Re: New ways to evade copyright law (was Re: Vicarious liblity (was: KDE not in Debian?))
There is one way you can redistribute copyrighted works within the law.
Paraphrase them, and cite them.
Its done in schools every day and is perfectly legal.
If you take a paragraph of a book, and rewrite its meaning, cite the
original source in a bilbiography, and pass it on, that is perfectly
within the law. Similarly, you could take written software code, write the
specfications down, and send that instead of the original code (to get
around any liscensing issues).
Trying to claim random chance as a reason for a copyright violation is a
little like saying you had ten chimps randomly type up Hamlet in one week.
While theoretically possible, noone would take you seriously, and law is
all about being taken seriously. Similarly, you won't convince twelve
jurours that sendmail accidentally sent out 50,000 emails, which when put
together in reverse order and rot13'd, for example, inadvertently became
Applied Cryptography.
---
David Graham
canada@eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca, canada@ishmael.geecs.org, dgraham@uoguelph.ca
GEECS.org administrator, CSClub.cis.uoguelph.ca administrator, frosh, BComp
This .signature is dynamically rebuilt 1440 times a day.
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial
challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
-- The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985
On Fri, 4 Feb 2000, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Raul Miller writes:
>
[...]
>
> No, because the law concerns itself with judging intent.
>
> If you distribute random data which _truly accidentally_ could be
> interpreted to violate some law, then that's no problem; but if you
> had the intent to violate copyright law by a _series of related
> actions_ -- no one of which violated a copyright -- then it might
> easily be established that the overall design and pattern of your
> activity was a deliberate violation.
>
> Someone could argue in court about the probability that it was just
> an accident. In most cases in which you actually violated a
> copyright on purpose, it's not very likely that it would end up
> looking like a plausible accident (if you intended for some other
> person to be able to reconstruct the original information, then a
> court can probably reconstruct it, too, especially given any
> instructions that you or someone in concert with you happened to
> give out).
>
> Using statistical arguments to estimate probabilities that copyright
> violations are accidental is not a new idea. In fact, the whole point
> of digital watermarking is simply to make that easier, and make it
> dramatically less likely that you can realistically claim that a certain
> similarity is merely co-incidental.
>
> So, what about the situation in which 5,000 people distribute something
> which they would otherwise not be allowed to distribute by taking
> random excerpts? E.g. I say "At offset 8354, value 0x98c4076d", and
> post that in some public place. Well, if some of these people actually
> intended that the result of their joint activity would be the
> effective transmission of whatever they were not allowed to transmit,
> they could be accused of conspiracy.
>
> --
> Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> | And do not say, I will study when I
> Temp. http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | have leisure; for perhaps you will
> down: http://www.loyalty.org/ (CAF) | not have leisure. -- Pirke Avot 2:5
>
>
> --
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