14 ms·

OFFSystem

brianhorakh 7y ago
If this caught on, the mpaa and riaa lawyers are going to be out of jobs.
amelius 7y ago
Last project activity: 5 years ago ... Sad, because it looked promising. However, this part seems weak: > If the OFF-internal search function is used, search terms are untraceable to its originator, because the search request is forwarded to the next node and its results back to that node instead of directly to the originator. It is thus not possible to decide whether a node is the originating node or a node doing a search request on behalf of another node. Being an accomplice in a crime is also a crime.
- qznc 7y ago
  There are quite a few of these p2p content-addressed storage systems out there: OFFSystem, Dat, Freenet, IPFS, I2P, Maidsafe, ... Does anybody keep an overview? Has any of them achieved serious use yet?
- rblatz 7y ago
  The whole thing is technically interesting but legally not at all impressive or interesting. It’s almost like this was built by engineers that tried to solve a legal problem based on a view of the law informed by prime time legal television shows.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Except that they make it impossible to tell who to sue. And that's the clever part.
- setr 7y ago
  The natural defense would be to have non-copyrighted things on the network as well. By assisting with any search, both legal searches as well as illegal ones, with no way to disambiguate (unless you had a copyright checker yourself when receiving the search request) the search is now laundered.
dooglius 7y ago
This seems pretty easily defeatable: an adversary just needs to track the timestamps of various blocks, and the last one that gets created is the "real" one. The stuff about copyright seems pretty dumb, obviously the most recent block is the interesting one, that you've just "encrypted" with the previous blocks. Also, even without doing any tracking, you can narrow down the uploader to a set of at most N people, where N is the number of blocks (which presumably can't be too big for performance reasons).
- ComputerGuru 7y ago
  The copyright stuff is bunk, but their defense isn’t (just) what you’ve said but rather that a single block is used to decrypt multiple files so their defense is that no one copyright owner owns the block in question. Which of course is BS since any part of a component derived from illegally sourced copyrighted materials renders the entire derived work in violation (eg a mixtape with one improperly sourced song or twenty is just as “fair game” for a lawsuit).
  - musingsole 7y ago
    As mentioned elsewhere, it is difficult to prove where any block in OFF was derived. So while a block is used to rebuild a copyrighted work, the block itself can't be subject to copyright, or more so, could have been generated by a freely available work and so has no ties to the copyrighted work. It seems like building a dictionary and then a system to rebuild books by combining fragments (words) from the dictionary. The book can be copyrighted, but the words couldn't be. Even if the word was coined in the book and submitted to the dictionary.
- contravariant 7y ago
  The problem with that tactic is that all blocks are essentially random noise (in isolation). You could strengthen this a bit by always writing 2 blocks, one of which is random noise, and the other a xor of that block and t-2 others. This way each block is provably completely random (the blocks just aren't independent from one another).
ComputerGuru 7y ago
It poses the following question as its defense: if a file is broken down into blocks and a single block is used to recompose two or more different files but is itself unique from any of the actual components of either of the two files, then no one can claim copyright to it. I don’t think that works the way they think it does, though. Just imagine analog data instead of digital, and take two copyrighted works, break them down into blocks, mix them together with some randomizers, and what do you get? A work derived from multiple copyrighted sources. No one needs to “own” the entirety of the source, if any part of it is derived from copyrighted materials in a way that isn’t exempted via eg fair use, then the entirety of the resulting work is in violation and is fair game for lawsuits, etc. Simply moving this to the digital domain from analog doesn’t change the logic, does it?
- tantalor 7y ago
  A simple example may be dubbing two songs on top of each other. Then you can subtract one of the songs to recover the other. Obviously the double-song is a derivative work of both.
  - amelius 7y ago
    The point is that using their algorithm, you can't prove that a block of data is derived from an existing work.
    - adhoc32 7y ago
      This. Any block of data can be used to reconstruct anything on the network.
    - Jasper_ 7y ago
      Doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you used a key with intent to decrypt such data and extract the original work. Courts don't operate on technicalities. The intent is pretty much all that matters, as long as you prove that someone intended to pirate stuff, doesn't matter what rube goldberg machine they use to actually pull it off. Schemes like this have been tried since the 1800s, perhaps far longer, where someone smugly announces "well technically I didn't defraud them, your honor" and gets sent straight into prison.
mdszy 7y ago
If you really think the copyright laywers who get paid tons of money to professionally bust stupid schemes like this wouldn't instantly tear it to shreds then oh boy do I have a bridge to sell you. This stuff honestly reminds me of "soverign citizens" "I'm doing something illegal but AH HA if I make use of this weird technicality or magical legal incantation it's not actually illegal! Haha!!"
- greenshackle2 7y ago
  > 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 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - mdszy 7y ago
    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.
  - adhoc32 7y ago
    Sure, but I have a question: Is this network illegal? Or the real copyright infringement is the URL used to reconstruct the copyrighted work?
    - shawnz 7y ago
      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.
ThePhysicist 7y ago
I don't know, following that logic it would be impossible to claim copyright over an encrypted file as it's basically also just a very large random number, even if I can reassemble the original file if I have access to the cryptographic key. I think you could probably share the encrypted file on the web if you don't share the key, as no one can know what the file contains (assuming the cryptographic method is secure). Together with the key this data will become copyrightable though as there is an easy way for any user to re-assemble it on his/her computer. So I'd say downloading individual randomized blocks is probably not problematic and akin to downloading an encrypted file without having access to the key. Downloading the URL that points to the descriptor list might be problematic though, as this will allow you to "decrypt" the other blocks.
- exrook 7y ago
