3 ms·
Monolith: muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate
- Amorymeltzer 12y ago>But what constitutes a derivative work? Certainly, some part of the original work must be present in a recognizable form. The munging done by Monolith leaves no part of the original work in place, so Mono files therefore cannot be counted as derivative works. Interesting piece, and while I appreciate the rather thoughtful explanation of the process and the law, I can't help but think it won't stand up. This process is basically XORing two files on a per-bit basis. Sure, the result is unrecognizable, but that doesn't mean it isn't derivative. A simple analogy of novel "munged" by replacing a with b, b with c, and so on (rot1) would be completely recognizable but that work is quite obviously dependent on the original novel. I can't imagine that would stand - you would never have made this new book without using the exact text of the original copyrighted work. IANAL
- Amorymeltzer 12y agoAnd yes, I specifically avoided referring to the second, new book as a novel novel.
- commentzorro 12y agoI had thought about similar ideas a few years ago. I don't think this approach would get very far in court as it's essentially just an encoding. My thought experiment was be to do something like mapping the copyright work in question to the bible or US Constitution then apply that as input to a reversible Markov text generator to produce output containing nothing but realistic text from the bible, constitution, etc.