Dibs on 17! Cause every time someone plays one of those "pick a random number between 1 and 20" games - cha-CHING!!!

Based on the title I thought maybe you were suggesting we get the DMCA sent away for a crime it didn't commit.

Now I'm imagining a conversation like this:

My T-shirt: 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625

AACS LA: Hey! That's one of our numbers! You can't wear that!

If this exchange took place, and assuming for simplicity's sake that I made the T-shirt myself, who would have broken the law, me or them?

Did stripper Carol Doda already copyright the perfect 36?

The way I frame the DMCA in Bounty Hunters was this:

an automobile company is going to get wind of this (DMCA) anti-circumvention clause . And what they'll do is build a car with an electronic lock in the hood that only they or a dealer can open. And then they'll sue any independent garage or car owner who tries to pop the hood without permission. You won't be able to work on your own car. And you'll have to go to a dealer for all your parts and repairs.

As soon as you start talking about copyright, there's a whole shebang of frames and metaphors that just completely skewer common sense. But most folks understand cars. They may not be mechanics, but they almost immediately get what the problem is as soon as you allow a car manufacturer to completely monopolize a car, parts, repairs, to the point that GM is issuing "Take down" orders to some website because it explains how you could change your sparkplugs rather than paying some GM dealer an insane amount of money to do it.

I call dibs on 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,35...

I'm planning to collect tiny licensing fees from a lot of users.

Of course, every computer file in existence is equivalent to an integer; it's all zeros and ones. So there's nothing inherently absurd about claiming to copyright a number. Tor does it all the time.

Copyrighting a number that has no creative element, or abusing copyright for non-creative purposes, is another matter.

#6 Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I've got some leaves and petals in my office here claiming prior art. :)

The thing is that they're not claiming to own copyright on the number. They're claiming publication of the number is an anticircumvention method, which the DMCA forbids.

Copyright has Fair Use clauses, and other limitations to the monopoly given to the copyright holder such that they are not allowed to enforce a complete and total monopoly on the work.

You are, for example, allowed to review a movie, and say it stunk. You could even show a clip from the movie of one of the more horid scenes to prove your point. When copyright holders tried to portray that as a copyright violation, the courts told them to get stuffed.

So the billion dollar industry started making campaign donations to congress and got the DMCA passed, which end-runs the court rulings on Fair Use.

The DMCA has no Fair Use clause. No criticism is allowed. No reverse engineering is allowed. The DMCA bequeaths patent-like powers (the ability to control who can use, manufacture, or sell a thing) without requireing the owner to invent something new and patentable.

So, it's not a matter of someone claiming copyright on some number. It's worse. If it were just copyright, fair use would still allow for people to print it.

What about 42?

There was a radio skit somewhere a while back on the BBC where they privatised notes on the musical scale, so that 'Happy Birthday' ran: 'dee-dee dum dee EAT AT MACDONALDS! Drink Evian water (tinkle splash!)' etc. They played the national anthem and various other tunes in this vein.
This doesn't seem all that much saner.

I heart T's response beyond all reason.

Greg London@5: You know that's been done, right? Lexmark, one of the major printer manufacturers, put just that sort of "lock" in their inkjets' ink cartridges. You can't buy third-party ink for a Lexmark printer, because nobody else is allowed to make the cartridges-- it'd violate the DMCA.

I agree with everything that's been written above about the DMCA (particularly by Greg), but the "it's just a number" argument doesn't seem like a very good way of framing the argument to me. If my credit card number were floating around on people's T-shirts (together with the expiration date, my name and my billing address) I'd be pretty annoyed. Yeah it might convince me to move to some more secure system for financial transactions, and I might concede that I couldn't stop it, but I'd still think the people distributing those shirts were immoral.

The point we need to make is that this number is necessary for people to engage in legitimate uses of the DVDs, which AACS is trying to prevent in order to cling to more profits.

Teresa @ 6

It's not nice to dun Mother Nature.

Teresa (#6), you're welcome to most of those. However, I've owned 2, 5, 19, 12,043, 216,493, and a few others since early 1992.

Don't worry though about the 2 and the 5, though. I only intend to charge fees to sleazy licensing authorities.

And while we're at it, I'm registering the Godel number for the American Novel. Teresa, wanna buy it?

mjfgates@13: You know that's been done, right? Lexmark...

yes, I know. The paragraph before I use the automobile metaphor, it says:

In 2003, Lexmark added authentication hardware in its printers and toner cartridges that served no purpose other than to identify non-Lexmark toner cartridges and stop the printer from working if one was detected. Static Control reverse engineered the authentication and sold chips that would allow a competitor to sell a toner cartridge that would work in a Lexmark printer. Smartek bought the chips and used them in their toner cartridge, competing with Lexmark's cartridges. Lexmark then used the anti-circumvention clause to stop Static Control from selling its chips, which prevented Smartek from making toner cartridges that compete with Lexmark.

DMCA was also used to try and monopolize garage door openers. I give an entire list of absurd abuses that the DMCA has been used to justify, then I end with the "Car built with a lock on its hood" metaphor.

Apparently, THAT has been done, in a way. The diagnostic computers for some cars, (I don't know the manufacturer), may actually require the mechanics/shops that use them to sign a NonDisclosureAgreement or something so that no one can reverse engineer the machine, which means no one can fix their own car.

So, AJ, does this mean that (1+SquareRoot(5))/2 is a copyright circumvention device?

IIRC, the traditional justification for copyright is to encourage publication by providing a profit motive. So the idea that there is a copyright act which explicitly prevents the publication of information is, at least, a bit odd. (I mean, there is a whole branch of research where publication might be illegal under DMCA.)

