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.
Just a clarification on 4'33": recordings of it are not pure silence (and are not intended to be). They're recordings of actual musicians on an actual stage, not playing any music. So you hear lots of little environment sounds, movements, coughs, etc. It seems plausible for a particular recording of that piece to be copyrighted. Or for the instructions to be.
The issue in that link is weird because it seems like part of the problem is that he credited Cage on his own album, admitting that he was copying it.
> 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.
I think a good analogy is that of two twin brothers A and B. One of them (A) commits a crime and is caught on camera. The judge, however, can't convict A because the video evidence isn't conclusive because of the existence of B. You can say that B is annoying the judge because he doesn't play along, but that's not how it works.
Funny how existing BS arguments that benefit copyright holders haven't annoyed judges so much
There is no ultimate defence, but there is forcing attackers to lose viable defence ground - Once they attack you on basis X, they can't defend themselves on basis not-X; or vice versa.
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.
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).
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).
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!"
> 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:
[+] [-] xg15|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] shawnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnr|5 years ago|reply
The issue in that link is weird because it seems like part of the problem is that he credited Cage on his own album, admitting that he was copying it.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
I think a good analogy is that of two twin brothers A and B. One of them (A) commits a crime and is caught on camera. The judge, however, can't convict A because the video evidence isn't conclusive because of the existence of B. You can say that B is annoying the judge because he doesn't play along, but that's not how it works.
[+] [-] Chris2048|5 years ago|reply
Funny how existing BS arguments that benefit copyright holders haven't annoyed judges so much
There is no ultimate defence, but there is forcing attackers to lose viable defence ground - Once they attack you on basis X, they can't defend themselves on basis not-X; or vice versa.
[+] [-] beagle3|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dooglius|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dane-pgp|5 years ago|reply
Does an adversary necessarily have knowledge of every time a block is added to the system?
> you can narrow down the uploader to a set of at most N people, where N is the number of blocks
I would expect N to be greater than 1000, and I don't think a 1 in 1000 chance of someone being the uploader is reasonable suspicion.
[+] [-] contravariant|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
Does anybody keep an overview? Has any of them achieved serious use yet?
[+] [-] rblatz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orisho|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aidenn0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavenlyblue|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdszy|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] brianhorakh|5 years ago|reply