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Brightnets are Owner Free File Systems
elucido writes "OFF, or the Owner-Free Filesystem is a distributed filesystem in which everything is stored in reference to randomized data blocks, as opposed to a 1:1 copy of the original data being inserted. The creators of the Owner-Free Filesystem have coined a new term to define the network: A brightnet. Nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away. OFF provides a platform through which data can be stored (publicly or otherwise) in a discreet, distributed manner. The system allows for personal privacy because data (blocks) being transferred from peer to peer do not bear any relation to the original data. Incidentally, no data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random." Their
main wiki page discusses a bit of what this means and how it might work as well. I've been saying that we need this for many years now, if only because we all have 10 gigs free on our machines and if we could RAID the internet we'd need fewer hard drives.
My network is still on the fence when it comes to the existence of God.
Isn't this just a sophisticated form of encryption, using a large, randomly generated key?
If so, does it have any real advantages over conventional encryption? It seems that the disadvantage would be the need to have both the file (large) and the random data (large) instead of, conventionally, just the file (large) and key (small).
Also, I can't be the only one who found the summary, uh, confusing??
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
As a rule, you don't copyright the exact data (i.e. the sequence of numbers representing a digital file). You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
Incidentally, no data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random.
It's not the data that's protected by copyright, it's what the data represents.
No matter how you mangle the data when storing it or transferring it from one location to another, the end result is the same. They're trying to use semantics and technical voodoo to get around copyright law. It won't work.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Yup, and attempted get-arounds like this are stuff courts love to slap down.
Or at least that is what it sounds like to me from the summary.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"copyrighted data"
to
"encrypted copyrighted data"
The first is merely infringement. The second is conspiracy to commit infringement, and you will have lost any chance of defending with "I didn't know it was copyrighted".
Curiously enough things like this are exactly why "conspiracy to commit" crimes exist.
Furthermore, unless I'm making a stupid mistake, it doesn't actually distribute the data, the key to find the data in the P2P net is the same length as the original data, in the random case, which buys you exactly ... nothing. You have to download the file twice.
This thing does not evade copyright law, and it's inconvenient to boot. I don't think I'll be placing a second look.
I'm not transmitting copyrighted data. I'm transmitting encrypted data, and a pointer to a key that will let you decrypt it INTO copyrighted data! Brilliant!
Hell, by that logic, I can't possibly break copyright distributing an MP3--it's not music, just 1's and 0's that the receiver will be trivially able to turn back INTO music.
Doesn't Tahoe already do this?
"A simple analogy is seen in that every number has an infinite number of representations (3+2=5, 2*2+1=5, 10-5=5, 10/2=5, etc). Even if the number (file) in question can be copyrighted under current legislation, it is practically impossible and unreasonable to state that every other representation of that particular number is copyrighted."
Actually, no, it's not unreasonable or impractical. In fact, that's how it actually works. Star Wars is copyrighted as a DVD, Film, mpeg, script, live performance, song, interpretive dance, etc. ..right?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Hmmm... I don't think that's the objective, exactly. I didn't read TFA as saying "material distributed in this way is not subject to copyright" but rather "none of the bits we're moving are copyrighted - go pester the people doing the uploading"
I also think there is a useful discussion to be had on the subject of numbers and the digital assets they may or not represent. If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
As a rule, you don't copyright the exact data (i.e. the sequence of numbers representing a digital file). You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
That's not the point. The point is that if someone downloads blocks from me to be used for copyrighted material, I cannot know what it is used for. Maybe these block also encode legal stuff. Because the same block encodes multiple files, and because a request does not state what the data is gonna be used for, I (probably) cannot be holded responsable for sharing copyrighted material.
You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
You're dead right. What is interesting is that if you're "caught" with some of these random blocks on your disk, they're just random blocks of data. You can't decode them unless you have the key, hence there's no charge of copyright infringement.
One problem with the proposal (which, by the way, is very obvious, and is how FreeNet and other systems work) is that their key length needs to be the same length as the data, because it's effectively a One Time Pad. If it's any shorter than the original data, then there will be a way to unencrypt the data without the key (proof by a simple counting argument).
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Once I actually understood what on earth they are on about, it seems like an interesting idea with very little basis in reality. Their main claim seems to be a magic-wand approach to getting round copyright, as opposed to a particularly useful distributed filesystem:
No data passing through the network can be considered copyrighted because the means by which it is represented is truly random
Sure... So if I put in Brittany's latest album, then tell my friend to click on the url that 'reassembles' the 'truly random' data into, well, Brittany's latest album, then do you really think copyright has nothing to say?
Breaking news! Photocopying books is TOTALLY LEGAL if you use yellow paper and/or put the book in the machine upside down!
A correctly encrypted file also appears random. It does not mean it IS random, otherwise it would be, well, not very useful.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
the space being used on the various hard drives involved becomes unrecoverable? Yay! Another Distributed Cruft Accumulator for teh Interweb!
If what they claimed is true doesn't that make a zip file of a dvd image downloaded via bit-torrent ( and everything ) legal?
From TFA: "Even if a number (file) in question can be copyrighted under current legislation, it is practically impossible and unreasonable to state that every other representation of that particular number is copyrighted."
Um...not. This is implying that performing any trivial encryption or other transformation on a file magically renders it uncopyrighted, because now it's a different "representation of that number".
You can, I suppose, have the "angels dancing on the head of a pin" argument that any random string of 1's and 0's can be "decrypted" to produce any other string by use of the appropriate decryption key, and so say "copyrighting any specific string automatically copyrights every possible string!" That's generally beside the point here. When you're giving someone the key to decrypt your "random" string into another specific string, your intent is pretty clear.
I hope you don't plan on using that with RoadRunner, Rogers, Bell, or any other ISP with a transfer cap.
While individuals are not passing copyrighted files to each other, the copyright violation does occur. The URL with the instructions of how to assemble the file is actually an encoded version of the file. Downloading those instructions is just as much a copyright violation as downloading a digital version of the file, or a zipped archive from which the file can be extracted. So, "nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away" is erroneous. Both the person offering the URL and the person accessing it need to hide if it's a work someone's going to exercise copyright over.
From the main site: "It must be noted that up until the point of retrieval of content from the OFFSystem, storage and transfer of a so-called copyrighted file is completely legal. However, the act of re-assembling a file may be considered copyright infringment in some cases, and users should be aware of legislation regarding copyright law which applies to their jurisdiction before doing so."
I think this analysis is flawed because it assumes that the instructions to construct a file are not a file, and that only when you have the end file have you copied the work. In fact, if the instructions contain all the information of a work, they are the work, in exactly the same way that any digital representation of a work is the work. "Y'onor, I didn't copy no files, look, this is just instructions to make the files" will not fly any more than "Y'onor, this isn't a music recording, it's ones and zeros."
Look, I totally get how encryption and plausible deniabiltiy is great if you people are circulating dangerous information about government conspiracies, or organising the resistance in Burma or Zimbabwe, but lets face facts, this will be used to share torrents of Hollywood movies and top 40 albums.
This is stupid.
Either accept the fact that all the political posturing about free being a better business model is true, in which case, just go enjoy all the free music/software/games/movies out there, or admit its just smokescreens to justify getting Hollywood movies for free, whilst your entertainment is subsidised by everyone who paid to see that stuff, and thus allow it to be made.
People seem to have this attitude that this kind of thing is cool because it lets you escape prosecution for copyright infringement. If copyright is such a fucked-up system, then why is it all the stuff people want to share is produced under that system? Surely all the cool movies/software/music/games is being produced under the free model right? Or could it be that the free model isn't viable, or popular with content producers, big and small...
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Doesn't matter to me. When I open up my hard drive with a hammer, I don't see any numbers anyway, so I don't see how that helps me.
Seriously, though, if you think stopping at a particular layer of abstraction and then adding another layer of abstraction isn't what IP lawyers call a "derived work", then I don't think you understand IP well enough to make any claims at all.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
For some of us that isn't a problem, since we don't believe in IP anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
All this is is Huffman Coding for a whole filesystem. The most frequently used blocks will have small addresses, but the rarely used blocks will have addresses that are the same size as the block they represent.
For transferring seemingly random data, like an mp3 or movie, this will achieve zero compression and only provides a very poor level of privacy.
Think I am going to skip participating in this. No matter how safe, undreadable and similar a whole lot of kiddieporn alarms are going off in my head. Thanks but no thanks
There's a lot of misinformation floating around here (RTFA please). Here's what happens: you want to upload a file. The program makes up a bunch of random numbers - really random numbers that have nothing to do with the original file. The original file is not consulted to make the random blocks - they could be pre-generated even.
Also generated is a URL that has the instructions on how to get the original file back from the random blocks. Anyone that shares this part is going to be guilty of copyright infringement (assuming the work in question is copyrighted).
It's basically a substitution cipher - with a unique way of substituting real data for the random blocks, as determined by the URL. So really, it's a one-time pad of sorts.
Whether you believe in IP is irrelevant to the law of the country of where you live. As a defence it won't hold up in court.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
From the article:
This quote in particular shows how little the authors understand copyright. Nobody copyrights a number (well... nobody who doesn't want said number to end up on t-shirts sold over the Internet that is!). You copyright a work, and then you can try and sue people who distribute (without rights) representations of that work (yeah yeah, fair use, derivative works, etc etc - some representations are protected). You can ROT-13 the work all day long, but at the end of the day you're still violating copyright.
This system might make it harder to prove that any particular block is a piece of a file that represents a copyrighted work... but then that seems more like the opposite of a "bright" net to me!
how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
$ sudo apt-get install common-sense && man common-sense
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
This argument is futile. The law covers distribution of the information regardless of the format of the information, so one large number is legally indistinguishable from base64 or hex. If the copyrighted data can be recovered it's considered distribution - in some cases even if the key itself is not distributed with the encrypted data.
I don't know if this new system exploits a loophole in the laws, but even if it does, that loophole will be closed. The new copyright laws appearing worldwide are practically making it illegal just to use a computer, so it's not like a single loophole is going to help.
Sam ty sig.
http://wiki.offdev.org/Talk:Why_is_OFF_safe%3F :
Trojan detected with avg free
Another side to the safety issue. I'm hoping this is a false positive, as I like OFF
* avg free v7.5.516 virus base 269.17.13/1208 finds
o Trojan Generic9.AKLU in
+ offsystem.exe from OFFStystem-0.18.00-win-installer.exe from sourceforge January 3 2008
This is worrisome...
Define "information" in terms not mathematically equivalent to binary data.
If you manage this, that would mean that all the computing technology is in fact impossible (as computers would not be able to process information), that no music or moving images can be digitally stored and that "information" cannot be encoded in form of electrical impulses, among other things.
What you want to happen here is one of the oldest cons in the history of civilization: that of a crook who claims that what he peddles is "divinely defined" and so no mere science can possibly explain such a "miracle" and thus he cannot be judged by the rules of such mundane things as logic. Which of course does not stop the crook from sponsoring "laws" to help his thuggery along to a profitable end. It was so with religious fanatics of old and so it is now with the purveyors of the whole field of "Intellectual Property" and related scams, of which your statement is a perfect example.
It's nonsense.
Who said im going to court? I adjust my activities to compensate which avoids that situation.
Doesn't change my belief, or disregard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This technique seems useful for making a message available in a robust maner so as to counter those that don't want the message to get out (CIA, FBI). The message would be sent into the OFF network first and the URL key would be made available later. It seems better for hiding a message (steganography) than for evading the law.
How do you distinguish between cold pills and crystal meth?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The problem I have with that, is I that don't think those commands work in a court of law.
Come to think of it, but I'm fairly they wouldn't work under Ubuntu either. (I wouldn't know about Debian)
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Too bad Western legal systems do.
