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View Full Version : having mp3s on a hard drive is not copyright infringement

2004-10-18, 13:05
It's been determined in the courts that the ISPs are not liable for what is referred to as "copyright infringement" conducted by p2p filesharers. The ISP's service provided is simply a conduit through which information passes. The people accused of copyright infringement have been the ones who have such samplings of what is called infringing material on their computer's hard drive.

What are files? They are a series of binary or hexadecimal characters. One series might be called an audio file while another series of characters may be called a picture. In p2p filesharing networks, one could do a search for a song and find many variations of what appears to be the same song, based on the file name. They will have different bitrates, time lengths, and filesizes. Different files can have the same file name and are presumed to be the same. But are they really the same? Science tells us that any files which are not comprised of the same characters but which still sound the same must indeed not really be the same files. Our ears can not discern the subtle differences in sound that exist between one variation of a file from another. Our ears deceive us and have us believe that varying files are actually the same. Our ears therefore are not a reliable gauge of which file would be copyrighted or not. Is copyright determined by the sound of a song, or is it the actual sequence of binary or hexadecimal characters which is copyrighted?

The flaw in the enforcement of copyright of digital sound recordings is that it has been based on a subjective experience. Here is an example of how subjective it is. A song by Metallica called "sad but true" is 5:24 in length on the CD I buy from the store. On the CD itself the file is a CD audio track. When I save it to my hard drive as a wav file it takes up 55 MB in space. I could then use a variety of mp3 encoding programs to encode the file to varying bitrates, or alter its volume level. What this creates is a multiple number of possible file sizes and variations for what is commonly called the same song. Yet I will argue that they really aren't all the same songs as some may sound different from others depending on the bitrate I encoded the mp3. In fact they ought to all sound different if they are all different files. Who is to judge? What if I present the several variations to a deaf man? He will have nothing to examine but the string of hexadecimal characters that differentiates one file from the next, using a hex analyzing program such as ICY Hexplorer (http://artemis.wszib.edu.pl/~mdudek/). And he will accurately conclude without any bias that none of the files are the same and none are in violation of copyright. A man who can hear and who happens to decide to play the files with his mp3 player, which goes to his sound card, and then goes to the speaker wires as electrical impulses, and then finally his speakers create noise which reaches his ears, may reach the conclusion that all the files are really the same song, yet such a man will be deafened by his own hearing, so to speak, for his ears and everything else non-digital in the process will deceive him to believe that different files are all in fact the same. So the absurdity of copyright enforcement of audio files such as mp3s is evident when one realizes that it comes down to a subjective judgement that determines whether a song is copyrighted, yet it has been demonstrated that our ears are inherently unreliable.

When people are sharing files on their hard drives, it is no different from what an ISP does by transmitting information. The hard drives are conduits of files and information. A hard drive by itself means nothing without an mp3 player, a sound card, speakers, and most importantly, a listener. At what point does the copyright infringement occur? Certainly not on the hard drive, because that is not the end of the line. On p2p filesharing networks the files shared are sampled approximations and can not be found in violation of copyright law. The irony and absurdity of organizations such as the RIAA which claim they are enforcing digital copyright laws, is that almost all of what has been labeled copyright infringement and piracy on p2p networks by them are actually musical samplings, subject to individual interpetation through non-digital means, that are not the same digital files as the originals, and therefore are not infringing any digital copyrights.

2004-10-19, 13:19
Interesting. Your theory, in itself, defends the mp3, but not the lossy.
Compression is then p2p's savior. Deleting little snippets here and there, creating a whole new song. lol.

2004-10-30, 21:05
Would a text file be an example of musical copyright infringement or would the infringement have to exist in the form an audio file such as mp3 or wav, to be considered copyright infringement?

I have uploaded a 12 MB text file to a website. This text file was created from an mp3 file on my computer by using the Hexplorer program. I went into the menu of the program after opening the mp3 file and exported it as a text file using the Intel Hex format. I could distribute the text file online, or print this text file out and make a book of it, and it would be somewhere in the range of 3000 pages long. You can download the file to your hard drive by right-clicking and saving the link target as here:
Metallica-Sad.But.True.mp3(exported.as.Intel.Hex).txt (http://www.p2pjihad.org/eclectica/Metallica-Sad.But.True.mp3(exported.as.Intel.Hex).txt)

Now go grab yourself a copy of the open source hex editor called Hexplorer (http://artemis.wszib.edu.pl/~mdudek/). Go to File-->Import-->Intel Hex and open the downloaded text file. After importing it it will give you an error saying: "warning: no start address record", but don't worry about that. Next in the program go to File-->Save As... and then you could name it Metallica - sad but true.mp3.

For those of you who believe that the posting online of the text file is an example of copyright infringement, I question you to tell me at what point the infringement actually occured.