{"id":2181,"date":"2004-08-05T00:37:23","date_gmt":"2004-08-05T07:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/08\/05\/2181.html"},"modified":"2004-08-05T00:37:23","modified_gmt":"2004-08-05T07:37:23","slug":"illegal-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/08\/05\/illegal-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Illegal art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Following a link provided by Aaron led me, slightly roundaboutly, to Illegal Art<\/a>, a fascinating site featuring various kinds of illegal art.<\/p>\n

I'm a big fan of intellectual property. On the other hand, I'm also a big fan of freedom of speech, and I think that remixing, appropriating, and hijacking imagery that has strong associations can sometimes lead to really good art.<\/p>\n

And then there's the whole CSS-descrambler thing. (In this context, \"CSS\" stands for \"Content Scrambling System,\" the system used to encrypt DVDs; no relation to the web technology Cascading Style Sheets.) On the one hand, I suspect that most people who want to read encrypted DVDs want to do so for reasons I disapprove of (such as making copies to give or sell to other people, without the creators or the people they've designated getting any money for it). (Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people who have legitimate non-copyright-violating uses for DeCSS.) On the other hand, I also strongly disapprove of the DMCA, particularly section 1201(a)(2)<\/a>, the part that makes it illegal to provide tools that are designed to circumvent copy protection.<\/p>\n

And I applaud the ingenuity of the people whose work is represented in the CSS Descramblers Gallery<\/a>. Lots of cool explorations of the areas where intellectual property and free speech run into each other. My favorite is Seth Schoen's DeCSS Haiku<\/a> (featured in a Wall Street Journal<\/cite> article<\/a> in 2001), which describes the algorithm in precise detail, using English words formed into haiku-like 5-7-5 verses instead of using a programming language. Which would be in the category of \"fun idea but not worth reading for most people\" if that were all it did, but the non-technical bits are a joy to read: full of discussions of philosophical and legal issues, literary terms, and sly jokes, like this bit:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Now I want a drink<\/p>\n

(mnemonics in crypto poems<\/p>\n

are great!); exercise<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

from singing so long<\/p>\n

makes me thirst for a glass of<\/p>\n

soda, slice of pie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Where the first of those two stanzas, in case you missed it, consists of words whose numbers of letters correspond to the first several digits of pi: 3.14159265358. Hence, a slice of pi.<\/p>\n

TrinSF on Slashdot comments<\/a>, about this poem:<\/p>\n

\n

[T]he whole thing is built around the Greek epic poem model. It's written to evoke Homer and Hesiod, complete with initial invocation of a muse and subsequent references to that muse. It includes traditional asides, stops frequently to praise its heroes, and closes with a prayer (of sorts).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don't know enough about Greek epic poems to confirm or argue with that statement, but pretty cool if true.<\/p>\n

See the author's page about the history of the DeCSS Haiku<\/a> for more information. (He appears to be a CTY<\/a> alum, which probably explains a lot.) One of my favorite bits from that page:<\/p>\n

\n

I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it can't fight against its own suppression....<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There's also some really interesting discussion toward the end of that page about the fact that in 1915, a court case determined that movies don't count as speech\/expression under the First Amendment. (That decision has since, of course, been changed.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following a link provided by Aaron led me, slightly roundaboutly, to Illegal Art, a fascinating site featuring various kinds of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}