interests of the company she is CEO for, then it wouldn't be. Courts are pretty good at being able to look at the circumstances and determine which is the case. And you did say that it was "for the sole purpose of squashing that competitor."

You seem to be doing something that many other /. posters do: thinking of the law as a machine that can be easily fooled, and which behaves in an overly mechanical fashion. It's a mistake to do so. You may enjoy reading the essay What Colour are your bits?.

If you forgot to set up the VCR and get it off torrent then somebody else recorded it and illegally offered it up for uncompensated distribution.

What color are your bits?

Scary. 1 + 1 = 2. Why do the mindless masses not understand that we have a serious problem when 1 + 1 = (an illegal pattern of active pixels due to having cut-and-pasted it from a copyrighted source)?

"A rose is a rose is a rose" (Unless Monsanto made it resistant to glyphosate). Whether I rip a CD or download the same songs, whether I record a TV show or download it - SHOULD NOT MATTER. But hey, what do I know, when 385,257,600* zeros in a row can deprive someone of ownership of all the other strings of non-zeros in the same collection.


* 4:33, at 44100hz, 2ch, 16b/s.

Matthew Skala - of cphack and MoleSter - recently started a daily Web comic called Bonobo Conspiracy. It's pretty geeky.

That's what Google is doing externally. Internally, is it possible that the courts will see the initial act of copying the books into their computers as the same as running thousands of books through Google's photocopiers (which would be obviously illegal, if done to books in their entirety).

Not necessarily. In fact, they probably have to do the equivalent - scan the entire text of each book into their database. Otherwise they could not do full-text searches on the content of the books.

The difference here is the intent. mp3.com's intent in making those copies was to distribute the copies to customers who had purchased original copies. Google's intent is to build a searchable database - not to redistribute the contents of the database.

Law is super stupid about things like that, read this for a genearl treatise on such things: What Colour are your Bits?

Fantastic article! A great way to speak about IP. Thank you.

Like if I were to get some Motzart sheet music, and then make a MIDI out of it, rander that to digital using synthesizers, I'd own the copyright.

I can't resist pointing out that if I also created a MIDI that I would own the copyright on my version. In fact my copy and your copy can be bit-for-bit identicial. If someone else then publishes that bunch of bits it is impossible to tell if that is perfectly legal or if it infringes your copyright or if it infringes my copyright until we find out where the got the bits.

What Colour are your bits?

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All your socks are belong to us!

Also, there is the issue of "color", so yes, if there was a way that they could link a color to that number, and prove that you had intent to disseminate that data, knowing its color, then they could bust you.

The court explicitly overturned the previous decision that file sharing is not copyright infringement. That question, which some people thought had been settled, is now up in the air again. Read this analysis - and chalk up one more point against the Slashdot editors, because I filed a more accurate version of this story and they ran the misleading one.

Either direct infringement (it's often infringement even when you copy just a very small part of a work), or contributory infringement, since you're working with a lot of other people to, in sum, infringe.

That you'd consider this kind of indicates that you're treating the law as a machine, which can be spoofed. This is a mistake; there are human beings involved, and they're often fairly smart, too. Your scheme is so very simple that it is no work at all to see through. I'd watch it with the whole pride thing.

You may also be interested to read the essay "What Colour Are Your Bits?".

Attention bonds don't work, as described here in more detail:

* Creates opportunity for traffic monitoring by people we'd rather not have doing that

* Creates money trail alongside email trail, making legitimate anonymity almost impossible

* Makes trolling a profitable business model

* Participants who are poor, or not allowed to form legally binding contracts (such as children) can't have email anymore

* If only applied to email, moves the spam problem to other media without solving it

* Creates obligation for email receivers to actually pay attention to the messages of paying spammers; can't set the price high enough to make that okay, without chilling too much non-spam communication from senders who can't risk being forced to pay a large bond

* Can be used as a payment system for underground economy (porn, gambling, drugs, general money laundering)

* Mustn't allow any communication beyond the bond amount, or else that'll be used for spam; but the bond amount isn't really enough information to make the read/don't read decision

* Senders often don't have the choice of talking to a different receiver on a given subject instead, so system can be abused by anyone you NEED to send mail to (e.g. legal notices, tech support, recipients of emergency communications, etc.)

