Brightnets are Owner Free File Systems 502
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.
Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
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??
Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
Data != Information (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Summary Misleading (Score:3, Insightful)
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."
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
As has been pointed out below, the data transferred is not the thing copyrighted - it's what it represents. So it's an arduous and painful encryption, with high overhead, easy to crack and no plausible benefit. With some hand-wavy 'it annuls all badness from bad things' explanation.
Insane lengths to go to (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
For some of us that isn't a problem, since we don't believe in IP anyway.
Huffman Coding (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:The data would change from (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The data would change from (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The data would change from (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who said im going to court? I adjust my activities to compensate which avoids that situation.
Doesn't change my belief, or disregard.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Context matters. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a form of encryption, the purpose is not to hide the data but to share representations. The basic idea is let's say that I have files/blocks A,B,C. Instead of storing them directly I will compute shares that merge the information into a new set of blocks. None of the new set of blocks will contain copyrighted info - or if it does then who will own it because there are competing copyright claims. To get file A back out I need to take a selection of the shares and xor them together.
It's an interesting technical approach, but a classic FAIL. Geeks never understand the law, they assume that it is a mechanical system that can be gamed (well, because they're geeks). But no matter how the law it is written, it is interpreted by people. The first time that it was tried is court would be something like this:
Pros: Could you explain to the court what you uploaded to Brightnet? .... .... .... in several parts.
Def: It was a non-linear combination of the xor of
Pros: Did you upload Britney Spears - Chart Slag.mp3?
Def: No, that was never on my computer.
Pros: Did you upload something that allowed the mp3 to be constructed exactly?
Def: Yes
Pros: Copyright infringment through unauthorised distribution, the prosecution rests.
Def: WTF?
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting it a little more plainly:
Copyright concerns provenance (similarity merely raises suspicion).
Patent concerns similarity (provenance is irrelevant).
However, both are unethical and ineffective anachronisms long overdue for abolition.
Let overpaid lawyers count the angels on a pinhead. It is not something computer scientists should concern themselves with, especially when litigation causes 99% of harm well before any judges get anywhere near investigating the provenance of bits - deciding which side of bread best provides inspiration as to the 'correct' judicial interpretation as to how bits should properly be constrained.
Use the GPL. It's a legal device against litigation.
Using BrightNets is a coder's sophistry, not a lawyer's. A coder may as well wonder why there's so much legal difference between copying an MP3 file and streaming it, when there's marginal technical difference. Conversely, lawyer's won't be fazed by significant technical differences if the end result is the same - they'll sue you first and leave the questions to judges in subsequent decades.
You might as well create a distributed and co-operatively administered 'YouTube' host with anyone legally permitted to upload and download so long as the hosted works were only 'streamed' to the public and taken down upon request (DMCA).
Lex Asinus Est.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Short version (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just like piratebay.org, they don't host the data but in most countries what they are doing is considered illegal.
Re:A solution in search of a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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..
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
and you realize that without copyright law and software patents, the GPL is unnecessary?
Re:Data != Information (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, you won't fool a (competent) computer scientist with that, but a jury could be confused, to say the least.
Hans Reiser thought he could out-smart the jury. Look how well that worked for him.
Neither judges nor juries like to feel like they're being played. You play a game like that, attempting to confuse them with technology that's over their heads, and you're not exactly going to win them over.
The result of that kind of argument will likely be that they ignore the part that's confusing to them, and focus on the part that's simple to understand: you have the Indiana Jones movie on your hard drive, and that's a copyright violation. Simple.
Re:Big load of BS (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
But then, without copyright there is absolutely no need for the GPL. ... Bear in mind that the GPL is a means to enjoy freedom...
I'm no expert on the GPL, but am I not correct in thinking that the GPL forces restrictions on developers in order to ensure freedoms for users? For example, the requirement that if I build and distribute something that uses GPL code, I must use the GPL on my code and distribute the source code with the binaries.
Without copyright and the GPL, there is absolutely no way to force me to distribute my source code. I can take an open source project, add to it to create something new, hide the source code in a vault and distribute only the binary. You will be able to copy it freely, but good luck modifying it. You, the user of my software, have lost freedom because there is no GPL to force me to provide you with that freedom.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the assertion that this somehow circumvents copyright law is pretty ridiculous.
The composite of the entire system allows one to store data in a retrievable fashion, just as the composite of a hard drive, magnetic head, source coding strategy, filesystem, and operating system allow one to store data in a retrievable fashion -- despite the fact that it is fragmented on the drive and source coded.
The scope of the system may be different, but it accomplishes the same.
Sharing the "recipe" for assembling the blocks is the same as sharing the original file. It's just a definition of terms. You could say that a compressed (.zip) version of a text file is really just a recipe for algorithmically creating the original text file. The zip version and the original are treated the same under copyright law, as far as I know.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
[...] lawyer's won't be fazed by significant technical differences if the end result is the same - they'll sue you first and leave the questions to judges in subsequent decades.
The key to this is who the "you" that gets sued is. There are three classes of participant in this data transfer: uploader, downloader, and cloud member.
It seems to me that this scheme makes the uploader and the downloader guilty, but difficult to catch (you'd need to catch them exchanging URLs), and the cloud members not guilty of anything.
Cloud members would have no idea whether they were hosting (chunks of) copyrighted top 40 MP3s, legally redistributable freeware, communications between Burmese freedom fighters or plots to bomb American civilians. I wonder how many people would be comfortable with that.
Copyright still holds, and here is why (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Short version (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The law is all about technicalities.
Whether it is prosecuting Al Capone for Tax Evasion or successfully defending yourself because of technicalities, finding technical solutions to legal problems is exactly how the Judicial system works.
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.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone nicely said: "GPL takes away the freedom to take freedom away form others".