  I think the distinction this protocol makes is that by using XOR as the "encryption" method, given any input block you can choose a "key" to decrypt with to produce any other output block. A block in isolation provides zero information to the downloader. I think it could be argued that it is the knowledge of which blocks to combine is where the actual data is being stored, and maybe that's where the copyright owners could stake a claim.
  - adhoc32 7y ago
    So, the copyright owners will have a more difficulty job going after the users of the network. They have to prove that there is copyright infringement by monitoring the blocks downloaded as opposed to BitTorrent file hash identification.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    So does that mean if I store child porn on AWS I don’t technically own it since it’s somewhere in the virtual cloud? The only way I could access it is through that weird SSH key that doesn’t contain any videos in it.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
xg15 7y ago
I'll agree that copyright has gone haywire as much as the next guy, but this seems to be the exact kind of defense strategy that will archieve nothing but annoy the judge. The project seems to be based on the assumption that copyright really protects particular sequences of bytes - and that therefore, if you can sufficiently change the representation of a protected work, you're off the hook. IANAL, but that seems far from the intentions of copyright. The 4'33 case [0] comes to mind, where a work of nothing but silence was protected. From what I understood, in that case, the actual contents of the work didn't matter a lot (it was all just silence after all) - but what did matter was whether or not someone was consciously using this piece as a base for their own work. My understanding is that copyright bans the act of using a protected work in an unauthorized manner. By that logic, it doesn't matter how an illegal copy is represented if the data is used with the intention of sharing an illegal copy. [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2276621.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2276621.stm
- shawnz 7y ago
  A classic analogy for explaining the difference: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - chias 7y ago
    Came here to post that link. In a nutshell, we programmers tend to like to think that we can use technical means to show that copyright is fundamentally nonsensical / inconsistent / imperfect, as though copyright were a mathematical proof and providing a counter-example would somehow make it go away. This is fundamentally missing the point.
    - chias 7y ago
      Poignant excerpt: I think Colour is what the designers of Monolith are trying to challenge, although I'm afraid I think their understanding of the issues is superficial on both the legal and computer-science sides. The idea of Monolith is that it will mathematically combine two files with the exclusive-or operation. You take a file to which someone claims copyright, mix it up with a public file, and then the result, which is mixed-up garbage supposedly containing no information, is supposedly free of copyright claims even though someone else can later undo the mixing operation and produce a copy of the copyright-encumbered file you started with. Oh, happy day! The lawyers will just have to all go away now, because we've demonstrated the absurdity of intellectual property! The fallacy of Monolith is that it's playing fast and loose with Colour, attempting to use legal rules one moment and math rules another moment as convenient. When you have a copyrighted file at the start, that file clearly has the "covered by copyright" Colour, and you're not cleared for it, Citizen. When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour? It's just random bits! Then when it's descrambled, it still can't have the copyright Colour because it came from public inputs. The problem is that there are two conflicting sets of rules there. Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted. The randomly-generated file, even if bit-for-bit identical, would have a different Colour. The Colour inherits through all scrambling and descrambling operations and you're distributing a copyrighted work, you Commie Mutant Traitor.
heavenlyblue 7y ago
For multiple rounds of XOR for encryption and a reused one-time-pad it would not be so hard to reproduce the files if needed.
pgt 7y ago
Fix the brand then I'll consider using it.
orisho 7y ago
This is nonsense IMHO. This is just an encoding scheme to encode data. Just because blocks used by the encoding scheme are cached and reused for other data does not mean that they're not used to represent this data. If the data downloaded is copyrighted work, then copyright applies. Are copyright laws specific as to the technical method in which reproducing copyrighted material without authorization counts as a violation, or is the method irrelevant? If the method is irrelevant, then yes, using this scheme to copy copyrighted material is copyright infringement. If it is relevant, then there's nothing special about this scheme at all except that it is different than the specific methods outlined in the law.
beagle3 7y ago
This is interesting. I am not versed enough in law to opine on whether the actual uploading/download itself would be considered legal or illegal - there are many very strong opinions here on many aspects, and none with a legal argument more convincing than "I believe if a judge looked at it they would ..." However, I would describe it differently: This is a "denial of information" (sort of a "denial of service") attack on the legal process. In order to actually sue, you need to have to make a more-than-good faith effort to discover who it is that wronged you and needs to make you whole - and, unlike torrents or emule or whatever kids are using these days, OFFSystem makes that part hard to discover or prove beyond reasonable doubt - especially if the descriptor block is transferred out of band. This is somewhat similar to shell games played by many legal "villains" such as patent trolls: You encapsulate company ownership through various jurisdictions (e.g. company A in the UK is wholly owned by company B in NL, which is owned by company C in the US, which is owned by company D in Russia, etc.); it is incredibly cheap to set up (a few thousand US$), and incredibly hard to unravel (tens to hundrends of thousands of US$). If you are trying to target such a company - e.g., to countersue, you realize you have no idea who to sue - you have an opaque company A, and not much to go on. Courts e.g. in germany, have ruled that IP address is not a good enough identifier to sue a person for copyright infringement unless you have other supporting data. It's not directly comparable, but indicates that OFFSystem might provide a defense, practically (can't figure out who to sue) and maybe even legally (not sufficient proof), depending on jurisdiction. It's the intent that matters in many cases, but burden of proof also matters. I think it is philosophically a very interesting question and far from clear cut.
aidenn0 7y ago
This reminds be a bit of Dagster: https://core.ac.uk/display/22569796 https://core.ac.uk/display/22569796