* Human beings known to behave irrationally when involving transactions in small amounts of money (same reason micropayments fail)

* Creates complicated international payment system with huge numbers of participants; not possible to keep such a system secure. (Like credit cards but a thousand times worse)

* Large companies like Microsoft will use embrace-and-extend to create/extend monopolies and punish users of competing software

* Probably already subject to conflicting patent claims

* Creates need for middleman businesses that have no other function; opportunity for abuse, like the domain name registration racket.

* Escrow system likely to end up using anti-robot captchas (like domain name registration), making legitimate non-human, and disabled human, email users unable to participate.

* Either malware on your machine can make you owe a lot of money to random people, or else spammers can escape having to pay their attention bonds by invoking whatever mechanism protects malware victims.

I think copyright expansion may itself be part of a scheme to avoid the balance-of-payments issue you describe. The thing is, copyright is ultimately a fiat good; they can create an unlimited number of licenses to the same copyright, and sell each one separately. So as long as the USA can get other nations to recognize, and pay for, American copyright licenses (and other intellectual property) they can export those licenses instead of exporting real goods, and it reduces the need to print money and postpones your predicted currency crash - but it only works as long as they can keep expanding copyright protections faster than other nations do. It's a question of substituting inflation of copyrights for inflation of the dollar. See this article for a more detailed explanation of the theory.

Setting aside that your logic is really flawed in light of what the law authoritatively says must be proved to make out a prima facie case, you might find this essay enlightening.

My own site's search engine has been providing RSS feeds of its results since last December - not that anyone's actually using them. Having a standard for doing this seems like a pretty nifty idea; I'll have to update my code to generate this format. I don't have high hopes for it being ad-free when provided by a commercial site like Google, but I've got software that can filter ads out of RSS feeds, too.

My own site's search engine has been providing RSS feeds of its results since last December - not that anyone's actually using them. Having a standard for doing this seems like a pretty nifty idea; I'll have to update my code to generate this format. I don't have high hopes for it being ad-free when provided by a commercial site like Google, but I've got software that can filter ads out of RSS feeds, too.

I guess you are probably talking about this article titled "What color are your bits?"

...and I guess I'm being a bit of a karma whore, but I liked the article, so never mind.

There's no real threshold. Some courts sometimes find de minimis infringement, other courts say that there's no such thing, based on their reading of the statute. Minor infringements might be fair uses, but there is a multifactor fair use analysis (see 17 USC 107) and while size is a factor, if those are the important parts, the fact that you ignored the unimportant majority isn't going to matter much.

The important thing is that it derive from the copyrightable work. If "Paul Clifford" were copyrighted, and you copied "It was a dark and stormy night" from it, then that's going to be infringing. OTOH, if you independently came up with that line (which, as the works are more and more similar, is harder to be convincing of, where you had access to the plaintiff's work), then there is no infringement.

I would suggest reading the very good essay What Colour Are Your Bits? for more on this.

The DVD says in the big frickin FBI warning "licensed to view". So you have bought a license to view.

Actually, I don't recall any DVDs saying that, and at any rate, no, you didn't license anything. When you buy a DVD, you buy it. The mere fact that the law temporarily prohibits some of the things you can do with it is not unusual (anyone buy a car and speed lately) and doesn't diminish your ownership of it.

You are now downloading the stuff (just numbers) and when you VIEW it (which then causes the numbers to have meaning), you have license to view.

First, it's never just numbers. For someone who can throw around terms like promissory estoppel, you ought to know that. At the very least, I'd suggest reading the excellent essay here.

Second, reproduction is distinct from performance. Being allowed to do one doesn't mean you're allowed to do another.

This might be pretty cool, though it was postet before and MoleSter is already down to 6 lines with 466 bytes, but is small code size really a reason why it must necessary be legal? Don't get me wrong, I don't think that code can be illegal at all. But stating that small code size implies that the resulting app and it's uses are legal sounds quite silly to me, considering SQL Slammer is only 376 bytes.

Molestar uses a very loose defintion of "lines" ... So as far as line count is concerned TinyP2P is around half the size as Molestar.

No. Perhaps you should have had a look at the TinyP2P web site, which defines a line as follows: "Each line has 80 characters or fewer."