BTW, if I understand things correctly, you could shroud the infamous 128 bit number, publish it and the AACS could, legally, do nothing. They would have to circumvent the DRM you have put on the number to recognize it. That, of course, is illegal under the DMCA.

This gets us into all sorts of weird and perverse territory. e.g., what if someone wrote out the digits of that number in Pig Latin?

David@14: The point we need to make is that this number is necessary for people to engage in legitimate uses of the DVDs

That is why I said they don't claim the number is Copyrighted. Copyright allows for Fair Use, criticism, reverse engineering, etc. DMCA does not.

It should be noted that DVD Jon, the kid who cracked the original DVD, basically wanted to watch DVD's on his Linux box. He had the hardware, the drive, the monitor, the computer, but the movie industry wouldnt let him.

Even if you own a legitimate copy of the DVD and owned your own hardware, the DMCA makes that illegal.

The movie industry tries to present it as if they're only trying to prevent unauthorized copying, but what they did was far more monopolistic than that. You couldn't watch a legitimate DVD on your computer DVD player.

David @ 19,

Yes. That ratio is mine.

And while I'm at it, I should probably mention that I have a patent pending on Godel number encryption. Bruce is going to have to split those royalties.

Greg, @9: Oddly enough, when I was sitting in the auditorium waiting for a performance by Stomp the other day, I was bored, and so read the fine print on my ticket (having neglected to bring something better to read).

The fine print on the ticket said that I agreed, by using the ticket, not to publish or distribute an *account of the performance*.

I checked the tickets for several concerts I'm going to, and they all say the same thing.

Apparently agreeing not to publish reviews of the ticketed event has now become part of the ticket fine print boilerplate.

Lexmark did lose their case, though.

Jenny (#11) I wonder if this was influenced by an earlier idea. In an episode of the Goon Show (characteristically described as absurd & surreal humour) the scheming, villainous Hercules Grytpype-Thynne copyrights the word 'Help', then goes around pushing people into deep water, tiger cages, and so forth, so he can charge them money to use it.

Aphrael, I just checked the ticket for the event I'm going to tonight, and it's got the same boilerplate. (It also said that pucks, balls, and other equipment may fly into the spectator area and that it's my own dang problem if I get injured, but I'm not so worried about that at a Loreena McKennitt concert.) I do wonder if the other thing means I can't review the concert in my LJ, though. I notice that the ticket does grant all rights to the ticketseller to use my likeness in any way it sees fit.

Hmpf.

(Random aside: How long has the spelling reference been at bottom of the Post A Comment bit? Awesomesauce, btw.)

And I would like to dibs 13, 26, 39, 169, 144, and 20,736. Specially that last before my dear dad gets his hands on it.

This isn't about trademark or copyright. The essential question is: does a person (or company) have the right to legally prevent another person from publishing their password. So it's not a matter of "I own the number 4223 and no one else is allowed to use it". It's a matter of "You aren't allowed to tell anyone that the number 4223 is my PIN number!"

I would like to copyright rule of thumb pi (22/7).

Oh, darn. I forgot 13 was part of the Fibonacci series and Teresa dibsed it first.

Lexmark did lose their case. The judge ruled that they were trying to use the DMCA to create an artificial monopoly and his ruling was upheld on appeal.

This is why you are starting to see generic brand equivalents for ink now. Staples has a whole line of them.

Since the Super Sekrit Number is often expressed in hexadecimal, one could always ROT-13 it as an anticircumvention device. (After all, that's what the Adobe/Sklyarov situation wound up being based on.)

I am planning to register a few defensive patents.

09% of the population thinks this law is a bad idea.
F9 to 99 all agree.
11% of people think Congress should be replaced by Chimps.
02% think it already has.
9D-9% Chance that this law will not be repealed.
74% of all Congressmen do not vote regularly.
E3 Bingo!
5B is the secret room where bad laws are debated.
D8 is the decoy room.
41% of all people in the US believe political contributions=bribes.
56% of all paper money is recycled blue jeans.
C5 is where the battleship aint.
63 moons orbit Jupiter.
56 moons orbit Saturn.
88% of people surveyed say Congress should be in session 6 months out of the year.
C? Told you so!

Elise: I can't imagine such a clause holding up in a court, but it does mean that if they got upset with you, they'd at least have an argument in play.

I wonder how long that boilerplate has been there? It wasn't there ten years ago, but I don't read the tickets often enough to know when it crept in.

I tried to claim 5,271,009, but I got a cease-and-desist letter from the estate of Alfred Bester. Quant suff.

If they're up to integers, words can't be far behind. Bags I "a" and "the". Show me the money!

The essential question is: does a person (or company) have the right to legally prevent another person from publishing their password.

Except you have it backwards as to who is stealing from whom.

The public has a right to Fair Use of copyrighted material. The movie industry is using the DMCA as a way to put a padlock on Fair Use rights to lock the public out of what is rightfully theirs.

Are negative and imaginary numbers covered by this law, or only integers? I call dibs on the square root of minus 1.

Why? Because I want to.

It's fun to joke about copyrighting numbers and patenting venerable and computationally useless algorithms. But more seriously, Greg London (#9 & #21) and DavidS (#14) are completely right. No one is actually trying to copyright numbers.

I don't agree with sburnap (#27) however. This is a copyright issue, in a larger sense. The question is what sort of restrictions are we as a society willing to tolerate in exchange for a steady supply of creative content. I don't object to limiting distribution for a period of some years; Tolkien was entitled to his royalties.

