At 11:52 AM 7/31/01 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>If I want to increase the odds of its getting archived, I
>would just embed it in a sound file or a movie file using
>stego (original sound and movies, so as to avoid DMCA
>hassles, of course).
Porn would be a good carrier, as few actually 'rip' the
originals (eg from analog tape) and they are widely duplicated.
>Stegograms present an interesting copyright question for
>the legally inclined; if I'm using usenet archives as offsite
>backup via stegograms, I'm okay with the release and public
>use of the stegogram, which most folks will interpret as
>being the same as the covertext. But would that entangle
>the copyright on the stegotext as well?
When you put out an image you took, you own the copy rights to
it; you also own the rights to the same perceptually-unchanged
image with all the LSBs altered. Now if you start using
creative manipulations, at some point the new creator owns
a new creation.
(Ie, a song or picture with the watermark removed is
still copyrighted; but a processed sample can be used in your
own works.)
Or if somebody took
>the stegogram and figured it out, would I have legal recourse
>to stop them from doing anything with my code?
Of course, if you can prove you wrote the code first.
*Proving* the release date and giving the key and stego program
could convince others.
Presenting a one-time-pad which generates some contested-code
from some picture is not convincing :-)
>(I was considering going to a lawyer with this one, but
>since the odds against anyone hacking the password on the
>encrypted data in the stegotext are literally astronomical,
>I figure the point is sufficiently moot to be not worth
>answering except as an intellectual curiosity.)
>
> Bear
Maybe a colleage lifted the plaintext.
There's a dude from Avanti going to San Quentin for lifting code.
Cost over $100e6 to Avanti, too.
You'd be better off just encrypting the whole tarball and putting
it up on a geocities (etc) site ---Tomlinson style.
