[apologies to Anthony for the double mail]
On 11/05/07, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
What the law here is prohibiting - let us assume for a minute that the law would stand in court, and that the interpretation of the key as forming such a tool is valid - is possession of a tool intended to bypass copy protection.
No. You are very very wrong. That is not what the law is prohibiting. It prohibits trafficking "in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ... It most certainly does not cover mere possession of a tool intended to bypass copy protection.
My apologies; that was an error left in from a previous draft, when I'd been working on starting with analogies about the dubiousness of possessing innocuous items in certain contexts. I did mean to say something other than possession - perhaps supplying? Making available? Disseminating? "Trafficking" is the term the statute uses, but I confess to not being very fond of it - it does have overtones that confuse matters a bit.
The second part of that sentence is also very very incorrect. The chances of a random 128 bit string being the key is about one in 339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a couple trillion...). A computer one million times faster than current computers could generate random data for 6 thousand, trillion years before coming up with the number by accident.
Huh. I got something on a much lower order. (This is probably due to something exceptionally stupid like having done the calculation assuming digits were bits, and juggling numbers mentally... some days, I am amazed I ever passed my exams)
... because you're knowingly providing something which was produced with the intent of circumvention.
No you're not (IOW, you are once again very very very incorrect). You're knowingly providing something which was produced with the intent of encrypting and decrypting DVDs. You've actually stumbled upon what is probably the best argument so far that distribution of the HD DVD encryption key itself does not fall under the DMCA.
I'm not sold on the distinction here. Surely the key was released to the world ('released' by the guy who studied the system, not by the manufacturers) for the purposes of encrypting/decrypting *in order* to circumvent the protection?
On 5/10/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
I did mean to say something other than possession - perhaps supplying? Making available? Disseminating? "Trafficking" is the term the statute uses, but I confess to not being very fond of it - it does have overtones that confuse matters a bit.
Disseminating is probably close enough for casual purposes, since that isn't the part we're discussing at the moment.
The second part of that sentence is also very very incorrect. The chances of a random 128 bit string being the key is about one in 339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (give or take a couple trillion...). A computer one million times faster than current computers could generate random data for 6 thousand, trillion years before coming up with the number by accident.
Huh. I got something on a much lower order. (This is probably due to something exceptionally stupid like having done the calculation assuming digits were bits, and juggling numbers mentally... some days, I am amazed I ever passed my exams)
I'm not convinced that my numbers are exact, but I have heard 128 bits referred to several times as being more than the number of atoms in the universe.
... because you're knowingly providing something which was produced with the intent of circumvention.
No you're not (IOW, you are once again very very very incorrect). You're knowingly providing something which was produced with the intent of encrypting and decrypting DVDs. You've actually stumbled upon what is probably the best argument so far that distribution of the HD DVD encryption key itself does not fall under the DMCA.
I'm not sold on the distinction here. Surely the key was released to the world ('released' by the guy who studied the system, not by the manufacturers) for the purposes of encrypting/decrypting *in order* to circumvent the protection?
I think there's a huge distinction between something which was "designed or produced" for a certain purpose and something which was "released to the world" for such a purpose.
I also think it would be extremely difficult to trace the key back to the person who "released it to the world" and then to figure out her motives for doing so. This is especially true since the key has been discovered and released to the world multiple times by multiple people. The only common source is whatever company originally produced the key (AACS LA?), and that was done for totally legitimate purposes.
Anthony
2007/5/11, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org:
Huh. I got something on a much lower order. (This is probably due to something exceptionally stupid like having done the calculation assuming digits were bits, and juggling numbers mentally... some days, I am amazed I ever passed my exams)
I'm not convinced that my numbers are exact, but I have heard 128 bits referred to several times as being more than the number of atoms in the universe.
128 bits gives 2^128 possibilities, which is in the order of magnitude of 10^38. Which is well less than the number of atoms in the universe (which, IIRC is somewhere in the 10^70 range), but fits quite well with the number you gave.
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