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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 nonsen

by chias 6y 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 6y 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.
- monkpit 6y ago
  If all that mattered were the bits, then wouldn’t it be sufficient to just re-encode a video? All the bits are different now... It seems to me that changing the bits only helps to avoid detection. Not to avoid the legal issues.
  - chias 6y ago
    It wouldn't be just an equality check on the bits anyway, rather some kind of theoretical function over the bits. For example, is this JPG image a copyrighted image? Perhaps my function would be: - take the source image, reduce it to a 10px by 10px grid - take the image in question, reduce it to a 10px by 10px grid - for each pixel, calculate the deviation between the source pixel and the candidate pixel - if the sum of the squares of the deviation is smaller than some threshold, output true. The point is that no matter how clever a function you make, it cannot capture the notion of where the bits came from and can only capture information about what the bits are. Computers care about the latter. All these clever schemes care about the latter. Copyright law cares about the former. From a copyright law perspective, the notion that you might have two files on your computer whose bits are completely identical in every way, but only one of which you are legally permitted to copy, is perfectly reasonable.
  - jatone 6y ago
    it changes the nature of the question. now they have to prove you extracted the specific copyrighted material from those random bits that where exchanged. sure copyright would still exist, but proving one infringed on it becomes borderline impossible.

by chias 6y ago

chias 6y 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.

monkpit 6y ago
If all that mattered were the bits, then wouldn’t it be sufficient to just re-encode a video? All the bits are different now... It seems to me that changing the bits only helps to avoid detection. Not to avoid the legal issues.
- chias 6y ago
  It wouldn't be just an equality check on the bits anyway, rather some kind of theoretical function over the bits. For example, is this JPG image a copyrighted image? Perhaps my function would be: - take the source image, reduce it to a 10px by 10px grid - take the image in question, reduce it to a 10px by 10px grid - for each pixel, calculate the deviation between the source pixel and the candidate pixel - if the sum of the squares of the deviation is smaller than some threshold, output true. The point is that no matter how clever a function you make, it cannot capture the notion of where the bits came from and can only capture information about what the bits are. Computers care about the latter. All these clever schemes care about the latter. Copyright law cares about the former. From a copyright law perspective, the notion that you might have two files on your computer whose bits are completely identical in every way, but only one of which you are legally permitted to copy, is perfectly reasonable.
- jatone 6y ago
  it changes the nature of the question. now they have to prove you extracted the specific copyrighted material from those random bits that where exchanged. sure copyright would still exist, but proving one infringed on it becomes borderline impossible.