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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.
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
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!
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."
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
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.
The second is conspiracy to commit infringement, and you will have lost any chance of defending with "I didn't know it was copyrighted"
Unless you don't know what is stored where.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
And how do you know which files to download? You know because from somewhere you got a key that told you WHICH files you need.
The key is where this falls down. The key is an encrypted representation of the original. Trading the key is where the infringement occurs.
Let's take a simple examples. There are 4 files in my "brightnet"- "00", "01", "10", "11". I name these files "a","b","c","d".
Now I have my copyrighted string I want to trade. My string is 01101101001010.
I need to generate the key for the brightnet, which is "bcdbacc". This tells me that I need to take file b, then file c, then file d... to reproduce the original.
Now, you can argue that downloading file a, b, c, or d in itself isn't a violation. That may be true, but it misses the point. The point is that the brightnet is useless without my key file "bcdbacc."
My key file is, in itself, an encryption of the original copyrighted string. Trading in the KEY is the problem, even if downloading the files I'll use to decrypt it isn't.
All this does is let us generate multiple possible encryptions of the same file. And, with large enough brightnet blocks, each one can be shorter than the original. Which is cool for file traders--if there are multiple keys that encode the same file, now all of a sudden it's harder to catch me trading files--I can send the same file to 2 people using 2 different keys, so simply watching for a specific key won't catch me trading a particular file
At best, this makes it easier to trade copyrighted files. But thinking there's no obvious copyright violation here is just silly.
The random blocks don't infringe the copyright, but the key would likely be considered a derivative work and thus the key infringes the copyright.
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 ----
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you want P2P, this is no better than BitTorrent - and at first glance not nearly as robust.
If you're a seeder, it is "better" in the sense that (arguably) the chunks you're serving are not illegal to share.
Let's say you're serving just one chunk - A. A on its own is useless, and very difficult to demonstrate as illegal. Other people are serving B, C, D, E, F. A XOR B is a chunk of project_gutenberg_king_james_bible.txt. A XOR C is a chunk of britney_spears_toxic.mp3. A XOR D is a chunk of terrorist_plans.pdf. A XOR E is a chunk of lolita_rape.avi. Just to mix it up a bit, E XOR F is a chunk of wikipedia_dump.tar.Z
So, are you sharing PD text, top 40 pop, terrorist plans, pedophile porn, or none of the above? Is A the key to E or vice versa? Is F the key to E or vice versa? Every one of these chunks can *simultaneously* be part of a completely innocuous file, and part of something illegal or immoral.
It seems that there is a certain sort of person who likes to facilitate illegal filesharing. The advantage to those guys is that you can deny knowingly sharing copyrighted material. It's not just plausible deniability - you'd actually be telling the truth.
The downside is you don't get to choose what to share. I get the impression that many sharers rather like to know what it is they're distributing. Here you could be facilitating terrible things, and you'd never know..
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!!
how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?
Congratulation to the moderators, for moderating +4 insightful a post which is a one line question titled "Big load of BS", written by someone who clearly did not RTFA.
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.
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?
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
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").
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").
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").
That's not immediately clear. The Pirate Bay's entire purpose is distributing "keys" that point to external resources where copyrighted data can be found.
Similarly, a HTTP URL of a copyrighted file is a "key" that instructs your browser where it can fetch copyrighted data.
At the very least, under Swedish law, neither of these have been demonstrated to be illegal. IANAL, but IMO, this is the legal equivalent of bittorrent, with the added benefit that the "seeds" never actually store copyrighted data.
As the GP said, the only infringement occurs when you actually reconstruct the file after downloading.
If "keys" are illegal to distribute, then let's make everyone who reads this thread an infringer:
http://rapidshare.com/files/58489700/Metallica-TheEarlyDays.rar
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.