Muddying copyright waters
p2pnet.net News Feature:- “Monolith was developed on a lark. It is a philosophical experiment, a curiosity, and perhaps even a hare-brained scheme. In any case, Monolith is meant to stir debate: a perfect, flawless system would not stir debate very well, would it? Monolith exists comfortably in a world of logical gymnastics. The real world of copyright does not operate in a logical fashion. Thus, a word of warning: if you apply Monolith in the real world, your legal mileage may vary.”
So says MUTE’s Jason Rohrer of Monolith, created to explore the boundaries of digital copyright.
It takes two arbitrary binary files (a Basis file and an Element file) and “munges” them together to produce a Mono binary file, with a .mono extension. Monolith can also reconstruct an Element file from a Basis file and a Mono file.
“Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files,” says Rohrer in the Monolith page, going on:
“For example, munging two copyrighted files will produce a completely new file that, in most cases, contains no information from either file. In other words, the resulting Mono file is not “owned” by the original copyright holders (if owned at all, it would be owned by the person who did the munging). Given that the Mono file can be combined with either of the original, copyrighted files to reconstruct the other copyrighted file, this lack of Mono ownership may be seem hard to believe.
“Consider this simple fact: for a given Element file and any other file of the same length (call it fileA), it is possible to choose a Basis file that, when munged with the Element, will produce fileA as the resulting Mono file. Therefore, if a copyright holder claims that she owns the information in all Mono files that are munged from her work, she is also claiming copyright over all possible binary files that are the same length as her work. For example, suppose that fileA is an MP3 of a Beatles song, and the Element file is an MP3 of a Britney Spears song copyrighted by Jive Records. It is possible to find a Basis file that, when munged with the Spears song, will produce the Beatles song as the Mono file. Jive Records certainly cannot claim copyright over the Beatles song (which is copyrighted by Apple Records), nor can they claim copyright over any other Mono files munged from MP3s of their songs.
“What does this mean? This means that Mono files can be freely distributed.
“So what? Mono files are useless without their corresponding Basis files, right? And the Basis files are copyrighted too, so they cannot be freely distributed, right? There is one more twist to this idea. What happens when we use Basis files that are freely distributable? For example, we could use a Basis file that is in the public domain or one that is licensed for free distribution. Now we are getting somewhere.
“None of the aforementioned properties of Mono files change when we use freely distributable Basis files, since the same arguments hold. Mono files are still not copyrighted by the people who hold the copyrights over the corresponding Element files. Now we can freely distribute Mono files and Basis files.
“Interesting? Not really. But what you can do with these files, in the privacy of your own home, might be interesting, depending on your proclivities. For example, you can use the Mono files and the Basis files to reconstruct the Element files.”
Hit the Monolith site for the nuts and bolts.
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See:-
Monolith site – muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate
MUTE - MUTE: new p2p file-swapping app, p2pnet, January 21, 2004
October 18th, 2004 at 12:49 am
Like encryption of content,
the legal protection mungling provides is probably proportionnal
to the difficulty of obtaining “copyrighted content”,
if that even means anything.
As usual, Jason Rohrer raises good points
that clarifies weakness in the whole copyright scheme.
October 18th, 2004 at 7:43 am
Can you say “exclusive or”? I knew you could!
October 18th, 2004 at 6:36 pm
Jesus. I wish I could understand what the hell this article is about… jk. What a complex concept, though. Definitely worth exploring.
October 18th, 2004 at 7:57 pm
Could someone claim they own a file that is the result
of performing a XOR with a file representing, say, a copyrighted performance
with the irrational number PI up to the same file length?
Or with any other irrational numbers for that matter?
As long as you do not provide the PI file you do not give sufficient
information to construct the original file.
Yet someone could caculate PI to the required number of decimals
in order to produce the original file.
Would that break the law?
Any lawyers in the room?
October 19th, 2004 at 3:37 am
“What is the copyright status of the resulting .mono file?”
As I see it isn’t this just a derivative work from an original? We all know how “they” and “them” love derivative works.
Since when did “they and them” care whether a file is a mp3, avi, ogg mpeg etc, or if it was a sample or a complete work.
If it sounds like Britney Spears and it is Britney Spears what is it going to matter what program you used to create it?
Call me thick, I just don’t see how is this going to put copyright on it’s collective ear.
October 19th, 2004 at 5:57 am
This was discussed at length at http://www.TheBigHack.org last year where the original OFF system was devolped (look in the hack archives). If you want more discussion on it I would recommend you hit that place up. The guy White Raven that Jason mentions at his page was one of the founders of TBH. There is also a article here that touches on a similar process http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/freespeech.html
Cheers! FW