Saddam didn't believe in the court's jurisdiction. Didn't do him any favours!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
You're quite right.
Like it or not, copyright doesn't apply to bit-streams, but rather to particular instantiations of ideas (and derivatives thereof). No one can copyright a number. But in a particular context, a certain bit-stream can be considered protected by copyright.
This whole "you can't copyright a number!" is a red herring. No one seriously claims that particular numbers are copyrighted. But in a certain context, a particular chunk of data (a number!) can be reasonably shown to be a copy (or derivative) of a particular copyrighted work. If the same number appears in a totally unrelated context, and it's apparent that it is not being used to distribute a copyrighted work, then no court would find that instance of the number to be infringing.
Another way to say this is that copyright law is more concerned with the action of copyright violation (distributing a copy or derivative of a work without authorization), and is not concerned with maintaining a catalog of copyrighted bit-streams.
This seems to be just like Usenet. Anybody can upload anything they want on it, and no server is responsible for copyright violations. The copyright holders have a hard time purging the information because it's spread over hundreds of servers.
The original uploader, though, can be charged of a crime. Moreoever, if networks like this become a real thread to the copyright holders' existence, legislation will be enacted to ban networks that don't have a central administrator who could be held responsible.
If there is one copy at the start, and two copies at the end, then a copy has been made. If one does not have the right to make the copy, said right being reserved by law to the owner of the copy right, one has broke copy right law.
This is an obvious tool for infringing on the copyrights of other. If it were not, then there would be no reason to say
They can't even hide behind "it has other uses", because of all the talk about copyrights.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
For some of us that isn't a problem, since we don't believe in IP anyway.
So you're cool with violations of the GPL? After all, the only thing that gives the GPL any teeth whatsoever is copyright law.
For some hundred years ago and still some places in this world today a person have no chance in court if they're gay.
Today very few don't belive in IP, but I guess this will change when the youth today grow up.
"Whether you believe in Allah is irrelevant to the Sharia law of the country of where you live. As a defense it won't hold up in the Religious court."
There, fixed it for you. Since the evidence for existence of Allah is pretty much on the same level as that for the so-called "Intellectual Property" (i.e. the concept of 'ownership' of large integer numbers and the like) and the relationship between such belief and laws passed based on it is strikingly similar, the statement you made is pretty much equivalent to the one below: arbitrary bullshit based on whatever nonsense happens to deliver power and money to whatever "law makers" and their associates happen to be at the top at the time, logic, science and reason be damned.
At some stage the data will almost certainly be Ethernet frames, which doesn't bear that much relation to the orginal data.
:: £20,000 bill for speeding row scientist. Quote 'In speeding [copyright] matters, it is the law of the land not the law of physics [way you split the data] that matters.'
But then it is recombined to form the copyrighted work, to create the infringement.
I cannot see how this is different to that process and thus escape legal sanction.
To adapt a good quote, as in
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Intent.
The "number" is almost never without context, e.g. a filename, metadata, or other description. Sure you could lie about that, mislabel it, etc, but then it doesn't make it very useful for dstribution. If someone else can find out what it's supposed to be, so can a judge.
People act like this somehow new, too subjective, or breaks the "black and white"-ness of the law, but this is how the law has always been. It doesn't fit neatly into "if-then" boxes as INTPs would like to pretend it does.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an opponent of copyright zealots as much as you, but in your example, yeah, you have a string of numbers, but what do those numbers represent?
The answer: A copyrighted work (MS Office).
MS (or any copyright holder) isn't claiming copyright over 0100010 or 00100111. They're claiming copyright over what those numbers mean. Complaining about it like this is like saying "Authors are trying to copyright all the letters of the alphabet" when they hold and exercise their copyrights on novels, magazines, and the like.
If the copyrighted data can be recovered it's considered distribution - in some cases even if the key itself is not distributed with the encrypted data.
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
In this case, though, the law has it right. No matter what you're doing to break up, encrypt, hash, randomize, or distribute files, if the end-goal is to end up with a representation of copyrighted material then you're still breaking the law.
If you don't like the law, then go out there and do something about it. Trying to find a workaround for the law is just going to get the courts mad at you if you get caught. Information may want to be free, but right now it isn't (at least not the information that these kinds of things are being created for). Legitimize it, not strategize about how to avoid the problems that can come with it.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
> $ sudo apt-get install common-sense && man common-sense
Warning: Installing "common-sense" for assumed environment "human-geek-slashdot_newbie-debian_user-simpson_family" . This version may not be compatible with versions for other environments.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers?
Read the link I posted earlier. Legally it depends on where the bits came from. No amount of compression and encryption will change that. Copying zipped or encryped MS Office, or for that matter the Linux kernel, doesn't magically make the copyright go away of the copyright owner lose their right to compel you to either follow the license or not use it.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
feed 'em to the dog and see if it goes bananas?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Many posters seem to not get the idea that a given 128k chunk cannot be infringing because it cannot correlate one to one to a given file, copywritten or otherwise. The set of sharable files is much larger than the set of 128kB words.
Imagine this purely in textual terms. If you had a group of three character strings containing every possible combination of three characters, you could express MacBeth, The Bible, or whatever as a series of addresses within that string-space. The string "e t" is not specifically part of any given work.
What would then be an act of infringement is distributing the recipe to assemble a protected work without a liscense to do so.
If I had a problem with GPL violations, id be a hypocrite.
Its all the same to me, none of it is valid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For an excellent explanation of why this is legally stupid, see What Colour Are Your Bits?
I think this has more potential in distributing network loads, than any copyright issues it may or may not circumvent.
Other related links...
Wuala - A distributed file system.
ABSTRACT After three years of research and development on a distributed storage system, we are ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In the talk, I will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and I will also show a demo. All attendees will also get an invitation code to join the early alpha version.
A New Way to look at Networking
ABSTRACT Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows. Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what's available from either the research community or the marketplace. I'll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy.
Could not agree more. Were I in a state where there were a Sharia law in force I would be careful about disrespecting Allah just in the same way that I tend not to blow hash smoke in the face of the British police force. That was my point, and all my point.
As long as we live in society we have to pay some regard to the rules of that society whether they make sense to us or not. My belief that smoking cannabis is harmless doesn't make it legal, my belief that Allah is as meaningful as the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't make it wise to disrespect Allah in strong Muslim countries (ditto bad mouthing Jesus in the Bible Belt) and the GPs disbelief in IP won't protect him/her from the IP laws of whichever country they live in.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Actually, my concern is more over the other side of the coin: that some corporation or cartel will try use the same apparent novelty to try and claim ownership over the numbers. As in "we own 'The sound of Music' so therefore we own number 135678012456677787...."
I'm not trying to suggest (as some seem to assume) that this constitutes a way of evading copyright.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
... and that's why that Freenet team released a software project based on a somewhat similar concept alllll those years ago. Of course, Freenet's goal is more about privacy than copyright... uhm... yah.
What you are saying is a half-truth.
Stallman has stated on many occasions that the only reason for the GPL to exist is BECAUSE of copyright. Yes it uses copyright law, but it uses it in a subversive manner as a temporary solution until the day when copyright (on software at least) is abolish and all code is in the public domain, at which time, it will not be needed anymore.
Of course, a catch there is what happens if we abolish copyright: companies will still ship binaries without code (so of the four freedoms only distribution will exist), so to reach what Stallman would consider the ideal we would need an abolition of software copyright coupled with a consumer protection act that makes shipping binaries without code an offense.
I tend to agree with him. I also believe that one should follow the laws while they stand, even as you do activism to change them. That is what the GPL is - a form of legal activism, a way to prove that user-rights are more important than 'owner'-rights, and that thinking like that does not prevent the creation of useful software: on the contrary, it appears to accelerate it and more-over to do it better in most cases.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No, in telling them how to assemble the file you are also not committing copyright infringement.
If that were true, telling someone how to make a bomb would be distributing weapons.
Extending copyright infringement as an offense to this new definition of yours amounts to "thought crime"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You guys are getting all the wrong idea. Here's the deal: it doesn't matter whether nodes are known or not, because there is not one single piece of data that can represent the copyrighted info on any one particular individual's system. There are no pointers, either, because the pointers are stored in the same manner.
So, in order to sue anyone for copyright infringement, you have to sue EVERYONE connected to the network, jointly. Good luck with a court letting you name 1,000,000 individuals collectively as one defendant.
The nodes are saying 'go talk to the uploaders, we don't have any copyrighted data on each of our systems', while actually tracking down the uploader is just about impossible without compromising a vast majority of nodes on the network.
And my last statement is the problem, not what the rest of you are on about.
My blog
I don't want to give the RIAA fuel for their fire, but I'm willing to bet that they have at least ONE smart person working for them so they'll probably figure this out anyway. Once you create the URL and the metadata (which blocks to d/l and how to xor them), doesn't that constitute a derivative work? The random data out on the cloud is sort of a red herring.
If all people were as pathetic as you, feudal lords and slavery would be the norm in all societies today. USA would not even exist, merely a colony ruled by the unchallengeable laws of the King of Britain, because as you so aptly said: "we have to pay some regard to the rules of that society whether they make sense to us or not". Luckily for us all, some of our ancestors took somewhat more enlightened view, sometimes even involving sticking a sword up the "divine lawmakers" asses.
Laws are only to be respected if they are a) logical and b) just. All others are just tools of tyranny and usurpation of power to be ignored and resisted. If all else fails, violently and with deadly force. It is a difference between principled courage and spineless slavery.
Going by their logic all you need is a 50Gb drive filled with random data blocks. If you know the content of each block, you could easily recreate "ANY" file by selecting the appropriate blocks in order then phrasing them into the appropriate format. No need to send the copyrighted files, Just the index of what blocks to put in which order. Hey presto have every file you'll ever download already on your PC.
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
man common-sense
always returns true. But
woman common-sense
always returns false??? Is that a bug or just an unimplemented feature?
Thank you.
I'm not the only sane person on the anti-ip side of the argument.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Everyone who has been prosecuted for P2P copyright infringement in the USA was charged with Uploading or making available, downloading is not illegal, storing online in an encrypted form is not illegal making that data available to other people is...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I agree entirely, and I wasn't trying to suggest that this would be an effective way of avoiding copyright law. I think the OFF devs may be hoping it allows them to avoid being sued when someone else uploads copyright material, and I'm not sure that will work either.
I'm not complaining about anything, thank you very much. I'm just saying that, in an age when every possible from of IP legislation is being bent to in an attempt to claim a level of control never intended, when trademark law is used to silence criticism and when patents are granted on movie plots, it would be nice to see the law specifically say that the numbers were not subject to IP, even if the asset they might encode was so protected.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
is hundreds of RIAA executives gnashing their teeth.
Problem is, the key that is used to turn the random (or arbitrary) data into the copyrighted work is itself a derivative work of the copyrighted file. That is, you generate the key by hashing the random file with the copyrighted file. So any distribution of the key is distribution of a derivative work (same as if you took a song, add your voice as an introduction to it, and distributed it).
Your fear is completely unfounded, as in the USA copyright law simply does not work that way. Your post, while bringing up an interesting philosophical idea in some sense, is also based on ignornace of the most basic character of fair use, at least as it is understood in the USA. Please wikipedia the term "fair use" and you will see that use of a number in, say, mathematics, would easily be classified as "fair use" by the "use and character" clause.
