copyright nonsense (was Re: ITP: debian-backports-keyring -- GnuPG archive key of the backports.org repository)

[Joey Hess <joeyh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

brian m. carlson wrote:
>> I don't think there's a legal basis to claim copyright on a blob of random
>> bytes generated by a program.  Who's the copyright holder?  gpg?  The authors
>> of gpg?  The person who typed gpg in command-line?  The entropy source?
>
> Copyright (in the United States) requires an original creation.
> Generating several prime numbers for a purely functional purpose is not
> at all original and hence not copyrightable.

On the other hand, the numbers we're using for keys are long enough to
encode a nice litte copyrightable short story or song. Major media
organisations have recently been threatening to sue over distribution of
fragements of text much smaller than 128 letters[1]. Making up a large
number of such copyrightable fragments and then tracking down and
threatening to sue[2] people distributing public keys that happen to
encode to the same bit string might be a nice business model for anyone
who is tired of spamming.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/06/biting-hand-feeds-traffic-them
[2] Who knows, some judges might even fall for it.

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