Information Preservation and Data Havens?

tiltowait asks: "An interesting story on LISNews.com this morning about savvy U.S. students photocopying textbooks in Mexico then returning them for refunds got me thinking about data havens. There's already few places on the web where you can exploit countries having different copyright durations and eligibility. On the flip side, there's restrictions such as broadcast blackouts and country-wide firewalls. But just as the rich can use of international tax loopholes and in light of the recent file-sharing victory, are there any projects out there, beyond the P2P networks, to distribute possibly-protected information by any means necessary? For example, your company may already outsource labor, but what about an off-site backup in case of an FBI raid?"

Comments

i'm anal-retentive about data backup

[circletimessquare]

and after i got a usb watch for xmas last year, i have gotten into the habit of archiving all of my company email every 3 monhhs, and walking out with the archive on my wrist

i always wondered about the constitutionality of that... it's not really MY email, even though, for all practical purposes, the content of it is more important to me than my company (records of who said what to whom, my ideas, my code, etc.)

we live in a day and age where corporate rights encroach on individual rights more and more

i think we should all do our best to fight that, in big ways and small

walking out with "corporate intellectual property" on my wrist is my way of doing that

Off-Shore Network Storage?

[Hiigara]

I seem to remember reading that some organization was setting up servers on abandoned oil rigs in international waters for just such a purpose. I don't know what happened to them. Something about a giant squid maybe?

Reminds me...

[bburton]

Reminds me of South Korea.

The copyright laws there are pretty much non-existant.

For example you can purchase a jacket or article of clothing, and they will embroider it with just about anything you want, including emblems/logos that in America are Trademarked (Starter, Nike, etc).

You can also buy fake oakley sunglasses (AKA Foaklies/Oakies) in many parts of the world for $5 a pop.

The rest of the world doesn't always play by America's rules. But we're working on that. ;-)

Offtopic...

[nkh]

I'm not american so I don't understand this: what kind of books are you supposed to buy? I'm in college and all the books I would ever need are available at the library (In fact, all my courses are done without books). I only bought two crypto books (Schneier and Zémor) because I told my teacher I wanted to have fun at home.

Copying textbooks....

[pjdepasq]

As a young(er) Master's student in Computer Science back in 1996, I noted that many of my international colleagues (grad students) photocopying their textbooks and sharing the copies from semester to semester and student to student.

I brought this up at a department meeting I was a student-rep for, and the grad program chair said something like "why should we care?"

I was shocked at this attitude and lack of concern about the actions of those doing the copying. Yes, it is/was illegal and something should have been done/said about it. However, since I knew that several tenured professors didn't care, me saying anything to anyone wasn't going to change the situation. Perhaps, in hindsight, I should have alerted the book companies.

Re:Raid?

[Alan Cox]

There are lots of legitimate businesses and parties who need strong crypto, offsite data for protection against raids etc - journalists in many countries, unpopular but legal organisations who will be raided just to put them out of business by the powers that be (or by the powers that be on behalf of their paying customers like the IPR businesses)

One of the cutest I've seen was RAID5 over network block device (encrypted) with the disks all in different legal jurisdictions.

Netlibrary.com

[jlseagull]

NetLibrary has a stupid interface - you log in from a member institution, then you can view books online. Good idea, right? Wrong. All of their content is crippled - you can't print it more than a page at a time, save it to a file, or even look at more than two pages consecutively without going through a screen that says "Please type the letters you see in the box. This is to protect against actions you have performed that appear to violate copyright." This is after simply viewing three pages in a row quickly, because I wanted to find a particular equation!

So what did I do?

Right.

I wrote a script that brought up each of 280+ pages sequentially and printed them to TIFF files, popping up a browser so I could perform their human-detection action when required. The I packed the whole thing into a PDF, and ran an OCR on the whole thing. Presto! The original book, in un-DRM'd form, happily readable and printable.