I am not a judge, but you know not many would really understand all that technical mumbo jumbo. They prefer their own kind of mumbo jumbo.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes, and Freenet did this almost a decade ago
Don't make assumptions and read carefully. I said that you have to pay some regard to the rules. As a frinstance I believe that the laws on the smoking of cannabis in the UK are plain wrong and stupid and encourage the trade and distribution of much more damaging recreational drugs. However, smoking dope in public doesn't get the law changed - it gets me a £50 fine - and that was back in 1971 when £50 was a lot more than it is today. I've spent my time on the barricades, unlike the politically apathetic students of today but, with age comes a certain amount of prudence and I know I have to temper my personal beliefs with those of society at large. Sorry, I'm not Ghandi or MLK, or even Rosa Parks, but then, quite frankly very few of us are.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I'm sorry, one of the permutations of your post has been copyrighted and needs to be taken down. You will be hearing from our lawyers.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
First off, these people don't do themselves any favours with descriptions like this:
"No data stored or transferred in OFF is copyrighted because all data is random..."
and
"...the randomized blocks do not represent the original data inserted to begin with"
Of course the data is not random. And of course it represents the original data. If either of these two nonsensical statements were true, then it would be impossible to reconstruct the original data. They may randomly generate the blocks, but the selection of blocks and parts of blocks to represent data is anything but random. What they mean is that the distrubution across many blocks in complex relationships means that a happenstance collection of blocks alone is not of any use in reconstructing the content. Sure, private storage of copyrighted data would be acceptable in this sort of encoded, distributed format. But if you publish the URL required to decode the content, you will be every bit as much in violation of copyright law as with any other form of file-sharing.
In the end, the only possible response to this technology is "so what?". If you want online storage, you can buy it by the terabyte from Amazon S3, or for that matter from your ISP. If you want P2P, this is no better than BitTorrent - and at first glance not nearly as robust.
Plus: how many people are going to be willing to put their extra disk-space permanently online, and drill a hole in their firewall so that the world can access it? Heck, I don't even do things like Seti-Online anymore - even if I trust the application, it's extra work that I just don't have time for.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Before we go any further with this one, could you quote me the line where I said "Hey, everybody! This is a workaround for copyright law - and I recommend that everybody try it!"
Because, you know, I really don't remember writing anything of the sort.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Yes, they key, or in OFF's example, the URL is indeed in itself a derivative work of the copyrighted file. But the random or arbitrary data (which is what OFF stores) isn't. Hence, you can't infringe on copyrights with a Brightnet. It is nothing more than a large collection of random/arbitrary data.
An example: I could store a backup of a copyrighted work (say a DVD) on OFF. It would be stored a random blocks of data, which wouldn't infringe on any copyright. It is just random data, the being what turns it into a copyrighted work. As long as I keep the key to myself (e.g do not distribute the DVD), no laws are broken. I'm allowed to make backup of a legal DVD for personal use under Dutch Law.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Suppose such a URL told me to get blocks A and B to get legal file U, and to get blocks C and D to get legal file V. I download these blocks and create the files that I wanted. I continue to share blocks A, B, C and D, because I support the distribution of files U and V. Have I done anything wrong?
What if blocks B and C, combined with a third block E produce illegal file W? What if block E combined with block F form legal file X?
Curiously enough things like this are exactly why "conspiracy to commit" crimes exist.
I thought copyright infringement was a tort, not a crime per se., no IANAL.
What we have here is a technical solution to a legal problem. Every time a story pops up on Slashdot with a legal solution to a technical problem, we laugh at it. Well, the other way around doesn't work either, folks.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
Shaking your laptop is how you erase it. You have to hold it upside down though. And make sure the nib is in the correct position for your next drawing before erasing, or you will have to leave a trace to get it there, potentially ruining your new masterpiece right from the beginning. True masters purge the contents before drawing so the art is permanent.
- Life according to Etch-a-Sketch
HAH.. what it means is you take the activity underground and dot it anyway, otherwise you don't really believe what you say you believe.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You could try uploading the version you have to virustotal.
Andy
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
As a society we value the creation of content and came up with IP as a mechanism to help content authors make a profit from their work so they would be motivated to create more works.
I have yet to hear an alternate system in which content creators can make a living. Do you have a proposal?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Willingly facilitating in the distribution of copyrighted material is illegal. So although running a brightnet client may be legal by itself (as is hosting most web pages) as soon as you use it to distribute copyrighted material you have a problem.
It's just like piratebay.org, they don't host the data but in most countries what they are doing is considered illegal.
Absolutely - come round to my house and I'll skin up a joint - we might even share some files I've downloaded. Just don't ask me to blow hash smoke in a policeman's face.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
"It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something."
OK, then any person who posts a URL to a copyrighted file will be sued for copyright infringement, rather than the person hosting the data. In what sense is that an improvement over the status quo?
In other words, "uploaders" can't be sued in this setup unless you can prove that the uploaded file was intentionally violating copyright (you'd need to be monitoring the person already).
Of course, as downloading unauthorized copyrighted material also appears to be a crime in the US, they could still go after the downloaders.
I'd thought of this a while back. The general idea is that given blocks A B C, A XOR B = some copyrighted content, A XOR C = some public domain content, B XOR C = junk. This can be extended to require more than two blocks at a time. It's probably not defensible legally, and you have to store and ship around twice as much data.
In order to define information, as it is perceived by humans into binary data you would need a far deeper understanding of the human brain than we currently do. Words can be exchanged for ones of sufficiently close meaning, the edges of a picture cropped, sections of a tune repeated and so on in ways which do not significantly change the information a human would extract, but which would defeat a simple binary comparison. While we can represent information as binary data, we just don't know how to represent the nuances of human interpretation as mathematical operators on binary data. That's not a failing of copyright law, but of mathematics and biology.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Just ignoring the law and breaking it doesn't make you a fearless defender of freedom. It just makes you a criminal. Only if, through your actions, you actually hope to effect real change, can you justify them using your thesis.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
Your post says that common sense isn't applied in a court of law (and more often than not, that's the case). However the context of your post implies that this kind of thing would be legal were it not for those pesky courts disagreeing, though you certainly didn't suggest that everyone try it. Or that's how I read it, at least.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it. It is not just encryption. To upload my file A into the network, I take N blocks at random that are already up there, XOR them and use them as a 1 time pad for my data. Then i upload the resulting block. Ok, sounds like encryption so far.
To reassemble the data I need all N+1 blocks, otherwise it is just garbage. Also, I need a URL telling me which blocks to combine to get which files, otherwise there is a combinatorial explosion in the number of possibilities.
Also, someone else can come tomorrow and encrypt his file B using some of the same blocks I used. So if you are hosting one of those blocks, and A is legal while B is illegal, which file were you really sharing? Also, even if the people who uploaded those N+1 blocks could be traced, which one of them uploaded the file? So really, the only person distributing the file is the guy hosting the URL.. but URLs are small and it's much harder to stop distribution of small files.
About the overhead: since the blocks can be reused, there doesn't have to be much storage overhead. Of course there is an N-fold bandwidth overhead.
Sure... So if I put in Brittany's latest album, then tell my friend to click on the url that 'reassembles' the 'truly random' data into, well, Brittany's latest album, then do you really think copyright has nothing to say?
Sure, so the URL is a link to copyrighted material, and reassembling the file is copyright violation. Thing is, none of the N random blocks which are used to rebuild the album is copyrighted, individually... in fact maybe one of them is "provably random" as in a hash of shakspear's works, and another one is one of the blocks encoding someone else's home-brew porn.
We already rely on exclusive use of certain integers for particular individuals / organizations - pgp keys, etc. They're only (relatively) short - a few thousand bits, say - whereas the number representing MS Office is extremely long (many millions of bits). The set of all numbers representing actual creative works is incredibly sparse. It would take you a long time to get MS Office out of a random number generator...
So your concern of privatising the entire integer space isn't really valid. As you say, the number is just a representation - it's the creative work that matters and it doesn't affect anything how you dress it up.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Yes ... it will be the people storing and exchanging the URL's who will be in trouble.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Basically, the "URL" that they are using is nothing more then a list of indexes into a Random Number Table, and each element of the RNT is 128k bytes and the values of that table are distributed.
Say that you have a simplified RNT of 8 values:
Index; Seed; Value
1; 5; 10
2; 32; 9
3; 99; 13
4; 86; 17
5; 42; 11
6; 12; 7
7; 18; 23
8; 4; 3
Assume that the formula is simple addition, and your original text is "20". You can generate the following URL's;
...
2;5
1;6;8
4;8
However, if you publish the RNG, you can change the URL to simply be the seed values and you can compute the individual RNT value. This would simplify the whole system because you then do not need to transmit any blocks of 128k data.
I love kids these days, always thinking they are clever.
A long time ago a man wrote a book, he then made an index of all the words in the book and listed them in alphabetical order.
He then re-copied the book as a reference to the index.
Original: "I am the king of scotland"
Index: AM,I,KING,OF,SCOTLAND
Story: 2-1-3-4-5
Now this idea is nothing more then seeding a network with the index of data then to rebuild a particular file you pass is an index reference.
They would simply bust people for passing the index reference.
Ironical that old book became the foundation for modern day text compression schemes that used indexes and many of the key concepts that cryptography was born from.
Clever kids, if it was still the 1500's and you were trying to smuggle banned books under the nose of the inqusition. They just burned people with the indexes just as if they had the books themselves.
Honestly do they really thing that people are that stupid? If I use a pencil to stab someone I am going to jail just the same if I had used a knife. If someone is smuggling something across the border, but I don't know what, I am still an accomplice to some degree.
Plausable deniability is a great idea but the moment one of those indexes lands on you PC your gonna get dinged for whatever the index points too.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
URLs are small.
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Rather than reply to a load of (seemingly to me misguided) postings about OFF being clever encryption or whatever, here is my take on it: Suppose I have a file I want to upload. I do something like this. I split it into blocks (128Kbytes in this case). Then for each "original" block I create a set of "new" blocks such that, if the "new" blocks are (say) XOR'd together, they create the "original" block. I then upload the "new" blocks to various servers. The URL for the file lists which "new" blocks to get from which servers; anyone with the URL can retrieve the "new" blocks, do the XOR and regenerate the original file. Now, the "new" blocks cannot be copyright. If there are N "new" blocks for each "original" block then I can generate the first N-1 randomly, and then generate the Nth to give the right result. The Nth block is random in the sense that it is generated as a result of an "original" block and N-1 randome "new" blocks. The URL itself cannot be copyright; if it was then it I give someone instructions on how to get to some place where there is a copy of a book, and the PIN number for a photocopier, then that would be copyright as well. It seems to me that copyright is only infringed when someone gets the "new" blocks and recreates the file. So, the OFF does not magically get around having a dodgy copy of a copyright work, but it does get around storing that work,
With this kind of excessive use of random data, isn't hash collision to be expected pretty soon?
Maybe I've misunderstood you, but that sentence seems to suggest that you don't understand how public key cryptography works.
So, "nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away" is erroneous. Both the person offering the URL and the person accessing it need to hide if it's a work someone's going to exercise copyright over.
True. But the people hosting the blocks used to encode the copyrighted file do not infringe. The system is designed in such a way that the block you create to encode your file today will be used tomorrow by somebody else as part of the encoding for something totally different. This is what you call plausible deniability. I am just hosting some blocks, I really have no clue what all the uses for each block are.. and I don't mean possible uses (yes, I can one time pad anything into anything else) I mean real uses that someone has made of that block.
From the practical point of view it makes a huge difference because preserving anonimity while sharing small amounts of data (the urls) is an easier problem than preserving anonimity while sharing large amounts of data (the files themselves).
Here is all the digital data available in the universe with all duplicate versions removed. It takes up 1 byte.
0|0
1|0
0|1
1|1
You are not allowed to assemble these into a copyrighted work. You have been warned.
