This doesn't seem too different from the telecommunications furor in this country a couple of years ago when the FBI wanted phone companies to provide tapping services (at the companies' cost!).
What ever came of that, BTW? It all got quiet all of a sudden, which makes me think that the FBI got its way.
All of these RNA computational studies (there have been several to date) highlight the fact that individual RNA "computers" are extremely tiny and cheap, so that massively parallelizable operations can be accomplished quickly.
It's important to remember that, while RNA computation can accomplish amazing things through humongously parallel arrays of specialized molecules, the computation is still subject to the limits of (for example) NP-completeness. In this case, the "hard part" appears (you have to read between the lines) to have been the enumeration of all 9-bit numbers in coded RNA. This part of the problem scales exponentially, even if the actual final step is so massively parallel that it runs in constant time.
When I was knee-high to a lisp interpreter, I remember hearing about different sort algorithms that ran faster than quicksort. My favorite was the spaghetti sort, which runs in linear time for moderately sized numbers and involves slamming a bundle of raw spaghetti into a table (the linear part comes from cutting the strands to lengths proportional to your numbers). The problem is that, by the time you scale the spaghetti sort up enough to beat quicksort running on a Cray, you find that you have to slam 10^23 strands of spaghetti into the face of the Moon -- and then you end up having to spend something like at least root(n) time figuring out which one is the longest, so quicksort wins in the end (if you break the sort up into many spag sorts you end up with a hybrid solution that runs in n log(n) time).
I think that the RNA sort is like this: for small numbers it scales OK, but there are hidden costs to each operation that spoil the scalability later.
The second half of Footnote #14 is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole ruling. It says: >...even if DeCSS were intended and usable solely to permit the playing, >and not the copying, of DVDs on Linux machines, the playing without a >licensed CSS "player key" would "circumvent a technological measure" >that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work and violate the >statute in any case.
That's interesting because it addresses an angle that most of ``our side'' has not covered. There have certainly been enough arguments that DeCSS is not an effective form of copy protection; but it is an effective form of control. Judge Kaplan' statement implies that, regardless of the original coders' intent, DeCSS is a way of maintaining access control (for the movie studios) at the read-and-display level -- and that this is indeed its primary function.
This small side note, if legally correct, changes the whole playing field. If CSS is not to be considered copy protection but rather access control, then DeCSS is illegal simply because it avoids the need to pay license fees for a reader, notwithstanding any argument about potential redistribution of the original material.
It is as though books came with diary-style locks, and duplicating the keys were illegal. Ludicrous in the non-digital case; but a matter of law in the digital case.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't seem too different from the telecommunications furor in this country a couple of years ago when the FBI wanted phone companies to provide tapping services (at the companies' cost!).
What ever came of that, BTW? It all got quiet all of a sudden, which makes me think that the FBI got its way.
All of these RNA computational studies (there have been several to date) highlight the fact that individual RNA "computers" are extremely tiny and cheap, so that massively parallelizable operations can be accomplished quickly.
It's important to remember that, while RNA computation can accomplish amazing things through humongously parallel arrays of specialized molecules, the computation is still subject to the limits of (for example) NP-completeness. In this case, the "hard part" appears (you have to read between the lines) to have been the enumeration of all 9-bit numbers in coded RNA. This part of the problem scales exponentially, even if the actual final step is so massively parallel that it runs in constant time.
When I was knee-high to a lisp interpreter, I remember hearing about different sort algorithms that ran faster than quicksort. My favorite was the spaghetti sort, which runs in linear time for moderately sized numbers and involves slamming a bundle of raw spaghetti into a table (the linear part comes from cutting the strands to lengths proportional to your numbers). The problem is that, by the time you scale the spaghetti sort up enough to beat quicksort running on a Cray, you find that you have to slam 10^23 strands of spaghetti into the face of the Moon -- and then you end up having to spend something like at least root(n) time figuring out which one is the longest, so quicksort wins in the end (if you break the sort up into many spag sorts you end up with a hybrid solution that runs in n log(n) time).
I think that the RNA sort is like this: for small numbers it scales OK, but there are hidden costs to each operation that spoil the scalability later.
The second half of Footnote #14 is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole ruling. It says: >...even if DeCSS were intended and usable solely to permit the playing, >and not the copying, of DVDs on Linux machines, the playing without a >licensed CSS "player key" would "circumvent a technological measure" >that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work and violate the >statute in any case.
That's interesting because it addresses an angle that most of ``our side'' has not covered. There have certainly been enough arguments that DeCSS is not an effective form of copy protection; but it is an effective form of control. Judge Kaplan' statement implies that, regardless of the original coders' intent, DeCSS is a way of maintaining access control (for the movie studios) at the read-and-display level -- and that this is indeed its primary function.
This small side note, if legally correct, changes the whole playing field. If CSS is not to be considered copy protection but rather access control, then DeCSS is illegal simply because it avoids the need to pay license fees for a reader, notwithstanding any argument about potential redistribution of the original material.
It is as though books came with diary-style locks, and duplicating the keys were illegal. Ludicrous in the non-digital case; but a matter of law in the digital case.
Stand up for your beliefs -- don't be afraid of what's gonna happen