Stegotext in usenet as offsite backup

David Honig honig at sprynet.com
Tue Jul 31 13:12:37 PDT 2001


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.





 






  








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