4 ms·

Copyright law differs from place to place, but I think what you have written is incorrect. There is a distinction between "infringement" and "making available"

Copyright law differs from place to place, but I think what you have written is incorrect. There is a distinction between "infringement" and "making available". You can infringe copyright without making it available. In this case, making a copy is infringement, even if you don't make it available. Even loading a file into a computer can be an infringement, and so you need a license to do so. The format is irrelevant. If you take a chunk of data out of /dev/random, it is not subject to copyright because it is not a creative work. Mathematically transforming a creative work does not remove the copyright. Laws are written to be loose enough to deal with corner cases like this. Out of interest, I once saw a modern art piece that was a sculpture of an ouroboros made of pornographic magazines. Clearly the magazines were still under copyright. So is the sculpture a derived work? I think this is what is known as a transformative use. My understanding is that it is still an infringement, but that it is covered under fair use. (I have no idea how this is covered in countries without fair use!) I suppose you could encrypt a recording and publicly destroy the key. You could then actively trade the encrypted file. I suspect this would also be a transformative use as a kind of performance art. But as in all fair use, it is still an infringement. Copyright law is confusing :-P

syrrim 10y ago
When you xor data with truly random data, the result is just as truly random as the original random data. Consider this: considering that xor is its own inverse, how would a court distinguish the original and the xored random data? Perhaps you're right, and the latter is legally considered copyrighted. However, on a practical level, this is completely unenforcable; so long as you never state the way the data came about, there is no way to acertain the connection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one-time_pad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one-time_pad). This is what the lawyer of the article believes: the xored data is copyrighted. He explains it by introducing a metaphysical "colour" associated with the data. Given that litigation can only occur when you have stated that the data is a transformation of a copyrighted work, it seems much simpler to ascribe the litigation to your statement, rather than to "colour". I am under the impression that "copying", as far as copyright goes, really refers to distributing. You are legally entitled to make a single backup of copyrighted work you come into possession of. If this backup was stored in the cloud, I imagine no one would mind, unless you handed your password out to just anyone. This is why I believe that distributing an encrypted copy is safe - without the password, it doesn't constitute distributing the original. As you said, copyright is confusing, so I may be wrong on the previous count. However, the fair use claim is much easier than you make it out to be. One clause of fair use is that the work doesn't compete with the original. An encrypted file, being useless for consuming the original, surely doesn't compete with it.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Just keep in mind that "fair use" is not a defence. If you invoke fair use, then you have admitted infringement. If you are awarded fair use, it's just that you are not liable for a penalty. It's kind of pedantic, but that's the way the law works. The problem comes with the corner cases. If you use a non-pedantic view of the law and think, "Well, it's just common sense that <insert common sense here>", you may very well come up with things that are very, very incorrect (and possibly very damaging to you). Of course, ANAL and this is not legal advice ;-)

syrrim 10y ago

When you xor data with truly random data, the result is just as truly random as the original random data. Consider this: considering that xor is its own inverse, how would a court distinguish the original and the xored random data? Perhaps you're right, and the latter is legally considered copyrighted. However, on a practical level, this is completely unenforcable; so long as you never state the way the data came about, there is no way to acertain the connection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one-time_pad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one-time_pad). This is what the lawyer of the article believes: the xored data is copyrighted. He explains it by introducing a metaphysical "colour" associated with the data. Given that litigation can only occur when you have stated that the data is a transformation of a copyrighted work, it seems much simpler to ascribe the litigation to your statement, rather than to "colour". I am under the impression that "copying", as far as copyright goes, really refers to distributing. You are legally entitled to make a single backup of copyrighted work you come into possession of. If this backup was stored in the cloud, I imagine no one would mind, unless you handed your password out to just anyone. This is why I believe that distributing an encrypted copy is safe - without the password, it doesn't constitute distributing the original. As you said, copyright is confusing, so I may be wrong on the previous count. However, the fair use claim is much easier than you make it out to be. One clause of fair use is that the work doesn't compete with the original. An encrypted file, being useless for consuming the original, surely doesn't compete with it.

mikekchar 10y ago
Just keep in mind that "fair use" is not a defence. If you invoke fair use, then you have admitted infringement. If you are awarded fair use, it's just that you are not liable for a penalty. It's kind of pedantic, but that's the way the law works. The problem comes with the corner cases. If you use a non-pedantic view of the law and think, "Well, it's just common sense that <insert common sense here>", you may very well come up with things that are very, very incorrect (and possibly very damaging to you). Of course, ANAL and this is not legal advice ;-)