But what the movie industry is trying to do is a violation of the spirit of the copyright bargain. We've got a pretty clear standard for reasonable use for CDs, VCR tapes, and the like -- lending, making spare copies, and so forth harms no one -- and there's no reason we should mutely accept the content industry's attempt to unilaterally change the terms of our bargain. Especially not when they've chosen to do it by bribing legislators into crafting laws as full of mischief as the DMCA.

Are negative and imaginary numbers covered by this law, or only integers? I call dibs on the square root of minus 1.

Why? Because I want to.

This is all too complex for me.

Teresa 6: 34, actually. But who's counting?

#36 And if they're up to integers, words can't be far behind.

Freedom(tm) is on the march.

If God created the integers, who gets the blame for the words?

In the beginning were the numbers, and the numbers were the Elohim, and the Elohim were plural and multiplied throughout the multiverse without trademark. All numbers were equal to themselves and nothing else, and apart from numbers there was nothing. The 'verse was without metaphor, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Then some trickster said the Word.

The argument that the public has the right to fair use and that the DMCA somehow locks them out of what is righfully theirs is, well, lame.

In some states there is a right to use the waterfront. This does not *automatically* create the right to travel through private property which stands between you and the waterfront. Such a right of way could be created by law, but it doesn't automatically spring into being once the right to use the waterfront is acknowledged.

The question of whether you have the ultimate right to use something is separate from the question of whether someone else has the right to place an impediment in your path.

elise @ 25

the ticket does grant all rights to the ticketseller to use my likeness in any way it sees fit.

I'm going to make damn sure that the producers of the next concert I go to don't make voodoo dolls.

sburnap@27

I agree with you on one level, but is it still their pin number if they sell the item to which the pin number is attached?

The game that is being played is that I buy the disk when my ownership of the disk suits them but I meerly buy the rights to use the disk when their continued ownership of the disk suits them. And then there is the EULA where I have to use their approved hardware to watch the disk and not the stuff I already have. Oh, and they can retroactivly revise the EULA.

Imagine if a drug company tried this? "You broke out in hives? Are you aware that breaking out in hives is a violation of our EULA? Page 17, line 21 specifically forbids metabolic reactions involving histamines, gamma globulin and cytokines. I'm afraid this is now a matter for our legal department."

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey @ 35

Probably a good thing, too, or you might find yourself the last man on Earth. Sacre-Bleu! Jeez!

Patrick @ 43,

Your analogy is broken. Hope you won't mind if I fix it.

We've been using that road across Mr. Banks' property to get the ocean for two generations. This means, under common and US law, that we possess of an easement, i.e. we do in fact have a legal right to continued access. Moreover, we have every right to get angry if Mr. Banks bribes the local cops to harass us when we exercise that right.

Lizzy L @ 38

I'm taking all the quaternions. As they include all 3-dimensional rotations, none of you will have anywhere to turn.

Patrick @ 43

There are people who will deny use to the public, even when the legal right is established and there is a public right of way, simply because they don't want to share that section of beach or trail or whatever. The DMCA feels something like that.

If the RIAA could figure out a way to use the number Omega as a "product lock" code, they'd rule the world.

Omega, discovered by the mathematician Gregory Chaitin, has been proven to exist but is uncomputable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant

#39: "No one is actually trying to copyright numbers."

It may not exactly be copyright law, but I think that's the closest analogy to what they're asking for. Trade secret law would be the natural route, but there's no protection there from publication after reverse-engineering. It's not like a patent - those have to be publicly disclosed to have any protection. It's not like a trademark, as those obviously have to be public.

Copyright is the only such existing right that allows you to use legal means to prevent other people from duplicating information you claim to own, as the DMCA is attempting with this key, and to do so without publicly disclosing the information.

Actually, the more apt comparison is to the UK's Official Secrets Act, specifically section 5, which allows the government to prosecute anyone (not just government employees) who publishes or discloses information the government declares to be secret.

I don't know what it says about the US that while there's no equivalent to the Official Secrets Act for national-security secrets, Congress seemed happy to create an equivalent protection for a very specific class of commercial secrets.

Patrick @43:

The argument that the public has the right to fair use and that the DMCA somehow locks them out of what is righfully theirs is, well, lame.

In some states there is a right to use the waterfront. This does not *automatically* create the right to travel through private property which stands between you and the waterfront. Such a right of way could be created by law, but it doesn't automatically spring into being once the right to use the waterfront is acknowledged.

But Patrick, this is a little beyond having to cut across private property to get to the waterfront.

This is closer to someone building a wall around the waterfront, then enclosing the waterfront in a dome, then charging people to use the proprietary Access Portal(TM) that was built just outside the waterfront grounds but is now the only way to get there, and limiting access to that PORTAL once per day/week/month.

None of which makes bypassing AACS any less illegal, but I find it very hard to feel any symapthy for them.

In addition to what AJ says in #39, Cory Doctorow has written and spoken extensively about how one of the evils of DRM is that it allows them to change the terms of the bargain at any time, even long after the exchange of money. It also allows them to intrude into your personal life in ways that are quite disturbing. (e.g., Say that they decided that you are rights for a family to view the movie. Suddenly, they are in the business of decision what constitutes a family.)

Also, the inability to publish about circumvention measures has ramifications on computer security. It's sort of like saying, if we don't ever talk about software bugs, then all software will suddenly be bug free. There are lots of legitimate reasons to protect data. DMCA compromises research in that area, in my opinion, solely so that a bunch of movie distributors prevent piracy ineffectively.

43: The argument that the public has the right to fair use and that the DMCA somehow locks them out of what is righfully theirs is, well, lame. In some states there is a right to use the waterfront. ....