If this caught on, the mpaa and riaa lawyers are going to be out of jobs.

Last project activity: 5 years ago ... Sad, because it looked promising. However, this part seems weak: > If the OFF-internal search function is used, search terms are untraceable to its originator, because the search request is forwarded to the next node and its results back to that node instead of directly to the originator. It is thus not possible to decide whether a node is the originating node or a node doing a search request on behalf of another node. Being an accomplice in a crime is also a crime.

qznc 7y ago
There are quite a few of these p2p content-addressed storage systems out there: OFFSystem, Dat, Freenet, IPFS, I2P, Maidsafe, ... Does anybody keep an overview? Has any of them achieved serious use yet?
rblatz 7y ago
The whole thing is technically interesting but legally not at all impressive or interesting. It’s almost like this was built by engineers that tried to solve a legal problem based on a view of the law informed by prime time legal television shows.
- amelius 7y ago
  Except that they make it impossible to tell who to sue. And that's the clever part.
setr 7y ago
The natural defense would be to have non-copyrighted things on the network as well. By assisting with any search, both legal searches as well as illegal ones, with no way to disambiguate (unless you had a copyright checker yourself when receiving the search request) the search is now laundered.

dooglius 7y ago

This seems pretty easily defeatable: an adversary just needs to track the timestamps of various blocks, and the last one that gets created is the "real" one. The stuff about copyright seems pretty dumb, obviously the most recent block is the interesting one, that you've just "encrypted" with the previous blocks. Also, even without doing any tracking, you can narrow down the uploader to a set of at most N people, where N is the number of blocks (which presumably can't be too big for performance reasons).

ComputerGuru 7y ago
The copyright stuff is bunk, but their defense isn’t (just) what you’ve said but rather that a single block is used to decrypt multiple files so their defense is that no one copyright owner owns the block in question. Which of course is BS since any part of a component derived from illegally sourced copyrighted materials renders the entire derived work in violation (eg a mixtape with one improperly sourced song or twenty is just as “fair game” for a lawsuit).
- musingsole 7y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, it is difficult to prove where any block in OFF was derived. So while a block is used to rebuild a copyrighted work, the block itself can't be subject to copyright, or more so, could have been generated by a freely available work and so has no ties to the copyrighted work. It seems like building a dictionary and then a system to rebuild books by combining fragments (words) from the dictionary. The book can be copyrighted, but the words couldn't be. Even if the word was coined in the book and submitted to the dictionary.
contravariant 7y ago
The problem with that tactic is that all blocks are essentially random noise (in isolation). You could strengthen this a bit by always writing 2 blocks, one of which is random noise, and the other a xor of that block and t-2 others. This way each block is provably completely random (the blocks just aren't independent from one another).