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Numbers don't have a unique purpose. The same number can be used in the construction of arbitrarily many files. You don't have to lie about the purpose of any such number. Be honest: "It's a block which is required for generating my holiday pictures." You can even prove it, if you have the URL which references that block as part of your holiday pictures. That same block can be used for any number of other purposes, which you know nothing about and can not influence, but that is true for absolutely every data you publish, even outside the context of an OFF. Participation in an OFF is a privacy issue, obviously, because you simply do not want anyone to know which legal files you're sharing and downloading.
Wait, are you calling me a debian newbie, or a human-geek-slashdot newbie?
Either way, I'm fairly sure the output would actually be more like:
$ sudo apt-get install common-sense && man common-sense
common-sense is a meta package
The following NEW packages will be installed:
RMS-logic RMS-common_sense RMS-IP_thoughts
The following currently installed package(s) will be removed:
human_society
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
As a rule, you don't copyright the exact data (i.e. the sequence of numbers representing a digital file). You copyright the actual tangible information. Attempting to abstract the law into mathematics is pointless. They are not compatible.
That's not the point. The point is that if someone downloads blocks from me to be used for copyrighted material, I cannot know what it is used for. Maybe these block also encode legal stuff. Because the same block encodes multiple files, and because a request does not state what the data is gonna be used for, I (probably) cannot be holded responsable for sharing copyrighted material.
This is interesting. If it works like this, then the downloader could use blocks downloaded from you to make a file that you don't possess. It's still copyright infringement in spirit, but it's difficult to make available a file that you don't actually have.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
that sentence seems to suggest that you don't understand how public key cryptography works.
Well I have a degree in math and a masters in computer science, and can work through the common forms of public key crypto from first principles, but anyway do tell me how I this shows I don't understand how public key crypto works.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I don't believe in marriage, so you won't mind if your wife and I get together then?
-Styopa
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
Hey, this isn't a binary nerve agent, it's just two harmless little chemicals sitting in my artillery shell. If I happen to fire it at a bunch of enemy soldiers standing over there and the two chemicals happen to mix and form a nerve agent, well gee, that sure is unfortunate but it couldn't be my fault!
I agree with what the colour guy said above, the lawyers aren't going to see any difference here. In a courtroom, it doesn't matter who is right, all that matters is who knows the law the best, who can bullshit the most brilliantly, and who has the money to buy the judgment they want. Trying to out-lawyer a lawyer in a courtroom is like playing Starcraft against Korean high-schoolers except you stand to lose a lot more money when you get pwn3d.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think the idea is that you can't prove which files were made from infringing works, or at least, you shouldn't be able to. So you can say "It LOOKS like I got it from that source, but I DIDN'T!"
In practice, I would expect the MAFIAA to sue everyone who had a file that could be part of a MAFIAA-owned, copyrighted work whether they were in the process of transmitting MAFIAA-owned files or not. It's not like they care if you're guilty, anyhow. They make it as hard and expensive as possible to raise a defense whether you're guilty or not.
BULLSHIT
Are we not professionals?
Repliying to statements like this "Of course the data is not random. And of course it represents the original data. If either of these two nonsensical statements were true, then it would be impossible to reconstruct the original data. [...]" Here's an idea; Lets calulate PI(eg. 3.14.....) so that it consumes X amount of gig's of HD space, then you use a formula to convert parts of that data into any file that you want. According to the reasoning of statements like above, it would be illigal to store PI because you can make copyrighted files based off of it. Maybe that what they need to do, just precalculate PI to fill up 1TB of HD, then you don't need to transfer any data other than the forumlea to turn parts of PI into whatever you want.
The song "Happy Birthday" is under copyright.
If I send you two emails, one that contains a numbered list of every word to "Happy Birthday" along with 1000 other words, in alphabetical order, and another email that contains the numbers of the words "Happy Birthday" in the order they appear in the song, the two together constitute a copyright violation.
The same principle applies if I give the page- and line-numbers of a common dictionary, or any other referenced source, even if the referenced source was itself in the public domain.
If two legally independent systems existed to transport this data each one would probably be immune from being prosecuted for "aiding and abetting" copyright violations, particularly if there were other legitimate uses, but a combined infrastructure which encouraged people to use it for copyright violations would be legally problematic.
Let's put it another way:
If I ran a legitimate service that operated this way, and I filtered out "re-assembly URLs" that appeared to be copyright violations, that would be legally defensible.
If, independently of me, you took copyrighted data and put it on my system with bogus re-assembly instructions and labeled the data "random_numbers", and then sent the correct reassembly data through another mechanism, I would be legally off the hook, but if you were ever caught, you would not be.
Legally, this is not much different than copyrighted data encrypted by a one-time pad. Either half can be considered the non-copyrighted pad, and proving which half is the pad and which half is derived from the original can be legally difficult or impossible, but together, it's the same as the original and anyone or any organization that says "I have a safe way for you to use my product to safely transmit both halves to circumvent copyright protection laws" is going to get hauled into court and lose. Anyone or any organization which, through gross negligence, allows such traffic and who could reasonably stop it without shutting down non-infringing uses, or which doesn't have a substantial amount of non-infringing use, is asking for a legally expensive court fight. He might win the fight but he will be financially bruised for it.
If you are going to pull a stunt like this, make sure it's broken into enough organizational pieces that each piece is clearly legally defensible, and make sure both each piece and the overall technology enjoy substantial use by legal users. Also make sure there is no cheap way of segregating infringing from non-infringing use.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Good god, you have degrees. Impressive. After all, it's not like I ever get CS grad students in my office who have approximately the same level of computer science knowledge as my grandmother.
FreeNet keys aren't the same length as the data, nor do they function as one-time pads, nor can you decipher the FreeNet data on your hard drive without an impossible amount of computing power. When you say this "is how FreeNet and other systems work," you've either misunderstood FreeNet or public key cryptography.
Yeah, I think we (by "we" I mean "people on Slashdot") have talked about this sort of thing before, except in a theoretical sense. The example I remember from the time was something like the following.
Imagine you had a very big file being shared through bittorrent, supposing it was something valid (like multiple DVD ISO files for Linux distributions). Now suppose someone found that they could recombine some subset of those blocks in a different order, and get some kind of a copyrighted file. Could the copyright holder sue someone for copyright infringement for sharing those blocks of data online (by participating in the torrent)? Or would they have to try to sue the person who published an altered tracker, allowing that copyrighted file to be pulled out, even though the tracker was not itself copyrighted material?
I don't think all of this is simply an attempt at legal hand-waving. It seems to me it's a general problem with copyright in the digital/internet age. Of course, the given example is far fetched, but apparently not all that far-fetched if someone is making a distributed filesystem that works that way.
With that analogy, you are outlawing random data. Random data is like a binary nerve agent? Come on. Just because data is random and doesn't have any color, it should be illegal? Everything without color is illegal? That doesn't sound like freedom to me. If I want to produce bits without color, than that is my free right. I'm not going to artificially color my bits, just because some likes bits with colors. A society where colors are mandatory and where everything is checked to see if it is the "proper" color, even though color is just an artificial/virtual addition which has no real meaning, is about as far from a free society as you can be. Especially if the meaning of color is sold to the highest bidder or the one with the most power.
I don't discriminate. I don't care what color bits are, nor do I care if a bit happens to be born without color. I don't even care if a bit is unhappy with its color and want to change it over time. I do care however if a bit is (re)colored against its will.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
There is a new add-on you can download to better understand
this new technology and it's representation.
It is called the File Crypto Knowledge-base or F.C.K. for short
when coupled with OFF, lets you know exactly what the main scope of the
application is.
When the courts use F.C.K.- OFF they will get a better sense of
where our technology is going and where they might stand in the near future
with these prosecutions.
Sorry, can't afford to bribe a congressman or I would do something about it.
MPAA and RIAA lobby to make random data illegal.
to a social/political issue.
Its so common for the truly geeky to think "oh, if I game the system enough then they won't be able to touch me"...
Believe me, you start this up, and they'll either find a way to prosecute it against you, or they'll MAKE it illegal... People (and thus the laws they create) are not "Nomad" from Star Trek, and you are not Captain Kirk, ready to use 5 minutes of cheesy logic to make everything blow up.
If you're concerned about the state of copyright, then work in the political realm to change it, using rational debate, effective lobbying, etc.
Or, to throw in one more geek reference from the OTHER great body of work (I went with Star Trek, gotta represent the other side):
"Don't be so proud of this technological terror you've created, its pales in significance to the power of the law."
Hint: His argument doesn't have anything to do with public-key crypto (or ordinary symmetric crypto either) although he shouldn't have mixed Freenet there.
Look it from this point instead: Freenet data is easily decipherable. Just decode it with a key (gotten via torture or something) and bang - you have pretty much undeniable a proof that the decrypted data WAS made from copyrighted content and is thus infringing.
With information-theoretic approach there's no way to tell that. You have three documents X, Y and Z. If you xor X and Y together you get a copyrighted document A, if you xor Y and Z together you get a free document B. Is Y "made" from A or B?
Is storing peoples' digital "faces" (life histories, medical records, ids etc) in ways that are not owned by any particular "hosting" company, and are not subject to sifting for marketing purposes, nor pre-crime analysis purposes.
Also, since the data would be redundantly stored, distributed around the world, on several of billions of Internet edge nodes, the data would not be subject to destruction by the bankruptcy of or legal injunction against, any single host corporation.
For similar reasons, the data would not be subject to destruction by natural disaster, nor by totalitarian regime.
This is the beginning of the possibility of
perpetually persistent information. Too bad so
much of it will be used for nausiously boringly
similar videos of toddlers learning to fall down.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If the system requires that blocks be reused, then some blocks will eventually be used by both illegally distributed works and legitimately distributed works. Even if the courts ruled that certain blocks were equivalent to a copyrighted file, it would be harder to enforce that decision (imagine the bad press if taking down 1 MP3 involved shutting down a tenth of the Internet).
Then again, modern P2P systems are already almost impossible to shut down, so there isn't that much of an additional advantage to using a brightnet. It might be more useful not as a mechanism for storing files, but as an experiment in copyright law.
I have just made a startling discovery! With enough transformations I can turn the number 42 into anything. Obviously the answer to life, the universe, and everything will be in there somewhere alongside various copyrighted material.
IANAL, but my understanding of copyright law and law in general is that it is typically performance based.
That means that If it is used and appears to have the purpose of distributing copyrighted material, no mathematical slight of hand in the middle changes the fact that copyrighted material is being moved. It may, however, offer some protection to the people operating the network, but anyone at the end points (providing/retrieving) is still likely to run into trouble. At the very least, it will be a costly argument to someone in court.
If the system offered substantial benefits to non-infringing users (and was used that way) over traditional ways of transferring files, then maybe they are ok, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck.
Long story short: Seek legal advice!
More Caffeine. NOW
Binary data can only represent discrete values. As such, a digital recording of a record, or a digitised photograph is only a representation. One of many possible representations of the information. The computer processes a binary representation. The fact that we can represent it in this way does not mean that this representation is what we have copyrighted.
In legal circles, there isn't any concept of "divinely defined". Typically they use the "reasonable person" test. Even though mathematically, an mp3 and an analogue recording of the same song are very different, a reasonable person, when it is explained how these recordings are typically used, would conclude that they are the same tune.
On a sideways, kind of off-topickish view, if my name was Bitchard I would love to just undersign (like you do) my posts when replying to annoying people and get away with it. Legally, I mean. In a court of law.
I speak England very best
"IP" isn't something to believe in as if it exists on it's own. We made it up. But we made it up for a reason.
Are you claiming that there is a religion out there somewhere that wasn't "made up"? Truth be told, they were even "made up for a reason"... controlling the populace is a strong reason.
