Random Thoughts

It occurred to me today that I very very rarely need a physical mailbox. I wonder if someday it will be common to not bother putting one up. That is, much like nowadays where fewer and fewer people are bothering to get a physical land phone line in favor of cell phones; maybe someday physical mail will get phased out in favor of electronic mail (especially when it has authentication and encryption in common usage). Of course, package deliveries and such would still need to occur, but I’m not so sure about “normal” mail.

Which brings up another interesting question: Whom does one need to notify when creating a new address? Do we need to tell the Post Office to start delivering mail at our new house once it’s built? Does that all happen automatically somehow?

I’ve also been wondering about the future of Digital Rights and Copyright. Other companies want to control what you can do with particular blocks of bytes that you “possess”, or at least possess in the sense that they are on a hard drive that you own. This is quite a logical thing for a company to want to do. This has been the case with software for quite some time, although in recent times the discussion has focused more on music files. However, I’m not sure how such restrictions can be implemented in practice. It’s odd that other company could put restrictions on what manipulations I can do to particular bytes on my hard disk. Let me give an odd scenario that I came up with. Suppose that I have purchased and “own” a chunk of bytes called song.mp3. One of the constraints that the seller of that file gave me is that I cannot distribute that file to other people. So, suppose that I construct some arbitrary file file1.bin, which contains arbitrary bytes that I came up with myself. (And thus, I own all the rights to it.) Now, suppose that I also construct a compression program pccompress.exe using an algorithm I designed myself. (I own all the rights to this chunk of bytes too.) Suppose that if you compress file1.bin with my program, the output file file2.bin just so happens to consist of exactly the same byte sequence as song.mp3. (And suppose that I designed my compression algorithm to try to get this to happen.) That is, you can use the two files I created completely on my own to construct the same sequence of bytes as the copyrighted song.mp3. Can I distribute my two files to others? Can I tell them this particular interesting fact that I happen to know about my algorithm? What if my compression algorithm had this behavior completely on accident, and someone else discovers it and tells people about it? I’m not even asking about what the law actually is here, but more what the law should be (although I’m kind of curious about current law as well). Other random thoughts or contrived scenarios?