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>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 e

>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.

pdonis 6y ago
> What makes you say that? The article says so, at least implicitly, in passages like this one: What we are doing with rights management information is simulating Colour in a computer-sciencey way. But lawyers will seize on the possibility of doing this kind of simulation and say, "See! You admit it! You can recognize the Colour of bits after all!" and then conclude from there that all the other rules they want to make (such as "Red Troubleshooters may not walk down Orange hallways") are meaningful in the computer science realm. My view of the typical legal attitude towards DRM schemes and the like is similar. > 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 law is also supposed to care about the people who created the bits in the first place--after all, the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creation of works. But the law as it is actually practiced does not do this at all; the parties it most consistently favors are, as I said, large corporations whose business model does not include fair compensation to the original creators. I agree that, viewed as an actual legal strategy within the context of our current legal system, OFFSystem is daft. No court is going to agree with the legal interpretation that the creators of OFFSystem claim to be using. But I view that aspect as simply an illustration of the fact that you can't fight legal mumbo jumbo with more legal mumbo jumbo. The proper response to draconian legal doctrines with regard to DRM is to remind the legal system what it is actually supposed to be doing, and to refuse to accept the arguments that DRM proponents offer in the framework of copyright law, which basically amount to saying that they have exactly the same rights as the actual creators of the content, even though their business model treats those creators as expendable cogs in a machine. That's what I mean when I say the law needs to change: it needs to stop taking the claims made by large corporations promoting DRM and the like as presumptively valid, simply because they have maneuvered themselves into a position where they can show a piece of paper saying they "own" the copyrighted content.

pdonis 6y ago

> What makes you say that? The article says so, at least implicitly, in passages like this one: What we are doing with rights management information is simulating Colour in a computer-sciencey way. But lawyers will seize on the possibility of doing this kind of simulation and say, "See! You admit it! You can recognize the Colour of bits after all!" and then conclude from there that all the other rules they want to make (such as "Red Troubleshooters may not walk down Orange hallways") are meaningful in the computer science realm. My view of the typical legal attitude towards DRM schemes and the like is similar. > 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 law is also supposed to care about the people who created the bits in the first place--after all, the purpose of copyright law is to encourage creation of works. But the law as it is actually practiced does not do this at all; the parties it most consistently favors are, as I said, large corporations whose business model does not include fair compensation to the original creators. I agree that, viewed as an actual legal strategy within the context of our current legal system, OFFSystem is daft. No court is going to agree with the legal interpretation that the creators of OFFSystem claim to be using. But I view that aspect as simply an illustration of the fact that you can't fight legal mumbo jumbo with more legal mumbo jumbo. The proper response to draconian legal doctrines with regard to DRM is to remind the legal system what it is actually supposed to be doing, and to refuse to accept the arguments that DRM proponents offer in the framework of copyright law, which basically amount to saying that they have exactly the same rights as the actual creators of the content, even though their business model treats those creators as expendable cogs in a machine. That's what I mean when I say the law needs to change: it needs to stop taking the claims made by large corporations promoting DRM and the like as presumptively valid, simply because they have maneuvered themselves into a position where they can show a piece of paper saying they "own" the copyrighted content.