WastedTimes

[aiolos]

This strange system might be of interest to the lawyers. I doubt it will hold up in court though.



Sitting squarely in the murky grey depths of the latter side of the argument is the Digital Douwd, and their latest project, the "OFF System." The OFF portion stands for either Owner-Free Filing or Owner-Free File (the group claims to have not settled on a name yet.) The OFF System is a peer-to-peer file sharing service that attempts to jump through a tiny wormhole in copyright law and escape into a parallel universe where everything is available to everyone.

The ideas behind the OFF System were originally expressed in a more formal paper (PDF) that outlined how copyright does not extend to random numbers. Thus, to get around copyright restrictions, the OFF System cuts up files into tiny chunks (128 kilobytes each) and then encrypts these chunks by using an XOR (exclusive OR) boolean operation with two sets of random numbers. The encoding system is similar to a One-Time Pad cipher, and makes decrypting the contents by someone who does not have the appropriate key extremely difficult. The use of two sets of random numbers instead of just one is a kind of cryptographic sleight-of-hand which is used to argue that the bits are no longer copyrighted.

The argument goes something like this: a copyrighted file is converted into small chunks, which are labeled "A." These chunks are still copyrighted by the original owner. It is then encrypted by performing an XOR operation with a block of random numbers, called "B." The resulting block "C," is still copyrighted by the original owner, but things get really interesting when C is encrypted again, this time using not a series of random numbers, but a block "E" that is pulled out of the user's cache. Block E is itself the result of an encryption of someone else's copyrighted file (D), which would make the final result (F) copyrighted by two content owners at the same time. As it is not possible for both parties to hold a copyright on the same content, the result is that neither party does, and thus the block can be transmitted without fear of lawsuits from the RIAA or MPAA.

h__p://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060814-7500.html