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I wonder whether you can bypass copyright for a word list if you feed it into a bloom filter[1] and then save just the bloom filter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter



No, that wouldn't make sense because of the false positives.

You could instead store only the hashes of the words, using a sha256 or something similar.


If I were inclined to twist the copyright tiger's tail, the way I would do it would be to encrypt the plaintext with a one-time pad and them publish the cyphertext and the pad anonymously in two different locations (preferably on two different domains). The key and the ciphertext in a one-time-pad are mathematically indistinguishable, so both publishing parties have plausible deniability that what they published was the key, i.e. just a string of random bits, which if course they have every right to do.

An even more interesting experiment would be to copyright the resulting key and the ciphertext, and put in the TOS for getting either one that you will not sue the publisher for any copyright violations.

That is, if I were so inclined :-)


http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23: What Colour are your bits?

> Treating Colour as a function is almost the same as attaching tags to the bits - the difference is that when the Colour is a function of the bits, we don't have to worry about the tags being detached; on the other hand, when the Colour is a function of the bits, we can never have more than one possible Colour for a given sequence of bits. Monolith depends on exploiting this problem: it assumes that one file can only ever have one Colour, asserts that the Colour of its output file is the "you may copy this" Colour because of the (correct) claim that fixing any other single unchangeable Colour would raise legal problems, and then follows the logic to a claim that it can produce what would otherwise be an illegal copy of the copyrighted input, without breaking copyright law. One Colour per file was never one of the lawyers' rules of Colour; it's merely a consequence of "Colour is a function", and Colour being a function is just something we computer people decided to believe because functions make sense to our training and Colour doesn't. Colour is not actually a function at all.


You can't copyright a random number although I suppose you could insert some deadbeefs for "artistic" effect without compromising the pad.


> You can't copyright a random number

Why not?


Sony certainly tried.


No creative effort.


So write a haiku, xor your random key with repeated copies of your haiku, call the result modern art, and copyright that.


And when it serves a functional purpose as key you get to use it anyway.


scribd was sued over essentially this: putting hashes of copyrighted works into an internal filter so they could never be uploaded again

http://www.wired.com/2010/07/copyrightfiltering-scribd/




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