RE: [dvd-discuss] Gedankenexperiment

["Ballowe, Charles" <CBallowe(at)usg.com>]

Wasn't the arguement in the original case that MP3.com was keeping
a database of works that they did not own the rights to?

My personal view of the service was that it was similar to yahoo 
briefcases or xdrive type services with the modification that 
if you can prove you have data that is already stored on their system,
you could skip the upload stage and still have access to that data.
The idea seems sound, especially from a technical perspective where
it's easy to see that there are massive savings in disk space and 
upstream network bandwidth. 

With the ammount of bad analogies that get thrown around in DMCA
cases these days, I'm surprised a good one manages to go unnoticed.
"It's like backing up data to a service that already has the data
and just needs proof that the user does rather than a full copy from 
the user" ( so, that's exactly what it was, but somehow the court
missed it)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: D. C. Sessions [mailto:dvd@lumbercartel.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 12:00 PM
> To: dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
> Subject: [dvd-discuss] Gedankenexperiment
> 
> 
> Please shoot this down on either technical or legal grounds:
> 
> The MP3.com "my MP3.com" model, where MP3.com kept pre-ripped
> copies of music for customers who already had the CDs, *probably*
> could have been made resistant to legal objections if the copies were
> encrypted.  "Encrypted how?" you ask.  Suppose that they were
> symmetrically block-cipher encrypted using the RC5 checksum of the
> original track.
> 
> Trivially easy to extract and keep on a keyring if you have 
> the original
> CD, annoying enough to break if you don't.  Of course people could
> trade checksums, but then they can trade tracks too.
> 
> (Yes, somewhat OT but at least less so than the spam discussion!)
> 
> -- 
> | I'm old enough that I don't have to pretend to be grown up.|
> +----------- D. C. Sessions <dcs@lumbercartel.com> ----------+
>