Well, I'm basing my argument off of a couple hundred years of copyright rulings from various courts. It appears you're basing your argument off of how you want to map waterfront law to copyright law. I think starting with copyright law is probably "less lame".

But let me quote to you Bruce Lehman, the Patent Commissioner who lobbied Congress to adopt the DMCA, the man responsible for this mess:

"Some have argued that because it may now be technically feasible to "meter" each use of a copyrighted work, and to charge a user a fee for the use, the concept of fair use has no place in the NII environment.” -- Bruce Lehman, 1995

This was the intent from the beginning: to get rid of Fair Use and install a "per use" or "per copy" fee on every single work you listen to, read, or watch.

In November 2003, president of the Motion Picture Association of America Jack Valenti said:
"If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one."

I believe the phrase is "straight from the horse's mouth".

Any objection to my copyrighting the numbers 1984 and 2001?

So after this, latest DRM debacle is over, what tactics will the DRM lobby try next?

Suggestions:

1. Spending millions of dollars on "public shaming" campaigns. Kids caught copying DVDs will be shown in TV ads with captions like: "THIS KID COPIED A SLIPKNOT CD. HE IS A DISGRACE TO HIS PARENTS AND COUNTRY."

2. Sending anonymous threats to customers: "If we catch you pirating our movies and CDs we'll vandalize your car! -A Friend"

3. Hiring Colombian death squads to take out customers who make copies.

4. Buying a Presidency that declares a Global War On Piracy.

5. Desperate begging: "We're dying here! Pleeease stop giving copies to your friends and family, or we'll have to sell our McMansions!"

(*SATIRE*)

You know the sad part? The RIAA and MPAA, and the rest of the "content industry", don't like the DMCA either. They think it's too liberal, and they think it has too many loopholes that allow their customers to view works in ways that the content industry doesn't control.

The content industry is lobbying for new laws that are even more extreme than the DMCA. There's a good chance that they'll succeed. Even if they don't succeed, the effect is that the DMCA will look like the traditional, reasonable compromise position.

So...if someone publishes, for the first time ever, additional digits of pi, and copyrights the book, can the author sue someone who also publishes those digits of pi without permission? If so, would it be a defense that the second person derived those digits independently, as indeed anyone with knowledge of the math involved can do?

Jacob @ #51:

Right. One could rephrase part of your comment -- although hopefully without distorting your sentiments as -- "The DMCA's provisions aren't supported by any established legal principle."

As for Congress...well, I still find it depressing that the DMCA passed the Senate without a single dissenting vote. We're going to have to keep a close eye on the new Democratic majorities; they've been the primary sponsors of this garbage in the past.

People who are curious about what's been proposed recently should have a look at the Wikipedia page on pending IP legislation

Jacob Davies @ 51

there's no equivalent to the Official Secrets Act for national-security secrets

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Title 18 USC act as an equivalent? It sure seemed that way when I was told what would happen if I violated it.

#36: "If they're up to integers, words can't be far behind. Bags I "a" and "the". Show me the money!"

That's easy to do. Just encode the "09F9…" number with the S/KEY One Time Password System [RFC 2289] as a pair of six-word sequences. Here are your twelve words: "BYE ONCE TIM SAY ARID LICE SEAT CAR LOCK OATH COCA BULL"

You're welcome.

Watch. Now I'll have to be disemvoweled.

#58: pi is a fact. I don't think you can copyright facts. Also, no one is asserting copyright on numbers. What AACS is asserting is that publishing this number is illegal because DCMA makes the proliferation of information for circumventing a copy protection mechanism illegal.

They are not claiming that they have authored the 128 bit number. They are claiming that publishing the 128 bit number compromises the ability to protect their copyrighted works. What worries me is that, under DMCA, they may actually have standing for redress. (IANAL. I would be thrilled to be wrong.)

If you haven't read Matthew Skala's essay about the Colour of bits, you owe it to yourself to read it now. It's very well-written and prescient -- he wrote it in 2004, but it's still a much better roundup of the AACS issue than anything else I've seen.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go trade a large integer with random people on the Internet. In an amazing coincidence, when you write this integer to disk and interpret it as an AVI file, it's this week's episode of Lost. Well, either that or one-half of a pair of large integers that, when XORed together, produce all of Tor's 2006 hardcover releases in PDF format.

(It's both, actually, but you'll have to read Skala's essay to learn what makes that fact so interesting.)

Patrick @ 43, if you want to use the right-of-way analogy to talk about the DMCA, a better one may be that of the rancher who grazes his cattle on public lands, then puts a gate across the public road crossing "his" land because the cars disturb the livestock. You started off with public access, then private interests suddenly had financial interest in restricting said access and took matters into their own hands.

This is not saying "information wants to be free". This is saying that it is the proponents of the DMCA, those who are talking about "closing the analog loophole", who are the ones changing the rules, not the crazy people who think paying for content and hardware physically capable of accessing the content means you should be able to actually get at the content.

Just in case anyone's confused, the "Patrick" who's arguing the right-of-way analogy isn't me...

#63. Well, you can copyright certain types of factual material. If I made a list of, say, every 45 ever issued by Motown Records, with tile, artist, and number, or a bibliography of every Badger Books paperback ever issued, that would simply be factual material. But I could copyright it. People who publish works like these will sometimes intentionally introdce small errors (a fictitious entry, say) to guard against unauthorized copying.

Of course pi is a fact. But expanding it beyond whatever number of places it's been expanded to would involve original research.

I'm not in favor of copyrighting this sort of thing, but I believe one could actually make a legal case that such a thing is copyrightable.

The alphabet is next. I claim "e", "r" and "t".

