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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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CFAA and DMCA | 183 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
CFAA and DMCA
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 11 2013 @ 08:34 AM EST
That method is used for console BIOSes. The linkis you are pointed to aren't
zip files, they're just pictures.

I believe the practice is generally called stegography(sp?)

And it won't work as a genreral solution, because it's doing something that's
possibly illegal: The GPL is 100% legal, it's simply charging something other
than cash for the lisence.

I could see somewhere with Scotland's "You are always allowed to make a
backup of anything you have a lisence to" laws to do a "distributed
offsite cloud backup service" where part of the terms are that you *have* a
lisence to access the backup you're downloading.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

CFAA and DMCA
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, February 11 2013 @ 08:43 AM EST

Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea. I'm not a lawyer, and I can see some severe problems already.

The difference between your proposal and the GPL is that the GPL works inside the law. When GPL code is distributed, no-one is breaking the law. In the case of your proposal, there is a lot of law-breaking happening; P is choosing deliberately weak passwords in a clear attempt to provoke copyright circumvention, and the people downloading the films are in turn in pretty clear circumvention of copyright restrictions.

All you're doing is trying to hide the evidence, which makes P look even guiltier. Especially since no-one needs to break the CFAA to find out that the extra copies are out there - they just need to track down someone who's downloaded the film for that.

No, a better way to apply GPL-like ideas to film would be to persuade the people who own the copyright to release it under a Creative Commons style license. You can't do that with arbitrary films, of course.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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