A thought on illegal downloading...
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 6:34 pm
I'll simplify this as much as possible. I'm against piracy, but probably moreso against the prosecution of parents because their thirteen year old downloaded a virtual library of music. This is the only reason I'm posting my idea.
Let's say you want to download green, but it's illegal to do so. We all know that mixing blue and yellow, the end result is green, and downloading those two is legal, but not green.
Many P2P programs send data in pieces. While one user sends you a small 100KB section, another sends a different. They're garbled until reintegrated after the download is completed.
In a somewhat similar fashion, when a programmer compiles his code, a lot of superfluous lines are packed into little instruction sets that are later inflated when the program is opened. Also, when compressing files with software such as winrar and winzip, my understanding is that small segments of similar code is removed but referenced in the zip file. For example, a combination of ABCDEFG could be common but as a file could be replaced with 1ff. ABCDEFJ could be 1fz or some other short combination that represents the line. In programs, there are similar groups of code that do the same function, and if I'm right, compression utilities are basically a transcoder that takes an apple and turns it into apl, but it understands that apl is decompressed into apple.
Anyway, back to P2P. What if you broke down a file into something that was so dissimilar to the intended end file, and unique in it's own right (ie, blue and yellow) and therefor perfectly legal while apart, but then the software combines it all in the proper order after you feed it some sort of small reference file that tells it where the pieces fit together at?
Or maybe with no reference file at all... Perhaps a Tetris-like snip of code could be added to the end of each section so B would fit to A and C in the proper order, and only in that order.
The method of putting them back together is the easiest (and already implemented in just about every P2P program) thing to do, keeping the parts unique, separate, and indiscernible as a group is the hard part.
Let's say you want to download green, but it's illegal to do so. We all know that mixing blue and yellow, the end result is green, and downloading those two is legal, but not green.
Many P2P programs send data in pieces. While one user sends you a small 100KB section, another sends a different. They're garbled until reintegrated after the download is completed.
In a somewhat similar fashion, when a programmer compiles his code, a lot of superfluous lines are packed into little instruction sets that are later inflated when the program is opened. Also, when compressing files with software such as winrar and winzip, my understanding is that small segments of similar code is removed but referenced in the zip file. For example, a combination of ABCDEFG could be common but as a file could be replaced with 1ff. ABCDEFJ could be 1fz or some other short combination that represents the line. In programs, there are similar groups of code that do the same function, and if I'm right, compression utilities are basically a transcoder that takes an apple and turns it into apl, but it understands that apl is decompressed into apple.
Anyway, back to P2P. What if you broke down a file into something that was so dissimilar to the intended end file, and unique in it's own right (ie, blue and yellow) and therefor perfectly legal while apart, but then the software combines it all in the proper order after you feed it some sort of small reference file that tells it where the pieces fit together at?
Or maybe with no reference file at all... Perhaps a Tetris-like snip of code could be added to the end of each section so B would fit to A and C in the proper order, and only in that order.
The method of putting them back together is the easiest (and already implemented in just about every P2P program) thing to do, keeping the parts unique, separate, and indiscernible as a group is the hard part.
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