I hereby decree that the letter "O" will remain forever unclaimed, as will "0" -- zero, or zed. This will be known henceforth as the Thurber rule.

Anticorium writes: "If you haven't read Matthew Skala's essay about the Colour of bits"

Yeah, that's a pretty good essay. Unfortunately, there is one important aspect of Paranoia, the RPG, that he doesn't bring up: the setup that inevitably leads to the mass festival of scragging that ends a typical session of the game is that player characters, in addition to being assigned roles as Troubleshooters on a mission to help the Computer eliminate the Commie Mutant Traitors, are also assigned to roles in one or more factions of the Commie Mutant Traitors. His analogy only makes more sense when you take this into account.

In the world of Paranoia, the Computer is obviously insane. It's also forbidden in that world to recognize that the Computer is insane. In the analogy MSkala is drawing, the obvious insanity is that Colour is a computable property of bits; yet, it's forbidden by law to recognize that Colour is not a computable property of bits. Furthermore, in the analogy, the Troubleshooters are all, by virtue of the fact that they're computer scientists, some kind of Commie Mutant Traitor or another, because their jobs depend on their ability to recognize that Colour is not a computable propery of bits, which the Law says it's forbidden to recognize.

And, that's why we're all busy scragging one another's clones, and why Friend Computer has been driven insane trying to keep us from doing it.

Robert (67), that isn't so. The phone book isn't copyrightable.

If you want to see how well the AACS is doing, see

List of appearances
Let's see them take this down

Maps can be copyrighted (copyrote?) even when they're based on public information. Yes, small errors, such as fictitious streets, are frequently added.

There's creativity involved in drawing maps. Where do you put the street names? How do you choose to represent various weirdnesses?

Satellite photos aren't copyright.

PJEvans #71:

Not that adding small errors would be particularly useful in the case of a 128-bit key. On anyone's part.

Seth@72: Are they not? I'm under the fairly strong impression that all photographs, satellite or not, are copyrightable.

A nice illustration of the nature of copyright in the UK: the football fixtures lists are copyrighted (and require licensing to publish) because they are a creative work. The football results, which are essentially the fixture lists with additional score information, are not copyrightable and can be published by anyone, because they are a matter of historical record.

Robert L #67: Did you pull that Motown discography example out of thin air, or did you know someone already introduced a fictitious record into such a discography? (It was Don Waller in Motown Story, and the "record" in question was the Joy Buzzers' "T.G.'s Voodoo Lounge". I read about this in The New Book of Rock Lists in the "Money" chapter; it's the #7 entry in "Steve Propes Lists a Dozen Hoaxes (and Dispels a Few Rumors)".)

#60, on Title 18: "when I was told what would happen if I violated it."

Presumably this was while you were an employee of the government and not a private citizen, though?

I don't know the exact details of Title 18, but in the Pentagon Papers case the US government was not allowed to prevent the New York Times from publishing secret government documents. In Britain, that would have been a simple violation of the Official Secrets Act and the government would have been able to prevent publication.

This is not just academic: in the Spycatcher case in the 80s publishers and newspapers were prevented by gag orders from publishing the book or excerpts from it. (The book was written by a former Assistant Director of MI5 and is quite interesting, mostly dealing with paranoia and backstabbing at the agency, but not really all that dangerous.)

In this case, the analogy to copyright law comes from the ability to require that publishers cease to publish infringing material which is an especially powerful ability when set against the US First Amendment. There are very few other ways to require that someone stop saying or publishing something here in the US.

Of course in the case of copyright there are exceptions for fair use, and the facility for redress was traditionally civil law, not criminal. There's also the concept of merger in copyright, where you can't protect the only possible way of expressing something.

And of course books, film & music can be represented as numbers. But I think you'd have a hard time finding an interesting one that fits in a 128-bit number unless you have an unusually short attention-span.

I wonder if posting 02 * 03-16-19-03-11-02-03-20-01-16-12-05-19-08-11-19-05-17-06-08-19-18-07-00-17-15-03-10 is okay?

#75, I didn't know that (and I have the Waller book!) but may have heard it and forgotten it. I did have a vague memory that someone or other had done such a thing in a discography. I do remember reading that Jay Robert Nash included deliberate errors in his encyclopedic true-crime book Bloodletters and Badmen to confound those who might plagiarize him.

Of course, now what someone should do is make a faux-Motown recording of the Joy Buzzers, press a few copies, insert a few very battered discs in piles at key flea markets, then periodically offer a mint copy for big $$ on eBay.

It was a similar process, I believe, that caused the recording and pressing of "Stormy Weather" by the Five Sharks (sic) as an attempt to cash in on the real but ultra-rare doo-wop platter "Stormy Weather" by the Five Sharps (sic).

#67: Seth, I think certain things are not copyrightable simply because they have been deliberately given away, either by the government or by the phone co., and are thus public information. Certain other information about phones is--well, not copyright, maybe, but proprietary--certain types of reverse directories, or driver's license information. I'm sure if they can figure out a way to copyright phone books, they will. Cell phone directories?

Re #72 and #74: Most published photographs are in fact copyrightable, but there is an originality threshold they must meet. It's pretty low-- things like choice of angle, the moment chosen to make the exposure in a changing scene, etc., seem to be enough-- but it's there.

There was a court decision in New York a few years ago, for instance, that ruled that a literal photograph of another two-dimensional image (e.g. a photo or digitization of a painting, or of another photo) was *not* copyrightable, because it didn't involve any of those varying elements, but was just a "slavish copy" akin to using a photocopier. This rule didn't apply to a photo of a sculpture, though, since that involved a choice of where to take the photo from.

