Is DeCSS Legal In UK?

[John R T Brazier]

Is not everything a 'copy' at this level? The human retina 'holds' the
visual arrival of photons for a very small bit of time before the
information is sent down the optic nerve and the retinal cells 'reset' (note
that the eye shifts very slightly so that new cells are exposed during this
period - very analogous to the movement of a tape or the rotation of a disk
drive). Similarly, the ear holds audio information (in a much less well
understood way, according to my reading - I'd be grateful for updates on
this), before forwarding it onto the brain.

It gets worse within the brain, certainly for visual data. The signal is
analysed and stored throughout the visual cortex, before transmission to the
frontal lobes via a number of processing nodes, and it would appear that
what you 'see' is rebuilt entirely from the brain's processing of the
original visual information (well-known simplest example: the inversion of
the visual field as compared to the eye; Land's work also implies that all
colour is rebuilt internally). There are a large number of analogies with
computers. If we state that 'copying' includes temporary storage to a 'RAM'
or 'buffer' during delivery (and processing), then I believe that human
beings cannot actually sense anything without 'copying'. Which would suggest
that this legal definition is incoherent (even if it is the law of the
land).

All the best,

John B



-----Original Message-----
From: ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk
[mailto:ukcrypto-admin@chiark.greenend.org.uk]On Behalf Of David Howe
Sent: 22 July 2002 13:40
To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Re: Is DeCSS Legal In UK?


Martin Keegan <mk270@cam.ac.uk> was seen to declaim:
> I meant an audio CD as played by a hifi (if anyone still does that
> kind of thing ;) ). A CD-ROM with a computer programme on it is
> further down the spectrum towards DVDs which require copying.
afaik, almost all hi-fi players do some sort of buffering - if only to
repeat the last sample when hitting a scratch on the cd. obviously, that
is a fifo buffer, rather than some sort of storage chip, but it still is
a copy. in any case, you must feed an entire sample to a d-to-a
converter, so it must be being clocked into some sort of interface to
such..... trying to convert a single bit at a time wouldn't work too
well.