Well, that's nifty! 14362

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Daniel Tryba wrote on 05 Apr 2005 14:25:32 GMT

There are multiple issues here -- one of them may simply be the overprotectedness of the media industry so that they can potentialy extract remuneration on *every* transfer, not just the initial one from store to user, or perhaps from media mogul to artist.

However, one scenario goes thusly.

1 User buys CD *. (Store pays supplier of CDs in due course, etc.) 2 User plays CD. This may involve extraction of the data from the CD into a .wav file or series of .wav files, for his convenience. I for one don't see this as being illegal per se, but it complicates things. 3 User decides to share this, and posts extracted data to the Internet. (The details are immaterial; some might use Usenet, some might shove it into a public FTP site; some might simply offer it using programs such as Kazaa or BitTorrent. I don't know the details at this time.) 4 Other user wants to download it, and does so. 5 Other user plays the material.

So the big question is: where has the illegal activity occurred, precisely? It's a bit fuzzy to me personally -- though the obvious point might be 3. It's like prosbreastution; there are two parties involved (the other one commits a potentially illegal act in 4).

It's not even all that clear to me precisely how to characterize the illegal activity; the best I can do is "denial of rightful compensation for an artist's copyrighted work" -- and that's buttuming one buys into that argument. Of course as a point of pedantry one might consider theft of the bandwidth -- but that's not quite what's usually meant here anyway.

(And yes, someone's proposing "a penny a page". This could bankrupt Google and Yahoo, presumably (8B page views = $80M), and make a general mess of things on the Internet. However, on the surface it does sound reasonable. That "402" in RFC2616 is getting pretty dusty...)

Other possibilities get even messier, though they're not nearly as likely:

3'a Hacker pirate breaks into system (or user unwittingly lets in said pirate), downloads user's personal stash of .wav-decoded tracks, and dumps the stash somewhere. 3'b A fence (or the hacker) picks up the dumped stash and puts it into a publically-available datastream. Money may or may not change hands here.

Or:

3"a User backs up his system to a supposedly secure network datastore. 3"b Hacker breaks into network datastore, or eavesdrops during the backup.

And then there's the method of extraction. If I, say, were to take Britney Spears Pictures' songs and digitally extract the data to a file (complete with copyright tags-signatures-etc., if any), how does that, precisely, differ from my taking Britney Spears Pictures' CD, plugging in a high-quality stereo audio output player to a good stereo digitizer, and recreating an ersatz (but very listenable, for those who like Britney Spears Pictures -- I can't say I listen to her) .MPEG or .OGG?

I frankly don't see that mattering -- which throws half of the copyright checking code right out the window, and mangles the other half. The best I can do here is to take a noise remover to the allegedly copyrighted file (and to the original), feed it to a pitch adjuster (that high-quality transcriber might be slightly off pitchwise!), feed the results to a tonal decoder (if nothing else, the district attorney's ear), and then compare the two to see if one can establish beyond a reasonable doubt (to a judge or jury who may have a tin ear!) that the one is somehow derived from the other and therefore is worth civil or criminal action.

Of course an explicit copy is easy to prove: "diff". But the smarter criminals will figure that one out real fast. :-)

(And then there are issues on owning material that's illegal just to *have*, never mind duplicating it -- child love and state secrets are two such. But that's a debate for another post, methinks; it's a slightly different problem.)

And then perhaps illegally turn around and upload it. How one prevents the one without the other, I have no real clue at this time beyond law enforcement doing a simple scan through publically available uploaded files looking for proprietary copyrighted material, or various technological "sneaks" that look for signatures in data blocks and cause (simulate?) various data errors upon attempts to upload copyrighted data.

Have fun out there, fellow 'Net users ... :-)

* at a certain level the same arguments apply to software, with the replacement of the audio equipment by certain digital equipment and-or emulation and-or code rewriters and-or other such stuff.

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.