Marty wrote: > Any piece of digital "content" is a single number
Which does not imply that any number can be a copyrightable work. At least I don't recall sending royalty checks to the inventors of the zero. In this specific case, IMHO the key in question is not copyrightable because no “original work of authorship” was done to generate it. It was produced randomly, the same as any other key. You can find a large number of other such keys (although much, much longer than this weak key) in the debian-keyring package. Debian does not seek any kind of copyright permission to distribute those keys. The package's copyright file says: "The keys in the keyrings don't fall under any copyright." Another example is the ca-certificates package, which contains a lot of public keys that are owned by large companies, which Debian does not have to worry about copyright issues in distributing. The only copyright claimed on those is a compilation copyright from the Mozilla project. This particular number was a trade secret (which implies no particular legal protection) and is currently something that a big corportation with lots of lawyers is being a pest about people distributing, and that is the only pragmatic reason that I can see that it won't be uploaded to Debian tomorrow. Although using it as the version number for a peice of software would be sorta amusing. > I have long questioned whether copyright can be clearly enough defined to > be generally enforceable. The same can be said about anything from murder to jaywalking. This is why we have judges who generate case law. -- see shy jo
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