Pointy Haired Boss: Wally, the people in networking found that you were storing pornographic images on the server.

Wally: That’s impossible, sir. The server is only capable of storing binary data. All it has is a string of ones and zeroes that, if you happen to pass them through certain programs, can be made to look like pornography. I think the network security group intentionally did so, in order to accuse me of storing pornography on the server.

PHB: I’ll have them fired for this.

Wally: Also, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to have my strings of ones and zeroes back.

Technically, EVERYTHING stored digitally, including programs that turn those numbers into pirated videos, are just numbers. Which ones can be copyrighted, and which ones can’t?

Be warned, the “common wisdom” has already declared “none of them” since the heydays of Napster, so it probably won’t give a flip about things like artist compensation, at least until artists start refusing to create anything that can be represented digitally.

But I do fall on the side of the copyright owner when it comes to not wanting to have people take their work for nothing, with the caveats I wrote above (and more that I did not go into).

Omri, I never said copyright was absolute. You need to actually argue the points I make, or even read my comments a little more closely, as you may have noticed I came down hard on the Sonny Bono copyright amendment for Big Business (a.k.a. Disney).

I am thoroughly familiar with the concept of copyright, Omri. I have been writing since I was eleven. Give me a little credit, please.

1. They thought the takedown was bogus and done badly (you are not allowed to copyright a number)
2. They were upset that the user who posted the code was kicked off Digg with no explanation.
Cory Doctorow also received a notice and if Digg had done what he did (replace the post with a pdf of the takedown notice that contained the code) AND not have deleted the user accounts, it would not have been the riot it was.

When Malone says:

In other words, Digg was willing to block porn and hate sites, but was perfectly willing to violate trade secrets if its users said so.

He gets it entirely wrong. The users were saying that the post was not a violation of trade secret because trade secrets that are out in public are no longer secrets. If someone figured out, on their own, the formula to Coke, it would no longer be a trade secret and Coke would not be able to block them from publishing it.

Dammit, Jeff. You had to get me started.

I’m starting to think there should be a two-tiered copyright system. One for one-person (or small-team) authors, one for corporations. It’s the corporate copyrights that screw the rest of us.

I’m all for authors having their copyright for life-plus-50. I think it’s not right for a builder to be able to make a building and then will it to his heirs, but an author can’t do the same thing. (Well, now they can, but copyright used to be far fewer years.)

But I am not in favor of the Disney Corporation getting Washington to rewrite the copyright laws just as most of Disney’s early copyrights are about to expire.

As far as fair use vs. copyright, the reason the code was originally hacked is because the guy who hacked it could not play his HD-DVD on the machine he wanted to use . The encryption is instead a perfect example of using DRM to inhibit fair use.