What colour are your bits? (2004) | Hacker News Reader

What colour are your bits? (2004)

ansuz.sooke.bc.ca

69 pointsgrey-area15 comments

Adding a "(2004)" to the title might be an idea. This article came after the range of controversies related to the Dmitry Sklyarov case (he was pursued for his role in creating software to bypass Adobes e-book DRM) as well as DeCSS, that prompted a number of attempts to engineer systems to "bypass" copyright, one of which was Monolith - mentioned in the article - which basically xor's random data with a copyrighted work, which the authors then believed might somehow make someone distributing the files separately immune to copyright infringement claims.

It does lead to an interesting plausible deniability claim. If ten people come forward with chunks that XOR to a copyrighted file, they can all show to 90% certainty that they aren't the one with the derived/infringing chunk.

Dealing with the conspiracy claims would be tricky, though.

> Dealing with the conspiracy claims would be tricky, though.

That's exactly why conspiracy laws were set up. Engineers/information activists aren't the first people to have these ideas - you can probably find ideas like that going all way back to the beginning of human storytelling.

Using this scheme to evade copyright law is relatively recent but breaking things apart to create plausible deniability is ancient.

This article is great because it doesn't argue for piracy or against it. I do feel that it is missing a discussion about the colour of bits being amalgated by other bits. IE, if I buy a movie and then I torrent that same movie, is the torrented copy still illegal? Cloudy at best, I'd say.

Legally speaking, I believe it is not cloudy; it is still illegal because you have bought a copy of the movie, but you do not have the copyright of it so don't have the right to copy it (as the name suggests!).

Morally, I think most people probably feel that it is cloudy and in such a case often justifiable, but that has little bearing on the legal situation.

This depends a bit on the jurisdiction. In Germany for example we have a right to a Privatkopie (i.e. a personal copy of something we bought in case something happens to the original that renders it unusable). The problem is that this is trivial for CDs, books, and other non-DRMed media, but there is a conflict in case you have to break copy protection first which itself is illegal. Technically however, this is only legally pursued if you do that on a large scale and distribute the copies, so de facto you can still make copied for your own personal use.

For your right to a private copy there are numerous fees on devices that can make copies as well as media that can hold them, so we have to pay 17 ct per blank CD and something close to 10 € per DVD writer, etc. Basically you're paying for your allowed breach of copyright there, irregardless of what you actually use those things for.

IANAL, but I believe that it is actually cloudy, since you have a license for the content and a copy of the file. ( Actually I believe it comes down to the precise wording of the license, the exact implementations of 'fair use' in whichever jurisdiction you are in, and probably if the distributor replaces a broken Dvd...)

Downloading from a torrent won't be legal, because you'll also distribute the movie in the process.

Distributing copyrighted material is generally forbidden, even in countries where owning and creating private copies is allowed.

This is interesting for its main points, but also just to look at a familiar argument from an unfamiliar viewpoint.

There are some places where the analogy to color didn't ring true for me, but it was still worth reading.

Like the difference between the reality of a digital file and the "color" of it -- how these particular bits were obtained -- there's a hard line that you can draw between the reality of any situation and the many layers of stuff that we construct on top of it.

There are lots of concepts that we think of as "reality" when they're pretty much just conventions that we've built on top.

Arguments about ownership get fuzzy and confusing because ownership itself is not real; it's a complicated set of rules we generally agree on, but the details vary among cultures. If you observe a group of people without knowing their language, there's almost no way you can figure out who "owns" all of the things they interact with, and even asking the people themselves you'll get varying answers.

Human rights are an invention. They aren't a thing, they can't be inherent to anyone, and you can't even have them in the first place, though we talk about them as if they worked that way. Rights are rules that one person can agree to follow respecting another person.

If you're alone on Earth, your "human rights" are meaningless, aren't they? You need at least two people before one can violate/respect the human rights of the other -- by following the rules or not. And of course the rules are not universally agreed upon, because they are not real things to be discovered; they are constructions.

The flip side of learning where that line goes (between reality and our constructed ideas on top of it) is the realization that a lot of this "fake" stuff is still really, really important.

I agree that it is a construct. The most important thing about that realization is that it can be discarded if broken, or reconstructed in a totally different way. In the case of copyright and patent law, thorough reconstruction is needed to eliminate the vast absurdities of law that have arisen which simply put do not benefit us, and actively harm us.

On a tangent:

What happens if p2p systems start requiring proof that a new peer violated some copyright (that copyrighted work can be something explicitly created for that purpose - a guy's family pictures, anything)...

I'm pretty sure the technical side of managing the proofs, verifying them etc. is feasible, if not trivial. Wondering about the legal ramifications, would love to hear your opinions.

This is a great idea, it would make it impossible for any nongovernment entity to gather up lists of users to sue without opening themselves up to a lawsuit.

I had a similar idea that before receiving any torrent data each peer would have to send a message like:

As an agent of the copyright holder of works represented in aaaaa.avi, the user at [ip address] is working under my supervision and is authorized to distribute and reproduce the works contained in aaaaa.avi.

Ignoring the substance of the article for a moment, the delivery is masterful.

This is a very entertaining read.

Would be nice to have a [2004] appended to the article.

Also the link to Paranoia (which is an entertaining game) should probably be

http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpgs/paranoia.html

Or just the wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

this works too

http://www.paranoia-live.net/news.php

If you read the wikipedia you'll see that since '04 there's been a bankruptcy sale followed by two release cycles. The lifecycle of the paranoia franchise is almost as interesting as the ancient political article. For example Microsoft gave then a C/D (or sued them?) for the release of "Paranoia XP" which you'd think would be covered under some kind of satire provision... It is possibly true in that how you only get as many rights as you can afford, they simply couldn't afford to keep their rights, I donno the details.

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