To continue my anti-religion analogy, think about the following...
Q: What do you call a religion without followers?
A: Mythology.
- nuf sed
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There is a reason that legal "solutions" to technical problems deserve the derision we heap upon them. Legal "solutions" merely attempt to artificially constrain the problem without doing anything to resolve the technical nature of the problem itself.
To make this abundantly clear:
Legal solution to a technical problem - outlawing buffer overflow exploits
Technical solution to a legal problem - showing that the arresting officer made a procedural error which taints the evidence gathered against you.
You just mixed your namespaces.
1st: [Law solution (statutory)] tries to fix [Computer problem]
2nd: [Law solution (procedural)] tries to fix [Law problem]
These aren't equivalent. A technical computer solution to a computer problem is fine, as is a technical legal solution to a legal problem. What's worthy of derision is using a law solution to a computer problem or using a computer solution to a law problem, and that's what this is.
Claiming that you didn't violate someone's copyright because you copied their works without permission in a really nifty way is nonsense. Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody; it's a strict liability tort -- "innocent" infringement is still infringement.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I've spent my time on the barricades, unlike the politically apathetic students of today but, with age comes a certain amount of prudence and I know I have to temper my personal beliefs with those of society at large.
It might be that todays students are politically apathetic, because they fail to see how your generation made a difference with being politically active. I'm not saying your generation didn't make a difference (can't judge that) btw, but the only thing I can think of that came out of that era was feminism and the sexual revolution.
In the current political climate, really changing something by political activism isn't going to work anymore. You need heap loads of money, lobbyist and political capital instead. Young generations don't have access to those.
Take a look at copyright. Most youngsters are into p2p and don't agree the way copyrights are written into our laws. So what does the old generation do? They "educate" them, implement DRM/TPM, force laws which allow ISP's to monitor them, raid their "leaders" (piratebay), bad mouth them, etc, etc. You smoked dope, they download torrents. Will it make a difference? No.
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers? With the proper compression and/or encryption scheme, you could use any number (trivially in some cases) to represent a work over which you can claim copyright. Do we then let a corporation privatise the entire integer space? And if not, how do we distinguish between infringing and non-infringing uses of a large number?
Reminds me of some scifi theory/short story that I read once. It basically assumed that all data where contained in pi somewhere. All you needed was the offset, the length and an infinite processor that could calculate pi out to that far in nanoseconds.
That would be interesting if some one could search pi for valid files and if any are found.
As a matter of fact, if you give someone a set of instructions for building a bomb with the intent of the recipient building a bomb with them, you can be fined $250,000 and spend 20 years in jail.
It's been like that for over a decade now.
http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa021003a.htm
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
They are not derivative works. They are latent forms of the original work, and not derivative. A derivative work is the result of an intelligent and non-automatable transformation of the original work -- like translating a book to another language or adding a new, different, verse to a song.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I think it's more a case of what looks like common sense to a layman often misses the complexities of the case. It's the same in computer industry - as witness any number of users who ask "why can't you just make it do what I want?" as if a telepathic interface and natural language processor were the easiest things in the world.
Indeed.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
It's harder to trace the origin of one of 10 packets than one of 10,000?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
You could reasonably expect that someone downloading OFF blocks from you will use them to infringe. Who would use OFF for freely licensed material when it could be downloaded 3x faster in the clear? I wouldn't take the risk of being held liable for contributing to copyright infringement or worse, the distribution of illicit material.
Clearly they won't prosecute anyone for hosting the random bits, but they WILL prosecute anyone who distributes the URLs that allow the reconstruction.
J
I think they understand it quite well.
They just don't understand that the gaming involves money instead of technology.
whoever has the most money wins.
The internet is illegal right now thanks to rulings making it illegal to link to "infringing" content.
even ignoring the fact that 98% of what is on the internet is actually infringing (images, copied news reports, blah blah), if linking once to it is illegal, the next logical move is doubly-indirect links.. which will be ruled illegal under a "reasonable extrapolation" from that precedent, and then linking triple indirect.. until finally any level of indirection is illegal.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Wow, I can implement that in a one-liner: int getbyte( string filename, int offset ) { return rand() & 0xFF; }
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
In other words, it's distributing liability for infringement to all the people holding the bits you use to assemble the file. Wow. That's great.
No court is going to rule that centuries of legal tradition are meaningless before mathematical sophistry. The way you store the file is just as irrelevant to infringement as whether you've got music in MP3 format or AAC format.
You may think it's mathematically clever, but the court's aren't going to be interested in the logic of the math as much as the social and economic costs of allowing the creator's interpretation of copyright law to have any meaning. Courts will also look to the difficulty of enforcement if they limit liability to only those who uploaded the original file (which would be untraceable pretty quickly) and to those who downloaded the file via the URL (which is also nigh impossible to trace). The only easily identifiable contributors to the act left are those people holding the pieces.
The most likely result of a case like this is an extension of Grokster to create liability for just running the software since it doesn't have (per Grokster) "substantial noninfringing uses," and the software actively takes steps to make it impossible for the users not to have derivative portions of copyrighted works on their system. Efforts to make the transaction untraceable (via this randomized block encryption) and open advocacy of this as a means to defeat copyright would also count as "clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement."
I can't see this software as accomplishing anything more than distributing liability for copyright infringement. The only saving grace for it is that you have no idea whose rights you're violating or how many violations you've committed, so you can't be on the hook (civilly) for every file you share pieces of since there's no way of identifying all the victims.
However, all it takes is for the RIAA or MPAA to hire MediaSentry or some other firm to download a single file and copy down the IP addresses of every person they get a chunk from, and it's lawsuit city!
At least you're safe from criminal copyright violation since that requires willful infringement which I don't think can be proven, though again the fact that you ran a service that you can't not infringe with might be damaging, but given that the only practical means of enforcing the laws would be to make the people running data stores liable, that's exactly what the courts will do, all your protests of holding "random" data be damned.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What the law says is just as irrelevant as long as you dont get caught.
Absolutely true - but once you go down that road you might as well use AES/symetric cypher (even aes as a prng would be fine...)
or we can just ignore it out of spite and stay ahead of the game technologically.. You talk like law has to do with morality. It doesn't. It's bought and sold like any other commodity.
I made a longer winded post about this here, but I'll summarize for you.
That's not the point. The point is that if someone downloads blocks from me to be used for copyrighted material, I cannot know what it is used for.
That's the problem. You have absolutely no way of knowing that you're not sharing infringing blocks, you have no way to prevent it, and yet you've still willingly installed and ran the software on your system.
How are the courts going to preserve copyright law in the face of this technical challenge? Make no mistake, courts aren't going to just throw up their hands in the air and say, "Wow! Centuries of legal tradition and entire sectors of the US economy have now been made obsolete by a very clever way of copying data. Let's call the whole thing off!" Somebody has to be held to account.
What can they do?
1) Make the person who uploaded the file liable?
2) Make the person who downloaded the file liable?
3) Make the people holding chunks of the file liable?
4) Treat the URL itself as a derivative work?
The first option is technically unfeasible. So is the second, unless you run your own data-store containing pieces of your own files as a sting operation, and you know what each chunk downloaded from you is. The third is feasible, because all it requires is that an authorized agent (like MediaSentry) download the file and track the IPs of all people who give them chunks -- every one of those people had an infringing piece, after all. The fourth has some real problems with not overreach and would create massive hassles for search engines, so I doubt the courts would go with that.
I think the most likely solution is to treat the software like that in Grokster as software that aids in infringement and doesn't have substantial noninfringing uses and to extend the decision to hold users liable for contributing to infringement. It's the most practical solution (from the court's perspective) to the situation.
All this accomplishes is getting them to turn another screw. So, thanks to all the people who invented this idea. Thanks a lot. (With friends like these, who needs enemies?)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that sentence about independent reproduction. It doesn't really matter here, since that's not what's happening here (you really are sending around derivative blocks), but that was a very, very poor way of phrasing my point.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Your post advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to p2p file sharing. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(X) Pedophiles can easily use it to share child porn
( ) Regular internet traffic and other legitimate network uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will work for two weeks and then Comcast/Other ISPs will filter it.
( ) Users will not put up with it
(X) ISPs will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft/Apple will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from sharers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
(X) MediaDefender
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new protocols
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new software to get movies
(X) Huge existing userbase of BitTorrent
( ) Susceptibility of protocols to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install patches to keep the protocol up to date
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of P2P sharing
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who share files
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) RIAA/MPAA Lawsuits
(X) Friends ratting out your darknet
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able share files without being censorted
( ) Countermeasures should not involve iptables rules
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sharing files should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody [...]
This part of my post is incorrect. I think what I meant to say was that pretending to independently reproduce the same work doesn't matter, but the first part of this sentence is nonsense as written.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
So I repeat my question: Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation? I am really curious what economic model proponents of no-IP have in mind.
The thing is, with the right archiving algorithm, you could encrypt a given piece of data into any integer desired. For instance, XOR an MS Office zip against a tar file of the linux kernel. Take the output and go to the judge and ask for a Cease and Desist order, on the grounds that the kernel tar is in fact a representation of MS Office.
You'd need to be a bit more subtle than that, but I expect you make a reasonably convincing spoof encryption program without too much effort. You probably wouldn't go after something with such a solid provenance as the kernel, either, but you could probably shut down a lot of smaller legitimate online distributors.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Take a deep breath....relax....and understand what this is really for....
This is not to protect the person who uploads whatever copyrighted whatever to the brighnet....
This is not to protect the person who downloads whatever from the brightnet and does whatever to take their download and re-create whatever copyrighted whatever.....
THIS IS to protect the person who RUNS a brighnet node to distribute LEGALLY allowed content. When bad luck and trouble bring investigators to this person's hard disk, he is innocent.
If they cannot find they URL key, if I RTFA correctly, to take the random blocks and create the whatever copyrighted whtatever, brightnet admin is innocent.
Be it Britney Spears or kiddie porn....wait, was I redundant here?
Why sue everyone in the network? Just obtain a copy of the work via OFF and sue everyone that served up a block used in that copy. Repeat as necessary.
Do you really think "I just served some blocks of data that aren't part of any particular file, I had no idea what the person who downloaded them would use them for" is going to persuade a jury? How about after the plaintiff points out that OFF has no substantial non-infringing use? (It transfers three times as much data as is necessary when copying a freely-licensed work.)
This must be an intelligence officer's greatest nightmare.
Setup the system so that it uses images from google images or some other image source to store secret instructions and there you go. Forget about modifying an image or audio file, just use some random existing data.
So can neuronal discharges. Neurons in our brains can only be in one of two electrical states: firing and idle.
Information is by definition a "representation". Image of a building, a concept of a building are not the same as the photons bouncing off a building nor the concrete and steel itself. And by the very nature information is mathematically convertible to binary format (with an arbitrary loss of precision).
In order to be detectable in this Universe, information must be "represented" in some way, be it in dimples on a CD or as electron discharges in your brain or configurations of proteins in your synapses. Furthermore, all abstract concepts are, by definition, mutually equivalent with numbers. Every single one. That is one of the fundamental properties of information. And every number can be represented in base of 2.
Anything contradicting science (and logic or mathematics in particular) is by definition arbitrary bullshit pulled out of lawyers asses.
A few centuries back any "reasonable person" would tell you that one can test women for witchcraft by submerging them in a sack until they die. If they float, they are witches...
See above. That is why lawyers, judges and politicians so regularly turn out to be brain-dead jackasses. They simply have no idea about the things they try to decide on.