I'm not sure on which side of the line a satellite photo would fall. One can imagine different choices of time to take the photo, or choice of areas to cover, but on the other hand I gather than most satellite photos are automated, so a typical satellite photo could well be considered a "slavish copy". Does anyone know of any case law on the matter?

On copyrighting satellite photographs: it depends on who owns the satellite. If an agency of the US govt takes the picture, it's automatically public domain because the public paid for it.

I actually e-mailed NASA and asked about permission to use their photos for cross-stitch patterns. They said that as long as they got proper credit, they had no problem with it. (I did say, for personal use. I think I can safely give the patterns away, but I don't know if I could legally sell them.)

PJ: The original photos are public domain; that means you can adapt them freely and sell the results. (I'm as sure as someone who is NAL can be.)

Texanne, thank you for that reassurance, although I doubt that most people would be masochistic enough to do one (or more) of them. (For one thing, to get them to look good at all, you need a whole lot of colors.) The photos make really nice wallpaper for the computer, though. (Currently on my desktop at work: Cassini's composite view of Saturn-with-rings, from the other side. If you look closely, you can see the little blue dot that's us.)

Re: #80 "[...] If an agency of the US govt takes the picture, it's automatically public domain because the public paid for it."

Unless it's Classified as "Secret", perhaps. Other factors may also apply. S-f Fan Earl Kemp served a prison term not for publishing an edition of the Report of President Nixon's Commission on Pornography, or for the numerous (Very Graphic) illustrations he added, but for sending an advertisement for it though the U.S. Mail.

On the copyrightability of photographs:

I recently attended a talk at which the speaker mentioned that he was having trouble getting copyright clearance for some of the Renaissance paintings on his slides. This might strike you as odd --- if anything ought to be out of copyright, it's a painting from the Renaissance. But while the paintings are out of copyright, photographs of them are not --- and courts have apparently been persuaded that the photographers' choices of lighting, camera distance, and so forth in making those images involves enough creative effort that they fall under copyright.

Then again, that's more mental effort than went into the "non-obvious" inventions protected by some of the more notorious patents granted by the same legal system...

Just for clarity: it doesn't sound to me like AACS is actually claiming they own the right to publish the numerical sequence. They're claiming they control the right to publish the sequence in association with their product. Not as much fun to ridicule, but quite possibly also a poisonous assertion.

If I publish a web page that reads:

3X2(9YZ)4A
is the magic formula!

that's not the same thing as publishing a page that reads:

3X2(9YZ)4A is the decryption key that will unlock that new "Speed Force Adventures" DVD you just bought.

which is (arguably) not the same thing as publishing a page that reads:

3X2(9YZ)4A is a corporate credit card number registered to DC Comics.

Somebody should hunt down Mr. Avogadro's heirs, btw, because that guy could make a KILLING.

I put dibs on 10.

Snippers will be passed around so that everyone can remove a finger and toe.

Robert L @ 62 - Not true. What you have the copyright on is not the facts in that book, rather your arrangement of them. Nobody is allowed to copy directly from your work not because you have obtained ownership of those facts, but because they would then be infringing upon the creative work you did in arranging them and making them coherent. Since it's hard to recognize infringement of organization in a list (especially if it's chronological or alphabetical - and those might not be protected but I don't recall just now) that's why errors are introduced. Copycats will copy the errors while somebody else who just happens to come up with the same scheme won't.

For Patrick at 43, that's just fine, so long as you don't want me to actually go to the beach. If you do, and especially if you expect me to pay for the privilege, then you'd best give me a way to get there that I'm willing to use.

I'm only running Linux on my laptop these days so if you expect me to pay for it, it better function without me having to spend time I don't have hunting down a crack for your encryption because I'd rather spend that time making my splash screen pretty, and the desktop with Windows doesn't like me anymore. If you don't give me a legal way to pay for your product and use it so that it suits me, I just won't pay for your product. I might do without, if I really want it I'll probably borrow it from a friend. (The internet is so conveniently full of friendly people) If you don't believe me, you should have been there for the cussing fest that was Anaea resolving her inability to get the first two episodes of season 3 of BSG she bought from iTunes onto her TV by going and pirating second copies that weren't DRMed beyond usability. I'm still bitter about the fact that I paid for the season pass before finding out how cranky the whole thing made me.

#78, Robert L, I think certain things are not copyrightable simply because they have been deliberately given away, either by the government or by the phone co., and are thus public information. ... I'm sure if they can figure out a way to copyright phone books, they will.

The phone book example isn't a hypothetical; see the Feist case. The phone book in question did have false entries to discover copying, but even with the copying proved the Supreme Court ruled no copyright infringement occured.

#85: Bryan Talbot wanted to use images from the Bayeux Tapestry in his new graphic novel Alice in Sunderland, but likewise found that one is allowed to reproduce only approved, copyright photos which are fairly expensive.

Fortunately, he discovered the existence of the other tapestry in the town museum of Reading, Berkshire -- where I live, in fact. This near-replica was created by the Leek Embroidery Society in 1885-6, with just a little editing (naked corpses tastefully unsexed, and another naked figure in the border given a tiny pair of Y-fronts). Bryan did a deal with Reading museum and was allowed free use of their images in exchange for a plug in his book. "I fart in your general direction, Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux," the artist was not heard to say.

As seen previously on Making Light, you can remix your own Bayeux tapestries

Somebody should hunt down Mr. Avogadro's heirs, btw, because that guy could make a KILLING.

That would only be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Charles Dodgson: see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp, which held that in precisely this situation copyright was not applicable. This hasn't stopped art photographers from claiming they have copyright on their work, though.

