Tagging copyrighted text

Tim May and many of us argue that copyrights will become unenforceable 
as copying bits becomes cheaper and crypto privacy and anonymity becomes
more widely available.  This will mean that any static collection of
bits will just be FREE.  Musicians will have to make money on live
performances, because they couldn't sell many recordings.  Etc.

A question I've been thinking about is, will Dow Jones be able to charge
for its newswire?  

Step 1:  I subscribe to Dow Jones and then relay each message to a
mailing list, charging them a fraction of the original price.

Step 2:  Dow Jones starts changing random whitespace in the text, in an
attempt to "tag" the text untraceably to trace which subscriber is
leaking the information.  They cancel my subscription.

Step 3:  I get 20 new subscriptions, and use the redundancy to cancel
out Dow Jones's sneaky tagging.

Step 4: ...


Question:  who wins?  I haven't been able to work it out yet, but
it may just be a simple combinatorial exercise.


-- Marc Ringuette (mnr@cs.cmu.edu)

>Tim May and many of us argue that copyrights will become unenforceable 
>as copying bits becomes cheaper and crypto privacy and anonymity becomes
>more widely available.  This will mean that any static collection of
>bits will just be FREE.  Musicians will have to make money on live
>performances, because they couldn't sell many recordings.  Etc.

Er, I'd say this is another instance of cypherpunk extremism: ``The
world as we know it is about to collapse.''  Yes, information will
probably be much freer over the nets, and copyright violations probably
more difficult to pursue and punish.  But think about this: with the
speed and ubiquity of networks, it now becomes possible for every
author or creative artist to keep the only copies of his work. Then, he
could post "links" to it anywhere in the world. When people pass around
the work, they wouldn't pass around the work itself, they'd pass the
"link".  Whenever someone wants to view the work, the link points to
the unchanging address for instantaneous downloading.  A very small
transaction charge is billed to the receiver by the sender. (Of course,
people could write stuff that would actually grab and store the text or
whatever instead of just "play" it. But I'll bet that most people will
eventually say, "why bother?" The direct access will be more convenient
and the charge so minimal.)  Links could be embedded wherever there is
information, like in bibliographies or references or compilations or whatever.

 There are virtually NO MIDDLEMEN---the investment return to the artist
is total.  Contrast this to today's vast overhead with records and
books, for example (these costs are largely associated with
distribution, I'd wager).  Of course, the individual artist is free to
make contracts with knowledgeable cohorts for album cover design or
whatever.  The essence of a copyright is really to give a creative
artist more control over their own works, and global, high-speed,
reliable networks will give artists absolutely unprecedented and
unparalleled control (and yes, I admit, a lack of it too).

Hey, consider that programmers are artists too.  I write some hot
program, but I don't distribute it: I run it on one of my systems as a
sort of network pipe.  People anywhere in the world pipe in their data
and get it back with a small transaction fee to me.  In fact, what I'm
really getting at is treating the entire world like Unix utilities with
standard input and output, sort of like electronic vending machines!  I
can pipe my manuscripts to some address and they pop out edited or
published.  I drop a file on that goofy icon, and it goes to Bill
Clinton.  I could hook up pipes between companies to set up my own
company!  There might be a lot of command line parameters to specify
and plenty of glitches reported on stderr, but it could work...  This
all would happen with commensurate drains on my online account (all
digital transactions, of course).  Imagine that you could write
software that would bill the user!  Big companies do it, why not individuals?

>> Step 2:  Dow Jones starts changing random whitespace in the text, in an
>> attempt to "tag" the text untraceably to trace which subscriber is
>> leaking the information.  They cancel my subscription.

They don't just cancel your subscription.  They sue your butt into
next week.  You can make it harder for them to find you, but if you're
eating into their profits, they will, and the more effort you've made
them go through, the madder they'll be, and the harder their lawyers
will bite.

There's no way to "tag" a document in such a way that the tag cannot
be removed.  At worst, I read the document out loud, and have my
partner rekey it, while rewriting it slightly.  Unless it's something
like poetry which you can't just rewrite, this will pretty much
sanitize the data against any kind of keying.

The fact is, people copy music and software now.  It Happens, and as
much as they wish it didn't, it does.  And when things become more
electronic, it will still happen.  My guess is that unless such
duplication becomes institutionalized, it's not worth the effort to do
anything about it.  And if you start buying things, copying them, and
giving or selling them to lots of other people in an organized way,
the real owners will find you.

		Marc