Information is a scientific, not legal, concept and it has specific properties and attributes that govern its behavior. No amount of silk-suited morons will alter these properties nor the nature of information, no matter how many brown envelopes change hands and no matter how many "reasonable people" get to express their ignorant superstitions.
It seems to me that there's no way to ever delete anything, as it is all intertwined with other people's data/other data.... is this correct?
Not really. IP is a mechanism created by society for a specific economic reason: to encourage the investment of time and money in production of non-physical products because it is assumed, as a society, we would prefer to have those products than not have those products.
A question I keep asking, but no answer yet: Do you have an alternate economic model that will still result in the creation of products most affected by IP (software, movies, songs, books, etc.)?
Would an author still spend a year or two creating a book if there there were no copyright laws allowing him/her to make money? Maybe it's possible, but I haven't heard any kind of explanation yet as to how it might work.
All of those are examples of binary data and mathematical manipulation of thereof. Picture can be represented, to an arbitrary degree of precision, as binary data. The operation of "cropping" is a mathematical transform on such. Repetition is a mathematical transform. Words are equivalent to numbers. "Close meaning" is a concept representable by numbers (a pair of concepts in a table with a number indicating "cloeseness" between them). Etc. Information and numbers (and thus binary numbers) are one and the same. Furthermore, the information inside human brain is represented in a form of electrical discharges and chemical states, all of which are equivalent to numbers. There is no escape from this. All information and numbers are interchangeable. This is one of the fundamental properties of information.
All of these are already numbers (represented by electrical discharges and protein assemblies). That is what information is.
No it is not. Science has dealt with this long ago, whole scientific theories were developed and tested dealing with properties of information and its transmission. It is the brain-dead lawyers and politicians who refuse to listen, primarily because this scientific knowledge gets in the way of Lord Greed. And we all know that Greed will trump science every time.
A way will be found to make it illegal.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
All "fearless defenders of freedom" are always criminals in the eyes of their respective tyrants. Period.
As history teaches us, there usually is no other way. Being a "criminal" comes with the territory as your foes in power are certain to label you this way, particularly when you threaten their massive wealth and power with your actions.
Only if this is you doing it by your lone self. Now try 100000 people smoking at the same time and see what happens.
That is called "submission" and is the most basic mechanism by which the power elites get to rule, in whatever political system. Once you have a comfortable house, a car, kids and all sorts of things "to lose", your begin to make "compromises" designed to keep your comforts at the expense of "small concessions" in your personal beliefs and general "prudence". And before you know it, you have traded all your principles for a comfy couch in front of a flickering idiot box. Congratulations.
The fact is, there is no such thing as "a computer solution to a law problem".
And that's what BrightNet attempts to be.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and upload Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And how is that any different from Freenet? In both cases the uploader has complete deniability about what "KLM" is going to be used for.
You've uploaded a portion of a copyrighted work (for a purpose that isn't covered by fair use). There's your illegal act. Nothing FreeNet or BrightNet do make this more legal -- just harder to catch and prove in the case of FreeNet.
If I'm on BrightNetP2P and I download Random Chunk "KLM" from multi-gigabyte Random Block "ABCD...XYZ", what have I done that is illegal? And short of searching my computer, how are you going to prove I've infringed on anything at all? And speaking of searching computers, what part of my BrightNetP2P traffic would give you probable cause to do so?
In order:
However, this is all a red herring since the data chunk might not be there anymore. The real evidence will come from downloading it from you.
The only issue with their proposed system is in distributing the URL and there are ways to robustly and anonymously do that (a Freenet-esque overlay comes to mind).
That sort of goes against the whole "open and bright" thing they have going. Basically, all they have is FreeNet - Anonymity + "Chunked" Files. They seem to think that chopping up the files makes copyright go away. It doesn't.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
RIAA: Judge this scum infringed on our copyright, see we downloaded this file and part of it came from him so make him give us all of his money.
Mr. Smith: Actually Judge, the piece that they downloaded from me also maps to countless other files.
Mr Smith hands a list of URLs containing a bunch of non-copyrighted files containing that piece somewhere in the URL.
Did you miss the part where the blocks are 128 KiB in size? Just how many files do you think share the same, exact 128 KiB block (especially when the blocks are likely to be divided evenly starting from byte 0)? (Considering that there are 2 ^ 131,072 possible "numbers" for each block to represent.)
I think the "preponderance of the evidence" points to civil liability.
Even if the blocks were that universal, then by downloading the URL, all you've done is download a fancily compressed version of the file. It's not like you can get away with just putting an MP3 in a ZIP file and say it's no longer infringing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You're dead right. What is interesting is that if you're "caught" with some of these random blocks on your disk, they're just random blocks of data. You can't decode them unless you have the key, hence there's no charge of copyright infringement.
Under this system, anyone distributing URLs necessary to reconstruct a Britney Spears tune is definitely violating copyright. I also think that anyone holding any of the pieces referred to by those URLs could also get in trouble. It would matter little if the blocks got on your machine due to someone uploading some Creative Commons content. If one or two them also can also be used to reconstruct the Britney tune then some lawyer will make hay of it.
Except that this "mechanism" contradicts in a wholesale manner the scientifically testable properties of information, which it is supposed to somehow govern. As such it is an exact equivalent of a fundamentalist religion in which a "holy book" takes precedence over all scientific discovery.
First of all, an "alternate economic model" is not a requirement in demonstrating the anti-scientific nature of "Intellectual Property". If your business depends on people pretending that gravity does not exist, my demonstrating that it does (and by doing so depriving you of income) is not dependent on me finding you some other way to make money! It is your problem! After all it was you who were operating a scam based on falsehoods.
I can however point out an alternative: an updated for the Information Age patronage system. This is in fact what many independent artists do already: they depend on direct electronic donations from their fans from all over the globe. If promotion of arts and sciences was indeed the goal, one could set up a myriad of private, non-profit and governmental foundations, direct donation systems and so on, complete with methods of electronic public participation in allocation of these funds to specific artists. This not only solves the problem of paying the artists (and scientists) it does so without attempting to contradict the scientific properties of information. Of course under such system a mega-corporation would not be able to manufacture a random blond ditz into a "pop star" in order to profit from such a "product". And that is the main reason why this fight against science is on.
See above. All art developed prior to 18th century was created in the world without copyright. Only someone blinded by an ideology of greed would deny that the bulk of what we call "art" today existed before the assembly line "art" model was invented.
I'm going to set up a server that responses to any 'requests' for blocks with 128k of random noise. It should cause arbitrary data loss for those recovering files, and unrecoverable encryption for those adding files. It'll be particularly disastrous if the block is a directory block :)
Meanwhile, this system might be a way of cataloging all of the possible SHA hashes for some nefarious purpose.
No. The bits have no meaning. They are isolated random blocks of data, which have no meaning by themselves. Theoretically speaking, a random block of data could infringe in the same way a bunch of monkeys with type-writers might accidentally produce a text that infringes on copyright.
....Riiiiight....
As with the other respondent, you seem to have missed the fact that these "random" blocks of data are 128 KiB in size. There's only a 1 in 2 ^ 131,072 chance that a random chunk of data matches the particular one you want.
The filesystem cannot truly exist as a source of "random data" because the storage requirement for every single possible 128 KiB chunk of data are enormous. ...Or so I thought. I now realize, that that just requires 16 GB to cover every single possible 128 KiB chunk.
In that case, the entire network operation side of this is pointless.
It isn't a randomized block encryption. It is a storage space for random blocks of data. The random blocks of data carry no meaning and have no special significance. They are just random neutral blocks of data. What gives them meaning is the URL, which combines various blocks of random to become something with meaning.
If the blocks just exist "out there," then all you've done is encrypt the data in the URL, making the URL just as much a derivative work as an MP3 in a ZIP file. Just because you have to go through an extra step to retrieve the data doesn't make the file any less infringing, and all the information you need to do so is in the URL. All you need is your fancy BrightNet decoder ring.
(Note that the URL will always have to be at least the same size as the original file. You can't find 1 in 2^n chunks containing your n bytes of data without a n-byte key.)
So, you're right. Downloading the chunks doesn't seem all that effective of a way to deal with the copyright infringement. Instead, treating the URL as a derivative work and going after anyone who shares it is the best option.
This confuses me. P2P has substantial non infringing uses, that people don't use it that way, well you can't blame the technology or a service provider for that.
You don't understand what the courts mean by substantial. It doesn't mean that the distinct possibility exists that someone, somewhere might not be using a product for ill purposes. It means that a significant use (arguably the main use) of a product in noninfringing, like with the VCR.
Grokster was not such a product. The vast majority of traffic on Grokster was infringing material, and Grokster, Inc. encouraged the use of the product for infringement. Similarly, while this product could be used as a bizarre (and network wasteful) form of encryption (that's universally breakable by anyone using BrightNet), it's obvious declared intent is to void copyright law and to encourage infringement. There is, in fact, no use for this product (given its wasteful use of the network to download a single file in twice the number of bytes) except to avoid the law.
Judges aren't idiots. They aren't going to rule that the law is impotent in the face of some fancy shuffling method.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I gauged wrong the improbability of having the right sized chunk. You only need 16 GiB of data to represent all possible chunks.
That makes this nothing but a fancy, 128 KiB key decoder-ring style "encryption" scheme for the data. All you're doing is saying is that A -> D (on some other system), B -> X (on some other system), etc.
You didn't actually "store" anything. You just took a 5 MiB MP3 file and replaced it with a 5 MiB URL, which is just as much a derivative work as the original file. Sorry, ZIPing or RSA encrypting an MP3 file doesn't output a noninfringing file anymore than BrightNet does.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Then what do they know abut whats on your harddrive?
This was done long before, by Tangler and
Dagster.
Not sure what religion has to do with this economics question.
Then you didn't read my post. I was pointing out the flaw in your argument, where you said that Imaginary Property was something that we made up, and so it did not need to be "believed in" in order to be considered real. In case I didn't make myself clear:
I disagree.
As for your questions...
Do you have an alternate proposal for incentivizing content creators?
If not, do you believe that software/books/movies/songs/etc. will be created by individuals for no compensation? Or by companies for no compensation?
When I was growing up, artists and musicians did what they did for the love of the music/art. Metallica went on MTV and said they would never make a music video because they "weren't in it for the money." Now they've alienated their fanbase by suing them for giving away their music, and they're pissed off about the lack of money in the equation. Nevermind that they went on TV in front of millions of people and lied. Seems to me that the artists need to figure out which way they're trying to be, and stick to it once they've chosen. This, of course, is just anecdotal evidence and meandering ranting, and is also totally off topic. Get off my lawn!
Back to the issue at hand.
Yes, I have an "alternate proposal" for "incentivizing content creators". I like to call it "cut out the middlemen who do no work, maximize your profits without raking your customers over the coals, and stop pinching everyone's wallets while whining about how you don't make any money because you only get 1% of the profit of each CD sold". It involves content creators posting their content for the world to enjoy, and asking for (non-specific amounts of) money.
(As an aside, I'm typically insulted when people tell me I have to donate a specific amount of money. If I want to give you 50 cents for a single song, I should be able to. Don't tell me I have to give you $5 and take the whole disk!)
If this "economic model" seems surprising to you, then it would seem I need to point out to you that several big names are already doing it, as you can see with a little googling on the subject. To get you started, allow me to offer the following as potential search terms:
"Nine Inch Nails", "Radiohead", "donation", "free music"
It may interest you to learn that the results from these attempts have been successful (or at least, that's what I read). You may also be interested in Jonathan Coulton, who seems to be making quite a decent living by giving his stuff away for free.
Despite answering in the affirmative (and with proof!) and thus excusing myself from the "bonus questions", I will continue in this monologue, answering your second and third questions, too. Please note that the emphasis is mine.