Note that this isn't legal advice, you should talk to a lawyer before ignoring somebody else's claim to copyright, etc.

I will copyright the letters "a" and "i".

All of you start paying up!

Seriously though, if someone just say, casually mentions the code number in a conversation (how they do that is up to your imagination) and does not mention it is the code, can they still be sued under this law?

Will A #42: Freedom(tm) is on the march..

Too late.

JC #63: pi is a fact. It's also a number. I shall copyright it and charge a royalty to anybody who wants to engineer anything circular, like a DVD.

Jules @ #94:
I've been part of groups relying on this ruling to put facsimile photographs of out-of-print material on the web along with transcriptions and such.

For my own purposes, which almost exclusively involve printed books rather than paintings, I would still have to be extremely careful about reproducing in print anything I have a scan or facsimile of. While a claim to copyright may or may not be legally enforceable, the libraries can forbid me use of their collections if I break whatever rules (reasonable or otherwise) they put in place. Some (like the British Library) also make me sign an agreement about publication before providing copies.

chris y @96: Doh. If "freedom" is taken, I call dibs on "evil." Sloppy, ill-defined usage will be met with punishments worthy of the word.

P J Evans @ 81: I actually e-mailed NASA and asked about permission to use their photos for cross-stitch patterns. They said that as long as they got proper credit, they had no problem with it.

Have you actually done any of those patterns? And if so, do you have pictures? Cross-stitch is a craft that despite multiple attempts I've never managed to conquer--or even achieve rudimentary competence in--and so I greatly admire people who can do fancy stuff like that in it. (You would think that making tiny X's in thread would not be that difficult. And yet.)

Charles, Jules, #85, #94: anyone who's actually done art copy photography knows that it's time-consuming work, demanding of skill and (if one is a pro) work one will only do if one is paid for it--one can bloody well use one's time and equipment for something that will actually turn a profit, else. And one doesn't put one's heart into work for hire, either. Bridgeman is bizarre--there's no such thing as an exact photographic copy of anything--and it worries me a great deal; it sounds to me like the main result is going to be a lot fewer good photographs of older art.

I don't know how else to refute the multitudes of people who spouted off weird answers to my post other than to repeat the following:

"The question of whether you have the ultimate right to use something is separate from the question of whether someone else has the right to place an impediment in your path."

This is a true statement. It was not intended as a blanket defence of DRM, but rather as a counter to a particular argument that is awfully silly.

Also, to the guy at #54, because I can't resist flaming people who say dumb things. Your first quote is a a pathetic attempt at making someone sound bad by excerpting without context. The actual statement had the EXACT OPPOSITE MEANING that you attributed to it. The full paragraph reads:

Preserving the framework does not require, however, a dramatic increase in authors' rights, such as *more limited or no further applicability of the fair use doctrine* in the NII environment. *Some have argued* that because it may now be technically feasible to "meter" each use of a copyrighted work, and to charge a user a fee for the use, the concept of fair use has no place in the NII environment. They argue equally that other limitations on rights should be abolished or narrowed for similar reasons. The Working Group believes that weakening copyright owners' rights in the NII is not in the public interest; *nor would a dramatic increase in their rights be justified.*

He is clearing describing what "some" have argued, and stating that his organization disagrees with that position.

The answer to #95, can you be sued for..., is yes. Anyone can be sued for anything.

Would the AACSLA win that hypothetical suit? Nobody knows. The DMCA forbids circumvention devices and it is not clear whether the courts would hold that a single number counts as a circumvention device and, if so, under what circumstances. If that suit went to trial, and if it got all the way up to the Supreme Court, then maybe we'd find out.

81, 82: what "original" means in the case of images from spacecraft is a bit slippery if you aren't familiar with all the image processing that takes place.

The case I'm most familiar with, from my astronomical background, is the Hubble Space Telescope. The relevant copyright policy can be found here. (One-liner: anything credited to the Space Telescope Science Institute, vs. someone at another institution, is PD but they request credit). The situation is that what comes off the telescope isn't the pretty pictures seen on desktop backgrounds and the Hubble Heritage site, but much less-processed black-and-white images. See, for example, this example. Skipping over the issue of the proprietary period for the data, which is an entirely separate issue, there's a lot of work that goes into converting these images -- even the science-grade processed images -- into the pretty pictures, involving the choice of colors (lots of the really nice ones are four-color, rather than three-color, or involve converting multiple filters to a single display color) and tweaking the intensity stretch for maxium aesthetics. Here's a brief description of part of the process. There are people employed by HST who basically do nothing else. While StSCI has chosen to release their pretty processed images, it's not as automatic as "HST is a NASA mission, so everything it produces, no matter how much additional processing has gone into the final product, is public domain." Color images produced by other observers may or may not be copyrighted, depending on the policy of the institution. (Most observers would probably be happy to have their images used, with credit, so long as it isn't for purposes they find offensive.)

Susan @ 97,

I recently attended a Publishing and the Interwebs forum (which was mostly Interwebs for n0Obs), at which the final panel of the day was a copyright discussion. The first speaker was a representative of the Librarians of Canada, and he came out as a strong proponent of the information wants to be free view of copyright. He declared, proudly and staunchly, that librarians are not in favour of any measures that will restrict the dissemination of information in any form.

I guess the libraries that have rare books in their collections didn't receive that particular memo.

jennie @ #104:
Given what the BL charges for photocopies or microfilming, the motivation may be financial. I've gritted my teeth and paid as much as $70 for a single page. Fortunately, it was a Very Cool Page.

