4 ms·

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 o

• greenshackle2 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
      • adhoc32 6y ago
        You don't know that, only the owner of the URL knows what's what. The network can also store copyright free files.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • shawnz 6y ago
          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.
          • adhoc32 6y ago
            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.
            • heavenlyblue 6y ago
              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.
              • adhoc32 6y ago
                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.
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > 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.
    • AgentME 6y ago
      >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.