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.