Unfortunately, since I really need stuff from them, I have to play their game. But when the item in question is in any other collection, I go there first. Libraries elsewhere in the UK are much more accommodating. Oxford is just a joy to deal with. And there's a very nice librarian in a small town in Scotland who was quite bemused to suddenly receive calls from the U.S. about some old letters, but happy to make copies for about $6 total, including postage.

I much admire the Library of Congress, which has scanned huge amounts of material and made it available on their website.

Matt Austen, I think the question raised this morning on NPR is more meaningful: sure, they can sue, maybe they can win, but can they get the number off the internet?

Given that it showed up yesterday on ICANHASCHEEZBURGER (now aged back to page 2) all signs point to no.

Susan @ 105,

Oh, I'm sure their motivation is financial, I'm just amused by the contrast between charging $70 for a page and the vehement, indignant championing of everyone's access to free, FREE information I heard at the summit.

And the Library of Congress rocks my world.

Fade @ 99

Yes. It's the one-and-two of a color that gets me. I usually run the pattern through a copier (fair use!) and color it with highlighter as I work, so I know where I am.

The one that isn't quite done (all the one-and-two stitch bits) is the Eagle Nebula, from the picture they released for Hubble's 15th. (APoD ran it as the 'Dust Fairy'.)

As far as competence - I make plenty of mistakes myself. There's always at least one stitch crossed the wrong way, one the wrong color that I had to work over with the right color, the tension is off a little somewhere even with the good hoop. And somewhere I probably had to take out a bit completely and redo it because it was so the wrong color.

P J Evans @ 108

I've never even gotten far enough to switch colors when trying cross-stitch; for all that crochet and knitting worked just fine, there's something about cross-stitch that I just don't grok. I've never yet completed a single row without becoming frustrated, usually before I even start crossing the squares. Which is really a pity, because there are some lovely patterns out there, and it's so much better suited for transforming an image into yarn-art than, well, crochet or knitting. My mother used to do patterns from books or across pre-printed grids, and had so many marvelous colors of yarn. Me, well, I make socks, rather ineptly. I suppose not every craft is for every person.

When you're doing the nebula, is it all in 'standard' colors, or are you using any of the glittery threads I've seen used in patterns? I'm not quite sure if a glittering nebula image would end up very pretty or rather silly-looking, though I'm inclined to believe the former.

Fade @ 109

Standard stuff. I've used metallics and some of the other specialty stuff in projects, and while the effects can be spectacular, I haven't fallen in love with most of them. (Beads might be fun to put in where the stars are, if I could find the right colors.)

Jules@#94 - That's an interesting decision, especially as I'd been thinking of Bridgeman with respect to the parallels to satellite photography.

On a philosophical note I think I probably agree with Randolph@#100, insofar as it involves a non-trivial effort to create something that wouldn't exist otherwise. More significantly, I can't see any latitude in the Berne convention for a signatory to allow free use for any photograph except within standard fair practise or the context of of reporting current events.

Patrick@#101 - Lehman's quote does not represent Lehman's own position, but does establish that some copyright stakeholders (i.e. publishers) believe that fair use is no longer applicable. The fact that Lehman and his organisation rejected the argument does not mean that those arguing for it do not exist or are not attempting to achieve those goals via other legislative or other means intended to supplement the DMCA.

Personally, I have trouble with the concept of a specific legally defined right (whether it be fair use or a right of way) which is permitted to be abrogated by means of a deliberate impediment.

Patrick@101: The actual statement had the EXACT OPPOSITE MEANING

Hm. It's always interesting when folks make words mean whatever they want it to mean. I suppose your verion of reality would work just fine.

Oh, wait, except for the fact that Lehman is the guy who rammed the DMCA down our throats. Yeah, you should keep portraying him as the "Defender of Fair Use".

Because your interpretation of what he said should always overrule any actions he actually took.

because I can't resist flaming people who say dumb things.

This from a guy who responded to a statement about copyright law by making up some hypothetical about waterfront property law, and arguing that his hypothetical example was somehow more relevant than reality.

Whatever. It's clear your opinions are safely removed from any outside influence like reality or similar issues. Feel free to blather.

Greg: Not to defend any particular position or interpretation here, but <cough> is an analogy to waterfront property inherently more crazy than an analogy of copyright to bounty hunting?

The Other Patrick has a valid point. The HD-DVD DRM mechanism, as with the DVD CSS DRM, is being used to defend both against a lot of legitimate uses of material under fair use and a lot of known and expectable illegitimate uses of material. (I assume everyone understands this, but if you don't believe the latter is going on, just Google for torrents of movies and you may understand their motivation.)

So what is an appropriate position to take in regard to civil disobedience via illegal posting of a "lock combination" - actually a pretty good analogy - to protest a law which protects a lock mechanism that is being used to restrict both unethical illegitimate and perfectly ethical and traditionally legitimate behavior? Beats me. I just think the question is a couple generations removed in abstraction and indirection both from "they're copyrighting a number!", or "but every binary file is just a number!"

On the whole I think the crack is probably a good thing, as it might get through the industries' heads that this is a losing proposition, but I'm willing to agree that it's a little more complicated than some people are making out.

To quote the Beatle Vultures from Disney's Jungle Book, "Now let's not start that again."

Randolph@100 --- copy photography may involve a lot of effort, but since Feist, in which the Supreme Court specifically rejected the "sweat of the brow" argument as justification for copyright (in that case, on the listings in some company's phone book), effort is not enough to make something copyrightable in the U.S.; there has to be some element of creative expression. A cleverly altered version of an original image clearly qualifies --- but the most exact possible reproduction of the original (with no creative elements added by the photographer), perhaps not, no matter how much effort it takes to achieve that. <