

Monolith: muddying the waters of the digital copyright debate - striking
http://monolith.sourceforge.net/

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Amorymeltzer
>But what constitutes a derivative work? Certainly, some part of the original
work must be present in a recognizable form. The munging done by Monolith
leaves no part of the original work in place, so Mono files therefore cannot
be counted as derivative works.

Interesting piece, and while I appreciate the rather thoughtful explanation of
the process and the law, I can't help but think it won't stand up. This
process is basically XORing two files on a per-bit basis. Sure, the result is
unrecognizable, but that doesn't mean it isn't derivative.

A simple analogy of novel "munged" by replacing a with b, b with c, and so on
(rot1) would be completely recognizable but that work is quite obviously
dependent on the original novel. I can't imagine that would stand - you would
never have made this new book without using the exact text of the original
copyrighted work.

IANAL

~~~
Amorymeltzer
And yes, I specifically avoided referring to the second, new book as a novel
novel.

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commentzorro
I had thought about similar ideas a few years ago. I don't think this approach
would get very far in court as it's essentially just an encoding.

My thought experiment was be to do something like mapping the copyright work
in question to the bible or US Constitution then apply that as input to a
reversible Markov text generator to produce output containing nothing but
realistic text from the bible, constitution, etc.