This is such a hackers approach... (Score:1, Insightful)
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."
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Insightful)
However, there is no market for withheld or obfuscated source code in such a culture. Binaries cost nothing to make and could not be sold ... The GPL is about reproducing the culture that would result if copyright and patent were abolished, i.e. a free culture.
Imagine we live in that world without copyright, and therefore a world without GPL. Oracle builds and sells an RDBMS. Anyone can copy and use it for free, since there is no copyright preventing that. However, Oracle wants to make money off of their RDBMS. So, they sell support services. Maybe they also offer custom development to tailor the RDBMS for your environment. In order to prevent competitors from providing those services, it makes sense for them to keep their source code hidden and only distribute the binaries.
No-one's freedom is constrained if the source is withheld or obfuscated in a culture without copyright.
According to RMS, withholding source limits user freedom. Therefore, users of GPL software have more freedom than users of Oracle RDBMS in the above example.
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Sorry guys, the law doesn't work that way (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
The point that I was making was that the law operates on intent rather than action. If the sole purpose of your XOR of Britney and someone's holiday photos is to allow reconstruction of the mp3 then it is a defense that the court would see through.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Insightful)
It' not a circumvention of every aspect of copyright, it's a system where you can't claim that every single intermediary had some part in any copyright violation.
For example, I rip all my CDs and store them in this system (keeping the list of URLs needed to re-construct/retrieve the files to myself. Since only I can get the files back, I have not distributed anything WRT copyright.
The various nodes can't know what the blocks I stored are. Should I give someone else my list of URLs, I have now distributed, so I have now violated copyright. The nodes storing those blocks still don't know what they are and have no means of re-constructing them, so have not infringed.
You're mixing up your problem spaces. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Insightful)
This situation is perhaps similar to torrents. A torrent isn't the real data but does "refer" to it in a way similar to how the "key" in this filesystem refers to the actual pieces needed to reconstruct the file, even though those pieces aren't unique.
One could even say that the "key" in this case is even closer to the real data than a torrent.
Mathematical sophistry does not trump the law. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't say "human rights", which, by the way, is also a human construct just as legal rights are, so if you're going to be a pedant please use accepted definitions instead of redefining them according to your own sociopolitical dogma. I imagine you frown upon the RIAA's use of the term "theft" to describe illegal music downloading... hmmm.
Anyway, you're being blinded by the abuse of copyright.
Do you really not see the public benefit of intellectual property? Do you not see how in the absence of those "privileges" creatives would be even more at the mercy of businessmen then they are now? Why would someone write a book if the minute they submitted a transcript to a publisher, the publisher could simply publish the book under their own name? Why would someone sink the time and creativity into pushing the envelope of web design with something incredibly unique if the first person that likes it can co-opt the whole thing for their own use?
Even though you seem to think that these exist solely for the benefit of corporations, they are actually the only thing guaranteeing any kind of reward for the creator. Sure corporations wield these laws more effectively and have twisted them around over the years, but that's what businesses do. They'll exploit creativity for profit no matter what the law is, but if we abolish copyright they won't have to pay for it at all. Eventually more and more creatives will get the picture that it's a sucker's game to create anything. You can argue that the situation has gotten so bad that we'd be better off without copyright, but that is an unnecessarily extremist position. Abolishing intellectual property rights can do nothing but reduce the amount of creativity and research and development going on.
No. Try think this through from the court's side. (Score:3, Insightful)
I made a longer winded post about this here, [slashdot.org] 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?)
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
Human rights are legally protected, self-evident, natural rights. Copyright and patent are mercantile privileges, thus unnatural and unethical.
Copyright infringement is the unauthorised copying of a work protected by copyright.
Intellectual property theft is the unauthorised removal of someone's intellectual property from their private premises.
Copyright is an unethical privilege and an ineffective anachronism and should be abolished. Patent similarly, especially as applied to software.
Intellectual property rights are entirely natural and to be protected, especially from interference by the unnatural privileges of copyright and patent.
No-one has a right to publish someone else's work as their own. In any case, copyright is about protecting a commercial reproduction monopoly, not about preventing plagiarism.
Re:Encryption (Score:1, Insightful)
The GPL is about reproducing the culture that would result if copyright and patent were abolished, i.e. a free culture.
No, that's the BSD license. The GPL is the one where you cannot distribute software without giving away the source code.
Let's say you offer a program under BSD. I can do anything I want with it: I can change it, change the name, and sell the resulting binary without ever providing source code. Complete freedom for me.
Now let's say you offer a program under GPL. I can no longer do certain things. The argument from GPL fans is that the constraints on me are for the best, because it's unfair to the poor users for me to keep the source code away from them, and that as a result the total freedom of the software ecosystem is maximized.
I find it interesting that you believe no one would bother to keep trade secrets if there were no copyright law. Remember that patents were invented to encourage people to not keep stuff completely secret; in exchange for disclosing your secrets, you get a guaranteed monopoly on the idea for a fixed term. Before patents and copyrights were invented, the world had a culture without copyright and patent, and people thought it a good idea to invent them. So I encourage you to take a look at history and see what lessons you might learn.
tell me why in a culture without copyright you'd have to enact a law that prohibited the distribution of binaries without source code?
Because otherwise people will hold the source code as a trade secret and not share it, even if the original author didn't want this to happen.
However, there is no market for withheld or obfuscated source code in such a culture. Binaries cost nothing to make and could not be sold - they'd only be used to demonstrate that the software had been produced prior to sale.
And I know this to be true because... you say so here? Can you give me an example of some place in the world where this system has been tried and showed to work? I'll accept an analogy if you can make it work.
Re:The data would change from (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [rapidshare.com]
Re:Psst. Copyright doesn't work like that! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.