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Comment by greenshackle2 | Hacker News Reader

> No block can be copyrighted without logical contradictions, because blocks used for re-assembling a source file block are re-used for re-assembly of other source file blocks. It is undecidable who would have copyright on a block, which has several meanings. Everyone would have copyright on everything.

That's a hopelessly naive, almost sovcit-level take on law. The lawyers and judges will not give an iota of a fuck for this argument. The facts are, someone uploaded a copyrighted work to the system. Someone else downloaded it out of the system.

The classic "What Colour are your bits" is relevant here:

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

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> The classic "What Colour are your bits" is relevant here:

I agree this article is relevant, but perhaps not in the way you meant.

To me, the point of the article is that you can't tell what Colour bits are by looking at the bits. The OFFSystem can be viewed as a way of illustrating this point (though that probably wasn't what its designers intended). But the law wants to insist that you can tell what Colour bits are by looking at the bits--as the article says, that's basically what DRM and other such systems try to do. But it can't be done.

To me, that means that the law needs to change--as it has changed in the past when technology changes in a way that invalidates assumptions that the law previously made. It looks to me like the main thing that is preventing the law from simply changing in a common sense way to accommodate the technological change of computers is that there are large corporations who make a lot of money by owning copyrights. I personally don't have a lot of sympathy for those corporations since their business model has nothing whatever to do with compensating the actual creators of the works whose copyrights they own.

>But the law wants to insist that you can tell what Colour bits are by looking at the bits

What makes you say that? I would expect that the law (or the judge enforcing it) cares more about the reasons people use the software and what they get out of it in the end than about the specific bit strings. The OFFSystem is clearly software for storing and retrieving files or media; it's built for that use and everyone using it is using it for that. How it accomplishes that internally isn't significant.

Do you think any cases would or should be overturned if it were revealed that, unknown to anyone at the time, a popular torrent program actually worked like OFFSystem, or hell, worked by magic without actually physically sending data between users as long as someone was concurrently doing the seeding-the-file ritual? -- I think this line of argument is strongly related to the argument that it's still murder if instead of shooting someone, you intentionally kill them by using a rube goldberg machine or by placing a land-mine that the victim triggers or by using a magic gun that erases whoever you aim it at. Intentions and results matter to the law. I think this makes technically-minded people squeamish because intentions are a lot harder to prove and are easier to mess up than questions of plainer physical facts, but to ignore them is too gameable.

The OFFSystem only sounds interesting because it's transforming the data for no other reason than to try to be a legal loophole, but strangely we'd never even consider the idea that software that transforms data for a reason (like zip archivers, https encryption, or re-encoding) would work as a similar legal loophole. I think the concept of a data transformation for no other purpose other than to try to be a legal loophole just manages to surprise people enough to think that it might work.

> What makes you say that?

The article says so, at least implicitly, in passages like this one:

    What we are doing with rights management information
    is simulating Colour in a computer-sciencey way. But
    lawyers will seize on the possibility of doing this
    kind of simulation and say, "See!  You admit it! You
    can recognize the Colour of bits after all!" and then
    conclude from there that all the other rules they want
    to make (such as "Red Troubleshooters may not walk
    down Orange hallways") are meaningful in the computer
    science realm.

My view of the typical legal attitude towards DRM schemes and the like is similar.

> I would expect that the law (or the judge enforcing it) cares more about the reasons people use the software and what they get out of it in the end than about the specific bit strings.

The law is also supposed to care about the people who created the bits in the first place--after all, the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creation of works. But the law as it is actually practiced does not do this at all; the parties it most consistently favors are, as I said, large corporations whose business model does not include fair compensation to the original creators.

I agree that, viewed as an actual legal strategy within the context of our current legal system, OFFSystem is daft. No court is going to agree with the legal interpretation that the creators of OFFSystem claim to be using. But I view that aspect as simply an illustration of the fact that you can't fight legal mumbo jumbo with more legal mumbo jumbo. The proper response to draconian legal doctrines with regard to DRM is to remind the legal system what it is actually supposed to be doing, and to refuse to accept the arguments that DRM proponents offer in the framework of copyright law, which basically amount to saying that they have exactly the same rights as the actual creators of the content, even though their business model treats those creators as expendable cogs in a machine. That's what I mean when I say the law needs to change: it needs to stop taking the claims made by large corporations promoting DRM and the like as presumptively valid, simply because they have maneuvered themselves into a position where they can show a piece of paper saying they "own" the copyrighted content.

> But the law wants to insist that you can tell what Colour bits are by looking at the bits--as the article says, that's basically what DRM and other such systems try to do. But it can't be done.

