> Well if this is possible, why wouldn't he just post the full unencrypted movies (or whatever) there instead of bothering with the xor'ing scheme?
The movie is 30GB. The URL is 30 bytes. It's like asking why The Pirate Bay uses BitTorrent instead of hosting the movies directly on their servers.
Or how about this. The full list of URL pairs is provided after the end of each movie, so if you get one pair you get all of them. And the same scheme is also used for all kinds of things that aren't allowed to be distributed everywhere, like public domain or permissively licensed works that are banned in some countries over content.
If someone openly posts the URL pair for one of those works, which is permissible to distribute in the US because it's not copyright infringement and the content is only proscribed in some other country, would you punish them for that just because at the end of the work they actually intended for people to watch, someone else had included the URLs for all the copyrighted films?
> Er...under the justification that they are downloading infringing material?
Not if Bob was the innocent party, which you still don't know.
The judicial system looks at which persons acted with the intent of committing a criminal act.
Are you suggesting the judicial system would treat Bob and Alice as equally guilty because the bits in the xor'ed infringing material are coming equally from both files? That is not how it works. One of them acted with criminal intent, which is the one who will be persecuted.
Of course you can't see from the bits themselves who the guilty party is. But in this hypothetically scenario you could just look at the timestamps on the files.
A person who purchase or download the material is also guilty of copyright infringement. And it doesn't matter if the system can figure out who distributed it in the first place - consuming it is an independent crime.
It doesn't matter if the material was distributed as one unencrypted file or as multiple fragments on different servers which has to be combined or whether it was hidden among public domain material, or any other clever scheme.
The movie is 30GB. The URL is 30 bytes. It's like asking why The Pirate Bay uses BitTorrent instead of hosting the movies directly on their servers.
Or how about this. The full list of URL pairs is provided after the end of each movie, so if you get one pair you get all of them. And the same scheme is also used for all kinds of things that aren't allowed to be distributed everywhere, like public domain or permissively licensed works that are banned in some countries over content.
If someone openly posts the URL pair for one of those works, which is permissible to distribute in the US because it's not copyright infringement and the content is only proscribed in some other country, would you punish them for that just because at the end of the work they actually intended for people to watch, someone else had included the URLs for all the copyrighted films?
> Er...under the justification that they are downloading infringing material?
Not if Bob was the innocent party, which you still don't know.