[Gllug] Monolith - muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate

[Daniel P. Berrange]

This is an interesting project - sounds plausible, but at the same time
it sounds too good to be true - and if something sounds too good to be 
true, it usually is...

  http://monolith.sourceforge.net/

 "Monolith is a simple tool that takes two arbitrary binary files 
  (called 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.

  In most cases, the resulting Mono file will not be statistically 
  related to either file. If you compare the Mono file to the Element 
  file, the Mono file will contain none of the information present in 
  the Element file. In other words, the Mono file by itself tells you 
  nothing at all about the data in the Element file. Only when combined 
  with the Basis file will the Mono file provide information about the 
  Element file.

  ...

  Things get interesting when you apply Monolith to copyrighted files. 
  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
  
  ...

  The binary data in a Mono file cannot be directly interpreted to produce 
  a presentation of the copyrighted content, so they cannot be seen as 
  representational at all. Mono files take the data a step beyond any 
  explicit representations, and I claim that this step goes far enough 
  to leave copyright behind."

So could I digitize & munge my entire music collection with the text of 
the Bible, and then publish the munged files online[1]. Or is there some
flaw in this reasoning which means I'll be sued out of existance ?

Dan.

[1] Note to any music industry lawyers listening in - I'm asking
    hypothetically - I'm not actually going to do so - so go away!
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20060830/78b2ecd4/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug