Lawyer's Led Zeppelin Complaint Is a Work of Art (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Lawyer's Led Zeppelin Complaint Is a Work of Art (2014)

blogs.findlaw.com

65 pointsTomte33 comments

Ahh, another example of PDF retraction that puts an opaque black box over something, yielding to the highly sophisticated "Highlight the text" attack.

sigh.

(To ensure clarity: The addresses of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones are included at the end of the complaint, and are improperly redacted. One presumes this information isn't hard to come by, but if you're going to try to redact it, you might as well do it right.)

What is the right way to redact a pdf?

Delete the text you're redacting?

Adobe Acrobat has a redaction tool that will add the black box AND remove the underlying text from the document. It is not mere black highlighting.

The only true safe way is to print it, redact with a sharpie and scan it back in. Not everyone is versed enogh with Adobe acrobat to do it the right way.

Redacting with sharpie migh still leave the text visible via gamma futzing or other photoshop tricks. Print-exacto knife-scan is an improvement on print-sharpie-scan.

This will infect the printed (and scanned) document with patterns that allow the government and/or police to identify your printer.

Sobel filter afterwards.

Right, because people who aren't versed enough to use proper digital redaction tools, know how to apply a Sobel filter?

1) Irrelevant in the case of this court filing as the lawyer's name is attached

2) In the case where this might be relevant there's a much easier way - export PDF pages to high resolution PNG, edit to put a black box over the text, and then combine the PNGs into a PDF again. This also has the benefit of stripping any PDF metadata that may have been present in the original.

FWIW, (2) doesn't strip any sort of steganographic watermark that might already be embedded in the document, but invisible to the naked eye. Of course, there's no reliable way to do that, anyway. And steganography could be used in ways that are visible to the human eye (i.e., survives printing/scanning) but still imperceptible with a single copy of the document.

You can strip the steganographic watermark by having somebody retype the information from the document, but that doesn't defeat the barium meal.

Not necessarily! Consider rearranged words or punctuation in different versions of the document. You'd have to do something like type up a paraphrase to get around that.

Export the page in question to a raster image format like PNG at a high resolution, use an erasing tool on it, re-import the whole thing as a high-res raster (not OCR).

In the past 15 years I have seen so many poorly redacted PDF from government agencies, where they just draw a black box over the PDF-native text.

And then ORC afterwards for acceasability. Muller has not messed this up yet sadly.

Not that it's hard to guess who "Individual-1" is.

Interesting... Highlighting the text didn't work for me in Chrome or Adobe Reader.

But pdfminer printed out the addresses right away:

https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six

Highlighting shows the text underneath for me in Firefox.

For those interested, the jury originally ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin, but this year the 9th Circuit partially vacated the judgment and recommended a new jury trial. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab93a0e7-52e6...

Spirit's song Taurus, which Led Zeppelin allegedly infringed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHLO_2_THg

There's some strong similarities there.

Here is an arrangement by guitarist Davey Graham of She Moves Through The Fair. As someone who heard similarities between Scottish/Irish folk and Indian music, his take on the tune is really quite original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0h-XICWlSA

This is a recording of Jimmy Page playing the tune, which sounds so close to Davey Graham's version, it seems impossible that it's not a rip-off. I believe he takes credit for it on recordings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqzFzXCfaSc

What's striking is how all the fluidity and expression seems lost in Jimmy Page's version (though still technically accomplished, by most measures).

> There's some strong similarities there.

In that they both use a descending chromatic line over a minor chord in the harmony, a device that has been used in music for over 300 years.

Their differences are great, notably in the structural importance of the figure (it happens in the middle of an ambient passage in Taurus, but it's the opening, passage of Stairway); in the fact that Stairway uses a melodic line on top of the chords, whereas Taurus doesn't; and that Stairway uses it as a structural block for the whole song, and in Taurus, it's only a moment in the middle of a larger section.

And Zeppelin have some form.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led-zeppelins-...

A mistake for an attorney to do this. While some courts might possibly think it's 'cute' there is a higher risk that some will see it as a negative even if they try not to be biased.

A court filing is not a job application or a college applications or trying to get funding for your company. It's one shot. Not the type of risk that makes any sense at all. Good for publicity though if that is the idea.

Did you read the article, though? The fonts used were actually specifically designed for use in legal proceedings.

except for the Led Zeppelin-styled headings which were clearly not.

Has this been your experience as a lawyer?

Clerked in a Federal Court however I stopped practicing law a few years after that for something more lucrative. [1]

In any case the attorney (OP) says:

> Some courts mandate certain fonts, font-sizing, spacing, and margin size. Let's hope the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania doesn't.

Not sure how it can be any clearer (re: my point) than that.

Note also that I didn't say 'not allowed' but that it was a 'risk'.

Now perhaps the attorney that filed this knows something about the judge or court. My comment was for HN as a general point which is valid I feel.

Let's say you are meeting a new girlfriends family for the first time. You decide to show up in a clown suit. Sure it's possible that the parents might think that's great but also a risk that they will think you are foolish for doing so. (Ditto for most appearance related things).

[1] I get paid highly for strategy (non legal).

I think the idea is to drum up some public sympathy for the case, without going so far over the top that the case is at risk.

Note that it still uses double line-spacing, or something too close to that. (The embedded Scribd butchers some formatting on mobile, but I think line spacing is preserved.)

Double line spacing is wrong: it violates the principle of proximity, which is a cornerstone of all visual design―because it simply describes how humans' visual perception works. Practical formulation of the principle of proximity is very simple: there should be obviously more space around an item than inside of it, for the item to look like one integrated thing and not a bunch of them. This works on all scales.

Double spacing makes it look like you can stick a line between two existing ones. The lines don't stick together anymore, and this makes the paragraph shaky, like it's falling apart.

Double spacing lets you handwrite comments and other markup between the lines.

I don't like some guys making millions while some other guys nearly equally deserving get nothing. But still, trying to determine "originality" is a fool's errand just like copyright on so much of art is a fool's errand.

those fonts are so familiar that I am surprised they are not in the public domain already, maybe they are just refinements of old standbys?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com