OFF System Development
Have Nothing. Pwn Everything.
Brightnets vs. Darknets
The Owner-Free Filing system has often been described as the first brightnet; A distributed system where no one breaks the law, so no one need hide in the dark.
OFF is a highly connected peer-to-peer distributed file system. The unique feature of this system is that it stores all of its internal data in a multi-use randomized block format. In other words there is not a one to one mapping between a stored block and its use in a retrieved file. Each stored block is simultaneously used as a part of many different files. Individually, however, each block is nothing but arbitrary digital white noise.
Owner-Free refers both to the fact that nobody owns the system as a whole and nobody can own any of the data blocks stored in the system. The latter claim is explained below and supported in the linked works.
Owner-less Data
It seems highly unlikely to most people that the same exact data can be used to represent several things at once. But indeed, the same digital representation can be, “both a floor wax and a dessert topping.”
The misperception is simply a relic of computer metaphors that obfuscate an important reality of the digital world. Traditional rules do not apply. Mathematics is the only law.
Curiously, mathematics says:
1. There are an infinite numbers of ways to digitally represent any given work.
2. Every digital representation can be used to perceive as an infinite number of works.
The OFF System simply chooses one of the infinite ways that is non-copyrightable. There must be at least one, or else every possible digital representation would already be copyrighted. It just so happens that the same representation is already being used for other things.
A simple description of the process is available on this site.
http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?page_id=4 A more extensive treatment is done in the paper, “On copyrightable numbers with an application to the Gesetzklageproblem”
http://offsystem.info/CopyNumbCJ.pdf
Copyright
No creative works, copyrighted or not, are ever communicated between OFF peers. Only meaningless blocks of random data. No tangible copies of creative works are ever stored on OFF peers. It is completely unnecessary.
All retrieval of creative works is done exclusively on the users local machine. More importantly, no copies of a creative work ever NEED to be made. All works can be accessed in-place and on-demand by locally resident software in the same way that traditional file servers are used.
All storage of creative works is done exclusively on the users local machine. Uniquely, only a single virtual copy of the creative work is made directly into OFF virtual file system. That is all that is EVER needed. As with a traditional file server, that single copy is completely private. It is accessible only through the URL possessed by person who stored the work. Again this appears legally equivalent to making a single copy to your personal disk or server.
Should the person who stored the work want to allow access to others, he simply gives them the URL. The receiver can then access the work in-place without needing to make a copy. This is identical to the way that iTunes allows friends to play each others music via streaming without copying.
We call the OFF System a “Brightnet”. No secrecy is needed as nothing shady is going on.
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Footnote: This work builds on previous technology pioneered by David Madore in his paper, “Method of free speech on the Internet: random pads”
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/m...reespeech.html
http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/wordpress/?page_id=13