ComputerGuru 7y ago

It poses the following question as its defense: if a file is broken down into blocks and a single block is used to recompose two or more different files but is itself unique from any of the actual components of either of the two files, then no one can claim copyright to it. I don’t think that works the way they think it does, though. Just imagine analog data instead of digital, and take two copyrighted works, break them down into blocks, mix them together with some randomizers, and what do you get? A work derived from multiple copyrighted sources. No one needs to “own” the entirety of the source, if any part of it is derived from copyrighted materials in a way that isn’t exempted via eg fair use, then the entirety of the resulting work is in violation and is fair game for lawsuits, etc. Simply moving this to the digital domain from analog doesn’t change the logic, does it?

tantalor 7y ago
A simple example may be dubbing two songs on top of each other. Then you can subtract one of the songs to recover the other. Obviously the double-song is a derivative work of both.
- amelius 7y ago
  The point is that using their algorithm, you can't prove that a block of data is derived from an existing work.
  - adhoc32 7y ago
    This. Any block of data can be used to reconstruct anything on the network.
  - Jasper_ 7y ago
    Doesn't matter. At the end of the day, you used a key with intent to decrypt such data and extract the original work. Courts don't operate on technicalities. The intent is pretty much all that matters, as long as you prove that someone intended to pirate stuff, doesn't matter what rube goldberg machine they use to actually pull it off. Schemes like this have been tried since the 1800s, perhaps far longer, where someone smugly announces "well technically I didn't defraud them, your honor" and gets sent straight into prison.

mdszy 7y ago

If you really think the copyright laywers who get paid tons of money to professionally bust stupid schemes like this wouldn't instantly tear it to shreds then oh boy do I have a bridge to sell you. This stuff honestly reminds me of "soverign citizens" "I'm doing something illegal but AH HA if I make use of this weird technicality or magical legal incantation it's not actually illegal! Haha!!"

greenshackle2 7y ago
> 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 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- mdszy 7y ago
  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.
- adhoc32 7y ago
  Sure, but I have a question: Is this network illegal? Or the real copyright infringement is the URL used to reconstruct the copyrighted work?
  - shawnz 7y ago
    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.

ThePhysicist 7y ago

I don't know, following that logic it would be impossible to claim copyright over an encrypted file as it's basically also just a very large random number, even if I can reassemble the original file if I have access to the cryptographic key. I think you could probably share the encrypted file on the web if you don't share the key, as no one can know what the file contains (assuming the cryptographic method is secure). Together with the key this data will become copyrightable though as there is an easy way for any user to re-assemble it on his/her computer. So I'd say downloading individual randomized blocks is probably not problematic and akin to downloading an encrypted file without having access to the key. Downloading the URL that points to the descriptor list might be problematic though, as this will allow you to "decrypt" the other blocks.

exrook 7y ago
I think the distinction this protocol makes is that by using XOR as the "encryption" method, given any input block you can choose a "key" to decrypt with to produce any other output block. A block in isolation provides zero information to the downloader. I think it could be argued that it is the knowledge of which blocks to combine is where the actual data is being stored, and maybe that's where the copyright owners could stake a claim.
- adhoc32 7y ago
  So, the copyright owners will have a more difficulty job going after the users of the network. They have to prove that there is copyright infringement by monitoring the blocks downloaded as opposed to BitTorrent file hash identification.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  So does that mean if I store child porn on AWS I don’t technically own it since it’s somewhere in the virtual cloud? The only way I could access it is through that weird SSH key that doesn’t contain any videos in it.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago

