The Null Device

AMEG VERO: Napster gets the Pig Encoder pulled. I wonder whether such a software system for bypassing filename filters would count as a "circumvention device", and thus be illegal. What if it's a sequence of instructions to a human searcher (i.e., "remove the first letter of each word", "replace all As with Es", "transliterate into Hebrew/Katakana and back"), and not a computer program? If someone posted that up, could they be prosecuted for conspiracy or incitement?

(Come to think of it, English contains a lot of redundancy; you could probably systematically throw away a lot of information from song titles and still be able to find songs uniquely. Not that we'd encourage that sort of behaviour here, no...)

There are no comments yet on ""

Want to say something? Do so here.

Post pseudonymously

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot,
please enter the text in the image on the right
in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.