If you really want to compare sizes though, compare the number of characters: TinyP2P has 951 non-whitespace characters; Molster has 436. And the author of Molster also makes the point that almost all the P2P work of TinyP2P is done by an external library. Have a look here for more of the author's thoughts on the matter of sizes - they're quite interesting.

The point was to show how easily something of dubious legality can be made from parts considered legitimate, that SimpleXMLRPCServer and xmlrpclib are 15 lines away from actually being p2p_lib, so if legislators wanted to ban p2p_lib, they'd have to ban SimpleXMLRPCServer and xmlrpclib too. MoleSter goes even deeper, threatening that the Perl interpreter is under half a kilobyte away from being a P2P app as well.

$/=$_;$,=shift;$w=$a=shift;$k{+shift}=1;socket S,2,1,6;bind S,for(listen S,5;$SIG{ALRM}=\m! (\S+) ([e-i])([^/]*)/!s&&($k{$w=$1}=$,eq$`)&&&$2){alarm 9;(accept(C,S),alarm 0)?read C,$_,1e6:($_="$, $a f".shift)}sub i{}sub t{socket C,2,1,6;$k{$w}&&=(connect C,&a)?print C"$, ".pop:0;close C}sub h{t"$_ i/"for keys%k}sub a{$w=~/:/;pack'CxnC4x8',2,$',split'\.',$`}sub f{$w=$_,t"$1 $3/"for keys%k}sub e{open C,'>',$3;print C $'}sub g{open(C,';&h}

The last article also mentioned the 9 line Molestar written in Perl - which is now 6 lines.

$/=$_;$,=shift;$w=$a=shift;$k{+shift}=1;socket S,2,1,6;bind S,for(listen
S,5;$SIG{ALRM}=\m! (\S+) ([e-i])([^/]*)/!s&&($k{$w=$1}=$,eq$`)&&&$2){alarm
9;(accept(C,S),alarm 0)?read C,$_,1e6:($_="$, $a f".shift)}sub i{}sub t{socket
C,2,1,6;$k{$w}&&=(connect C,&a)?print C"$, ".pop:0;close C}sub h{t"$_ i/"for
keys%k}sub a{$w=~/:/;pack'CxnC4x8',2,$',split'\.',$`}sub f{$w=$_,t"$1 $3/"for
keys%k}sub e{open C,'>',$3;print C $'}sub g{open(C,';&h}

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/molester/

Dr. Edward Felten recently posted a piece of code called TinyP2P, which demonstrates how easy it is to create a peer-to-peer filesharing application by doing it in just 15 lines of Python. However, TinyP2P uses a ready-made XMLRPC server library, which seems to me to be taking the easy way out. Here's my response: MoleSter, a non-trivial filesharing application in 6 lines of Perl, using no protocol library more sophisticated than TCP.

The 15 line P2P has been mentioned before by Slashdot - but the New Scientist article wasn't mentioned last time (as it hadn't yet been written).

The last article also mentioned the 9 line Molestar written in Perl - which is now 6 lines.

It has to be a material contribution. That is, not an insignificant one.

There is a difference between saying that 'people sell drugs in Crackton and Bumtown' and saying that 'John Doe sells drugs at 1 Main Street, Crackton, between the hours of 9 and 5, and here's his phone number and a letter of introduction.'

The difference is not always a bright line matter -- but it's there, and courts can generally find it since they're used to dealing with these sorts of things.

On a related note, I find that people here often have difficulty with some important legal concepts such as intent, reasonability, materiality, etc. Here is an essay that I think helps with this. You may find it interesting.

RTFA ... The programmer has a fully documented version of the program, and even states the reasons for his tightly packed code.

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/molester/moleste r

But writing ultra-short code is fun even if it's silly. No other justification is necessary.

The reasons?
Who needs reasons when you got root?

See my blog posting from October. What browsers REALLY need is the ability to replace the most recently visited bookmark's URL with the URL of the currently-viewed page. That way you could stop and start reading (for instance, in a comic strip series) without having to create and delete a separate bookmark for each stopping place, and you could also comply with "site moved, please change your bookmark" notices without needing to go through an elaborate process to delete the old bookmark.

You could argue that, but it wouldn't matter. For a general discussion of this topic, I recommend the essay What Colour Are Your Bits?.

I think that a significant amount of the nonsense spouted on /. about this and other legal issues is due to people just not understanding that this is important in law even if it seems weird.