Of course you can tell what colour the bits are. If someone uploads a recording of Taylor Swift's Love Story, literally everyone is going to know who owns it. Same is true of lesser known recordings -- someone will be able to show that it is based on something they own, and thus the colour of the bits is revealed.

> business model has nothing whatever to do with compensating the actual creators of the works whose copyrights they own.

Property isn't determined by who made something, nor should it. Otherwise, you would have no rights to your own home.

> If someone uploads a recording of Taylor Swift's Love Story, literally everyone is going to know who owns it.

First, as a matter of technical fact, you are wrong. You seem to think that whether a particular sequence of bits is or is not "a recording of Taylor Swift's Love Story" is a simple, easily computable function of that sequence of bits. It's not. That's one of the main points of the article.

Second, when you speak of ownership, you are simply stating the position large media corporations take without supporting argument. Sorry, not buying it.

> Property isn't determined by who made something

I didn't say it was. I'm not talking about the concept of "property" in general. I'm talking about a particular case: copyright law.

In the US at least, the purpose of such law is explicitly stated in the US Constitution: to give the authors of works exclusive rights to them. You can't transfer authorship the way you can, for example, transfer title to a home; but the legal theory relied on by large media corporations assumes without argument that you can, and equates uploading a copy of a song that has already made millions, and over which rights of authorship are not even being asserted by its actual author, with stealing the bread out of the mouth of the author. That argument violates the US Constitution as well as obvious common sense.

The only reason this legal theory got any traction at all was that before the age of computers and the Internet, authors did not have the resources to get their works widely read (or the equivalent for other media) on their own. They needed publishers who were willing to take the business risk of printing a lot of copies of a book (or, once recorded music came along, a record) in the hope of selling them. So authors had a strong incentive not to make an issue of the obvious absurdities in the legal theory that the publishers were relying on to assert copyright.

Now, however, there is no reason except inertia for authors, or songwriters, or any other authors of creative works, to use large media corporations to distribute their works. And in fact most such works no longer are distributed via large media corporations; they are posted on the web by the people who create them, and those people have a variety of ways of getting paid for their work without involving large media corporations at all. The corporations don't want people to recognize this because it will just make their business models die that much faster. But there is no reason why the law should be propping up outdated business models.

> is a simple, easily computable function of that sequence of bits. It's not. That's one of the main points of the article.

It is... you get a human to listen to it, and they'll know.

> equates uploading a copy of a song that has already made millions, and over which rights of authorship are not even being asserted by its actual author, with stealing the bread out of the mouth of the author. That argument violates the US Constitution as well as obvious common sense.

The 'right of authorship' was asserted by the author when they gave someone else the right to enforce their copyright in exchange for a fixed sum -- something you call purchasing.

> So authors had a strong incentive not to make an issue of the obvious absurdities in the legal theory that the publishers were relying on to assert copyright.

There is no absurdity, except that which you construct in order to limit the rights of authors, the very people you are purporting to support.

> you get a human to listen to it

If you think this is what "simple, easily computable function means", I have no idea what language you think you are speaking, but it isn't English.

> they gave someone else the right to enforce their copyright

But how is that even possible given the plain language of the US Constitution that copyright protects the "authors" of works? You can't transfer the fact of being the author.

Yes, I know our current legal regime in practice allows this. I'm simply saying that means our current legal regime is broken and needs to be fixed.

> that which you construct in order to limit the rights of authors, the very people you are purporting to support

By your own account, the author is out of it as soon as they receive the "fixed sum" from the media company. So limiting the nonsense the media company can get away with after that point does not affect the author at all.

Sure, but I have a question: Is this network illegal? Or the real copyright infringement is the URL used to reconstruct the copyrighted work?

If the bits were derived from a copyrighted material then they fall under that copyright. Whether you can prove it just by looking at them is an unrelated issue.

You don't know that, only the owner of the URL knows what's what. The network can also store copyright free files.

Like I said, it's an unrelated issue whether you can prove the bits were derived from copyrighted material or not just by looking at them. That doesn't change their legal status.

I'm not disputing the legal status. Obviously downloading copyrighted material is illegal. I'm asking how they're going to enforce the law in a scheme like that. In order to have strong evidence you have to get physical access to the computer committing the crime. But in most free countries you can't raid houses without having evidence in the first place.

But once you have the URL, you will be able to raid everyone who had those blocks.

You could make an argument that “they didn’t know”, but it doesn’t mean they will not be able to prove that you were an associate in crime.

But each block is used by multiple different files. Owning a block of a forbidden URL does not prove that you're committing a crime. Owning all blocks of that URL is an strong indication but still not a proof to justify raiding.

Haha I thought of the sovcit angle too and edited it in before reading this. But yeah, I absolutely agree. Throwing weird technicalities around thinking it somehow absolves you of all legal responsibility is completely asinine.

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