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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