The answers are simple and undeniable. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by individuals for no direct financial compensation. Yes, I believe that software, books, movies, songs, etc. are being created by companies for no direct financial compensation. As proof, I offer up open source software (Linux, for example; The Apache Software Foundation, for another), free books (check out the Baen Free Library, or Project Gutenberg), free movies, free music, and the beginnings of an economic model that depends on having products and services that have more than just a financial value to the consumers and producers... which raises the questio
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Unless I'm mistaken I think there's something else going on here that may be getting lost in this copyright noise. What if instead of looking at this as a method for illegally trafficking in copyrighted material one looks at more like a backup system?
If I take my legally owned MP3's and place them into OFF as a safeguard against my machine crashing and losing that data am I violating a copyright? Assume that I don't share the magic URLs. Haven't I then just simply made one copy of the file that is now stored in the cloud?
Now my laptop falls off the back of my motorcycle on the way home from the office. It goes bouncing down the freeway finally getting hammered by a bus. Total loss. Can't I now retrieve all my MP3s by simply accessing the URLs that I created (and hopefully stored somewhere else!).
Have I reduced my personal backup storage requirements by keeping URLs instead of the original data? Have I increased my chances of getting my data back because it is no longer stored in a finite number of places ( 10 ) that are arguably less geographically dispersed than the OFF system?
Okay. As far as obfuscating the concept of who's actually doing the infringing goes, I can see this working. I just got the impression from reading this that they thought this would be entirely legal rather than generally legal in concept, and making it hard to enforce copyright laws.
This is a very clever separation of concerns. You put the burden of mass bulk traffic onto the shoulders of a huge crowd covered by bullet proof plausible deniability. But the actual acts of infringement - the provision of copyrighted material (through URLs) - can be delivered from low bandwidth servers in banana states.
It gives you a way to transfer copyrighted materials to other authorized users if you are authorized to do so.
But why bother with something so convoluted? If I'm authorized to distribute file X to 3 of my friends, I can just upload it to a password-protected web site and give them the password. The hosting provider is off the hook since I'm authorized to distribute the material to the 3 people who have authorized access to it.
With respect to copyright, it's a nice thought exercise but of little practical use.
Systems like this have practical uses when it comes to distributing material where it is dangerous or illegal to distribute the material but where those causing the danger or illegality are acting immorally, such as disseminating information to fight a despotic government or blowing the whistle on corporate malfeasance.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately, the soon-to-be president is secretly a Muslim.
From what I am reading (I know, WTF am I doing actually R'ing TFA?), this isn't encryption in any sense of the word. It's hash comparison using random data. The blocks of data are not, in any way, related to the "stored" data. From what I can understand, a hash is generated using XOR against a random file block, based on some portion of the file you are "uploading". These blocks are then stored all over the place, and reused if they match someone else's (and it would seem they must, eventually... 128k is not an overwhelmingly huge address space). Each "node" (storage place) has its own unique identifier, and the blocks stored on it are referenced by other nodes to "store" the "inserted" data in the OFF.
From what I'm reading, this is either a really cool method of using up all those extra few gigs of space on everyone's hard drives (although "inserted" files triple in size, according to the wiki) which has nothing to do with copyright stuff (assuming you're not sharing the locator info), or this is just one more hoop to jump through in an attempt to keep the MAFIA (Movie And Film Industries of America) from noticing that your Brittney Spears collection is growing again. If the former, it's less than ideal. If the latter... well, at least Deep Packet Inspection (is that like a colonscopy for data?) won't be able to tell that you're pulling down mixes of "Oops I did it again" again. And, as other posters have stated... if you can show that the data you downloaded is actually a linux ISO and a video of you playing with your new dog in your own back yard, why does it matter that you can also convert it into a copy of that new blockbuster movie?
Obfuscation of a ubiquitous behavior seems like a poor solution, too.
If the majority of people are doing it, why is it still a legal issue?
On the other hand, the wiki has this bit about how game patches could be distributed using just a little more bandwidth than the executable itself. I'm wondering if that's per download, or if it's a one-time bandwidth chunk.
In summary, the concept of a global network of data storage is pretty neat, but I think we will find in the end that this particular implementation is flawed... assuming it doesn't turn out to be just a hack to hide illegal activites from the authorities. Paradigm-changing new tech I'm interested in. Arms race, not so much. Fight copyright, not enforcement.
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On the third computer.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Your arguments are more effective if they stay on-topic. We are talking about economics, not science and not religion. We are talking about made up societal "contracts", thats all.
It wasn't a person operating a scam, it was a society that agreed the pros and cons of one economic model relating to specific transactions were more favorable to society as a whole than the other alternatives. Something you may not realize is that there really are no absolute rights, we created all of them. The only things preventing me from taking your computer are our laws/enforcement, and the possibility that you might be bigger than me. Whether it's physical property or any other manner of economic interaction, the only reason we have any rules is because we made them up.
Excellent, now we are on-topic with an alternate model. It seems like a very real problem with this model would be people copying others work and claiming they created it and then diverting donations to the person that copied the work. I can easily imagine a person/groups/companies being very effective at copying and advertising their "new" works and thus starving the actual artists of funds. Do you agree that this would be a natural outcome of that system or do you see inherent protections that would prevent it?
All those words and no content.
Is this from a random number generator hooked to a dictionary?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
The problem with this argument is it's reductionist. If you blend up 5 copyrighted works and pour them into 10 shot-glasses (the network), sure you can claim each individual shot-glass doesn't fall under the same copyright of any single one of the original works. But since you can extract each of the 5 original works from the collective set of the 10 shot-glasses, then the network as a whole does contain the copyrighted works, and does fall under copyright protection. In a sense, they have smeared each copyright out over many (possibly overlapping) chunks, but it's still there because the originals can still be retrieved. Banning the whole network seems a possible legal outcome, since non-infringing uses may still involve moving chunks which contain a partial copyright.
As much as the creators of OFF might claim their work is different to a darknet, actually it relies on very similar principles of obfuscation.
My point was not that it should be considered real. My point was that real/imaginary is not even part of the discussion. This is all about made up rules relating to economic transactions. Things you may consider real property also have rules we made up.
Alternate Model - Donations
Could work, but I strongly suspect people will take advantage of this type of model and merely copy some artists work, pass it off as their own and divert funds. People engaged in this behavior would probably be faster/stronger than the artists, using money to advertise their "new" works, constantly scanning the internet, etc. Without any IP laws to prevent this, how would you prevent it?
Examples of Current No-Direct-Compensation
Something to keep in mind regarding OSS is that much development is paid for by comapnies like IBM, etc., and their reasons are typically to help them make money in areas protected by IP. If the laws on IP were eliminated today, do you think we would see this same level of investment in OSS by these companies? I don't think we would. While I see the examples you have given of individuals and companies creating products for no-direct-compensation, I have a hard time picturing a large scale economy where so much is donation based. I think people in general will try to get away with what they can, meaning no or small donations, which I believe will leave the artists, etc. without enough income to exist.
why you are so fixated on the dollar, instead of the community
Because the dollar buys the artist (or other IP related fields) food, house and allows him/her to raise a family. It's not a fixation, it's merely a mechanism. While it would be nice to have a society where information is freely shared and each persons work can quickly build on anothers, I believe that competition is also a critical factor in advancement. People are motivated by the dollar which drives activity (to a degree). I don't think you can stray too far from competition and keep people motivated, and capitalism appears to be the best vehicle for economic competition. If there was another vehicle to drive competition then maybe community could be the primary focus, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
I like to kick puppies and throw water balloons at cats. Not really, but voicing an opinion in this particular thread is likely to get me the same sort of reputation. Heck with it, I'll do it any way.
Rary and ShieldW0lf, you both have a point. Distribution of binaries without source code, particularly without ever providing source code to any oversight body, is dangerous. The tetris clone for example, might contain vulnerabilities or outright malicious code to zombify recipient machines. Without oversight, even a benign and well coded version might be replaced with a malicious one and (without oversight remember) be used as a vehicle to inflict even more of that greatest evil (which is spam) on the world at large. Yet the coder of the benign tetris binary doesn't have ill intent nor any reason to be held to the same standards as a pharmaceutical company.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle ground, or "common sense" as it is sometimes termed. It isn't the distribution of closed source binaries that is particularly dangerous but rather the same without reasonable oversight. The answer is to provide a central repository, somewhat like or even an extension of the Library of Congress. We tack on a new source code oversight branch to some other government bureaucracy (as legislators are fond of doing) which is responsible for reviewing and rating the safety and suitability of purpose for each closed source binary released. Releasing a binary without providing source to the central authority would be a crime, perhaps a misdemeanor for non-malicious intent, and code which has not received a review yet but has been submitted, must be clearly described as unreviewed and potentially dangerous. (As a smoker let me tell you, de government likey de label laws.) Fines increase in proportion to potential damage of an unregistered binary.
Meanwhile, source code may be released or not as deemed desirable by the original author, but open source code is given a tax break for all revenue generated by the distribution, since it is a charitable donation to society (no tax break for related services, that would set up potential reward for poor programming.)
Everybody wins! Well, except for the tax payers who are used to being hosed over anyway. We can perhaps justify it by saying there will be an economical compensation with more safe code and better reviewed publicly used software. "We" as used here, being the politicians who get lobbied to pass such legislation since they will need some rationalization regardless of whether or not it is actually rational.
Oh yeah, only individuals may own the right to closed source code and it is open sourced at their death. If your code is really good, your life insurance rates will skyrocket until you release it.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Maybe, maybe not. It sounds like somebody was thinking about removing duplicate data from file systems in a significant way. They appear to have gotten side tracked by this idea of avoiding responsibility for copyright infringement, but the original concept is interesting. At least what I hope was the original concept.
Lets pretend I know the original concept, as I suspect I do, due to convergent thought processes. Essentially it is this, you get a large number of people to store chunks of indexed data and as more and more people add to the list, you remove duplicate entries beyond what is required for resiliency. For a couple thousand files, there is no significant improvement over regular existing compression algorithms, but over hundreds of millions, perhaps a couple billion, you end up with needing very little additional storage for your entire library of files. You can do backups of your entire system requiring additional storage of perhaps a couple hundred megabytes. Data is compressed on the end blocks with traditional algorithms, decompressed on the fly.
There are two problems with the implementation as I read it. First, they are randomizing the data rather than the distribution alone. I should be able to fearlessly store a couple gigabytes for anonymous users since I am gaining from the service a distributed resilient and redundant file system. However, the savings in storage are negated since two copies of the same file with different origins would have different (essentially encrypted) segments requiring double the storage of unencrypted versions.
Second, the system described in the only page I read doesn't adequately deal with data collisions. I'd be happy to make backups onto such a system if it were dependable, but leaving aside the nature of a voluntary anonymous Internet system, the possibility of data corruption would cut my desire down to practically nil.
Yes nitpickers, I do know that it isn't really encryption, but it is like enough for the purposes of my point. As to technical merits, I've done it at file level backups and it was hugely significant and reliable, I did md5.sha1 which was good enough for my purposes, but add more as fits your personal paranoia level. I was explaining my closest theory on a method that does almost this to coworkers complete with mysql database and whiteboard two weeks ago, i.e. convergent thought processes.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I like to kick puppies and throw water balloons at cats. Not really, but voicing an opinion in this particular thread is likely to get me the same sort of reputation. Heck with it, I'll do it any way.
I appreciate your opinion, and I promise not to fuel your reputation for animal cruelty. Unless you happen to kick my dog or throw water balloons at my cats, in which case prepare for a serious ass-kicking.
Unfortunately, you seem to contradict yourself (unless I'm missing something, which is possible at 11:30 at night).