xg15 7y ago

I'll agree that copyright has gone haywire as much as the next guy, but this seems to be the exact kind of defense strategy that will archieve nothing but annoy the judge. The project seems to be based on the assumption that copyright really protects particular sequences of bytes - and that therefore, if you can sufficiently change the representation of a protected work, you're off the hook. IANAL, but that seems far from the intentions of copyright. The 4'33 case [0] comes to mind, where a work of nothing but silence was protected. From what I understood, in that case, the actual contents of the work didn't matter a lot (it was all just silence after all) - but what did matter was whether or not someone was consciously using this piece as a base for their own work. My understanding is that copyright bans the act of using a protected work in an unauthorized manner. By that logic, it doesn't matter how an illegal copy is represented if the data is used with the intention of sharing an illegal copy. [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2276621.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2276621.stm

shawnz 7y ago
A classic analogy for explaining the difference: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- chias 7y ago
  Came here to post that link. In a nutshell, we programmers tend to like to think that we can use technical means to show that copyright is fundamentally nonsensical / inconsistent / imperfect, as though copyright were a mathematical proof and providing a counter-example would somehow make it go away. This is fundamentally missing the point.
  - chias 7y ago
    Poignant excerpt: I think Colour is what the designers of Monolith are trying to challenge, although I'm afraid I think their understanding of the issues is superficial on both the legal and computer-science sides. The idea of Monolith is that it will mathematically combine two files with the exclusive-or operation. You take a file to which someone claims copyright, mix it up with a public file, and then the result, which is mixed-up garbage supposedly containing no information, is supposedly free of copyright claims even though someone else can later undo the mixing operation and produce a copy of the copyright-encumbered file you started with. Oh, happy day! The lawyers will just have to all go away now, because we've demonstrated the absurdity of intellectual property! The fallacy of Monolith is that it's playing fast and loose with Colour, attempting to use legal rules one moment and math rules another moment as convenient. When you have a copyrighted file at the start, that file clearly has the "covered by copyright" Colour, and you're not cleared for it, Citizen. When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour? It's just random bits! Then when it's descrambled, it still can't have the copyright Colour because it came from public inputs. The problem is that there are two conflicting sets of rules there. Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted. The randomly-generated file, even if bit-for-bit identical, would have a different Colour. The Colour inherits through all scrambling and descrambling operations and you're distributing a copyrighted work, you Commie Mutant Traitor.

heavenlyblue 7y ago

For multiple rounds of XOR for encryption and a reused one-time-pad it would not be so hard to reproduce the files if needed.

pgt 7y ago

Fix the brand then I'll consider using it.

orisho 7y ago

This is nonsense IMHO. This is just an encoding scheme to encode data. Just because blocks used by the encoding scheme are cached and reused for other data does not mean that they're not used to represent this data. If the data downloaded is copyrighted work, then copyright applies. Are copyright laws specific as to the technical method in which reproducing copyrighted material without authorization counts as a violation, or is the method irrelevant? If the method is irrelevant, then yes, using this scheme to copy copyrighted material is copyright infringement. If it is relevant, then there's nothing special about this scheme at all except that it is different than the specific methods outlined in the law.

beagle3 7y ago

This is interesting. I am not versed enough in law to opine on whether the actual uploading/download itself would be considered legal or illegal - there are many very strong opinions here on many aspects, and none with a legal argument more convincing than "I believe if a judge looked at it they would ..." However, I would describe it differently: This is a "denial of information" (sort of a "denial of service") attack on the legal process. In order to actually sue, you need to have to make a more-than-good faith effort to discover who it is that wronged you and needs to make you whole - and, unlike torrents or emule or whatever kids are using these days, OFFSystem makes that part hard to discover or prove beyond reasonable doubt - especially if the descriptor block is transferred out of band. This is somewhat similar to shell games played by many legal "villains" such as patent trolls: You encapsulate company ownership through various jurisdictions (e.g. company A in the UK is wholly owned by company B in NL, which is owned by company C in the US, which is owned by company D in Russia, etc.); it is incredibly cheap to set up (a few thousand US$), and incredibly hard to unravel (tens to hundrends of thousands of US$). If you are trying to target such a company - e.g., to countersue, you realize you have no idea who to sue - you have an opaque company A, and not much to go on. Courts e.g. in germany, have ruled that IP address is not a good enough identifier to sue a person for copyright infringement unless you have other supporting data. It's not directly comparable, but indicates that OFFSystem might provide a defense, practically (can't figure out who to sue) and maybe even legally (not sufficient proof), depending on jurisdiction. It's the intent that matters in many cases, but burden of proof also matters. I think it is philosophically a very interesting question and far from clear cut.

aidenn0 7y ago

This reminds be a bit of Dagster: https://core.ac.uk/display/22569796 https://core.ac.uk/display/22569796