First you say:
Releasing a binary without providing source to the central authority would be a crime...
But then you say:
Meanwhile, source code may be released or not as deemed desirable by the original author...
So, the source code may be released or not as deemed desirable by the original author, but really he better do it because it's a crime not to. On the one hand you make it sound like the author has a choice, but it's really a choice of whether or not to break the law.
I just really have a problem with this whole idea of legally forcing software developers to release source code. First of all, closed source binaries are just not so dangerous that we need laws against them.
Secondly, let's look at this from the user's perspective. Whatever happened to users of software taking a little responsibility for their own decisions? I mean, if I trust a particular software developer or software company enough to use their software without seeing the source code, that's my choice, and I don't want the government stepping in and arresting or fining them just because they didn't give me the source code. There are open source alternatives out there, but I made my own choice to use closed source instead.
I see it like this. I like to write software. I write it professionally, but at home I also write software for myself. Once in a while, I might write something that I think others might find useful, and therefore I might decide to distribute it for free (as in beer). Sometimes I might include the source code. Other times I might not, for various reasons. Maybe I wrote it really quickly and I'm ashamed of the sloppy code. Whatever. The point is, if you want to use my code, then go ahead and use it. If you don't trust it without seeing the source, fine, don't use it. Whatever. But there's no reason I should be facing criminal charges for the binaries I post that don't include source code. That's just plain ridiculous.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
So you're creating a parallel between the act of terminating a human life and storing information?
It is a double xor encryption. Firstly with a random block, secondly with a block derived from another "work".
According to geek logic because the end product can be used to reconstruct two works it cant be derivative of either.
Sure glad they're not defending me.
Yes. No. Maybe. Umm... what was the question again?
In any case, I wouldn't know about Debian. I did do a search on the Gentoo bugzilla, and there's not so much as a request for an ebuild there. There's probably an overlay for it somewhere though.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
We know these are thought crimes, thats the reason why you have to encrypt your thoughts.
This is the same idea as Freenet, which doesn't work at all. Good job, you've copied a bad idea.
If someone stores copyrighted material on a storage medium and provides a means for others to retrieve it, e.g. by giving away a key or anything else needed for retrieval, then obviously he's distributing copyrighted material.
Parts of copyrighted material are also being transferred when someone retrieves copyrighted material from this filesystem that was previously stored in it.
The makers of this clumsy distributed filesystem also seem to be a bit confused about randomness. Encode some Y as X. Then the following holds: If you can retrieve Y from X plus some retrieval key K (if there is any), and K is not itself large enough to represent Y, then X is not random. It doesn't matter how random X looks, any good encryption algorithm produces random looking cyphertext.
I am only cruel to kittens belonging to people who fail to see the beauty of my logic. Don't make me make you kick my ass.
I do indeed see where I failed to communicate my idea clearly. To expound on my previous statements: "Releasing a binary to the public, without first registering (but not publicly disclosing) source code to a central authority would be a crime." Also: "Meanwhile, source code may be released to the public or withheld and only registered with the oversight board, as deemed desirable by the original author."
As to your users taking a little responsibility for their decisions, have you read a EULA on any significant commercial software? It's absolutely insane that you have to agree to not hold responsible the developers of a program which is advertised as being suitable for a purpose even if that software should not only fail but also actually cause serious problems.
I write a bit of software here and there and am very happy to live in a society where I might be able to receive compensation for my work. I would never require that you open source your profit making software to the public, but the current system where people are expected to run software on their computer with no way to tell what it does, no way to verify that it even comes close, no reliable authority even that they could ask, well, the current system sucks.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
From what I've read, it sounds like 3 things are happening.
1st thing - files are being broken up into chunks and randomly encrypted.
2nd thing - these randomly encrypted chunks are being distributed out, to random locations within the brightnet.
3rd thing - the mapping of the encrypted chunks, as well as decryption keys are being stored in a URL string.
Now - any member of the brightnet can be held as offering up storage for various bits, and unless they have the keys, have no way of knowing what those bits are. No one person has enough bits stored locally to recreate the entire file. This means that no one person has the entire set of data, so they themselves could not be held accountable for copyright violation.
The person with the keys, as long as they don't distribute them, also cannot be held accountable for copyright violation, they are just storing their own data, which due to fair use still treading water, is not considered illegal.
Now - as soon as someone shares the keys, they can - and probably should, be held accountable for copyright violation, in the form of distribution.
If someone were to steal the keys from said person, then no, they should not be held accountable, but due to the way the RIAA/MPAA they would probably try to claim that they did it anyway.
So, this methodology does not, in and of itself, constitute a shield to copyright infringement, but it does give a novel approach to distributed data storage, and protection.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Okay, that makes more sense. As long as it doesn't cost anything to submit source code to the central authority, then I'm not too concerned about the idea.
However, it seems to me that it would be pretty simple to get past this kind of a system. I mean, how hard would it be to submit benign source code to the repository, but then release a binary that has a trojan in it. How would anyone know that the released binary was actually built from the source code in the repository? You would have to arrange it so that the source code gets submitted to the repository, then the keepers of that repository build the application and return the binary to the developer, who then releases it. But then you're introducing government bureaucracy into companies' release cycles. There's so much software being developed on any given day that the repository would quickly become bogged down.
I agree that most EULAs are crap. But I still think the current system is much better. If you don't trust the provider of the software, or if you don't like EULAs, you have the option to choose open source alternatives. If you do trust the software provider, or you're okay with the EULA, you have the option to choose closed source. And, as a developer, I have the option to keep my source closed, charge a million dollars, and write a crafty EULA that forces you to give me your first born child, or to open my source, give everything away for free, and have no license agreement of any kind. Or somewhere in between.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Your arguments are more effective if they stay on-topic. We are talking about economics, not science and not religion. We are talking about made up societal "contracts", thats all.
Yeah, I think the point he's trying to make is that torte and criminal (ergo social) laws that contradict immutable properties of the subject are roughly equivalent to religious tenants that do the same. It's a tangent, but still a lucid observation.
It wasn't a person operating a scam, it was a society that agreed the pros and cons of one economic model relating to specific transactions were more favorable to society as a whole than the other alternatives...
That's a pure theoretical ideal that is undeniably diluted in reality. Federal laws governing copyright--as with most subjects--were drafted and enacted by a small, relatively organized and self-motivated minority with specific business and political interests in mind.
The larger governed society is characteristically unorganized and apathetic. Additionally, this larger population is relatively easy to influence. Belive it or not, not all influential advocates represent issues honestly.
I can easily imagine a person/groups/companies being very effective at copying and advertising their "new" works and thus starving the actual artists of funds. Do you agree that this would be a natural outcome of that system or do you see inherent protections that would prevent it?
This assumes that one (earnings starvation) follows the the first (copying). A salaried scientist or engineer will work (create) for a steady paycheck. A commissioned artist will get a commission for art. More work, more art, more money. Industries will continually innovate with new products if counterfeits prevent existing products from generating new revenue.
A technical solution would work like this, you post your source and platform to the central code oversight system via https and it automatically compiles, then generates three output binaries, a single self decompressing archive, a compressed archive (gz, zip, rar, your choice from a drop down) and an uncompressed archive, tar for example. Along with those it provides md5 and sha checksums and a unique id for each. Any member of the public can use the unique id to look up the check sums and the current status of submitted source code. They can get the code in any manner you see fit to distribute it, run their own checks and compare those to the official central code repository. Of course there will be software to do this for you automatically, but you can always manually perform the same checks yourself.
You can submit false source code, but the checksums will make it apparent that you're distributing binaries from unregistered code. You can create malicious code and hope to distribute it before people catch on, but it comes with a big fat warning much like a self signed ssl cert does now. The system doesn't keep people from doing bad or stupid things, it just makes it easier to make good decisions.
TNSTAAFL, taxpayers pay for it, we always do. If you prefer, you can lobby for a submitters tax or a verification tax, but mirroring the data should be reasonable and mirrors should be able to provide either a reasonably priced service ($100/yr perhaps) or fund their mirror through advertising.
There is much good in the existing system, and this wouldn't change the software market landscape significantly. What it would do is give developers a reference and end users information from a trustworthy source. For the end user like myself, who would like to use some software that is closed source in a business environment, it would enable me to use and pay for software that right now I just can't trust.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
And I am pointing out that these societal contracts contradict science and logic. Therefore they amount to not only a religiously (i.e. with no scientific foundation) motivated set of rules for all people to follow so that some few people get richer but they also require that scientific knowledge is actively repressed for these rules to be enforced.
It cannot get more "on topic" then that.
No, it was a group of people which set up conditions for a large number of other people to operate the scam. The fact that the original instigators were ignorantly "well meaning" changes nothing in the final outcome.
The same "reasoning" can be applied to slavery and laws governing human sacrifices. In both cases the "society" selected the cons of some people being slaves or have their hearts ripped out on a sacrificial altar as "more favorable" to it then the "other alternatives". That precisely because "the society" is historically prone to "agreeing" on such (and many many many other) examples of utter illogic and stupidity that science and logic are the only viable measurements by which to judge these "agreements".
A mere fact that an ignorant mob agrees to something while egged on by a hypocritical bunch of self-serving priests of Greed does not by itself make such an "agreement" right. Not even practically workable.
Spoken like a true Objectivst. Nothing exists to you outside of your Greed!
Some of us believe on the other hand that all sentient beings come into existence with some unalienable and self evident set of rights which no one can take away. Some dudes even tried to found a nation on that principle ...
This is a fundamental difference in world view between a self-centered, spineless, unprincipled sociopathic weasel like you to whom all rights are "negotiable" (as soon as he can get away with ignoring them) and someone who would rather die then be deprived of them.
See above. If that is the only thing that stops you, you are not a human. Some sort of Neanderthal who somehow managed to acquire modern language but not any other traits of sentience, such as conscience. It is a little wonder that troglodytes such as you are at the forefront of creation and defense of these "Intellectual Property" "laws". Greed is the only thing that exists in your existence and Greed requires that you own as much of the Universe as your slime covered paws could possibly manage to grab, consequences for everyone and everything else be damned. I assume that the moment some natural disaster renders the police force in your area defunct you are going to go on a murderous rampage through your neighborhood to steal as much shit as you can possibly cart away, attacking of course only the places you know for sure old ladies and children are the only occupants as they are guaranteed not to be "bigger then you". After all, as per your own admission, these were, quote, "the only things preventing you" from it.
Well, I still see some non-trivial technical hurdles -- you glossed quickly over the "you post your source and platform" part, which makes me wonder if the automated system is expected to have every conceivable version of every conceivable compiler/automated build utility/whatever (and what if my build tool is homegrown?) in every conceivable configuration, or if the developer is expected to provide those tools along with the source (if I'm a .NET developer, do I have to install Visual Studio on their computer?).
Nevertheless, I will admit that it actually doesn't sound like an entirely terrible idea.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
two words: arctic monkeys.
you stupid git.
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
the abuser would be unanamosly voted 'dont donate to him', he can still try to make profit, but will have a hard time of it. My $0.02
BTW, mod parent up +121 or i kill you.
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
...at least in countries that strictly adher to the presumption of innocence. There are only three points in the system that are vulnerable (given the necessary circumstances): The disk of the uploader, the disk of the downloader and the file used to convert the bits into the original file. There is no way to prove who uploaded/downloaded what, as long as neither the original nor the linkerfile are found on either computer/proven to have been up-/downloaded by either of them.
Which means there is still a need for transmission via a darknet, but now you only need to transmit a file that has a small fraction of the original filesize that way. And even if they're transmitted unencrypted, you're only downloading something illegal for a very short time. Compare that to downloading something for days (like with torrents).