Hello world,
COW or also known as Copy On Write, is a system in Filesystems that copy the read file and deletes the old on write.
I’m coming to think of this as I was recently moving files with cut-paste from one disk to an XFS disk and noticed that it had copied them with new creation days.
Where this comes to an issue is the copying part of copyright.
What are you thoughts?
I don’t think it does nor do I see how it could be unless someone was somehow using it to distribute the copyrighed material. It may break the reproduction part of copy right, but if its been copied for your personal use then idk why it would break copyright. Thougt I’m a not a lawyer.
I’m having a hard time following the logic here. Are you implying that the create data metadata of a file can break copyright? To my knowledge metadata isn’t part of any copyright.
COW filesystem have alot of drawbacks and problems but I don’t think copyright compliance is one of them.
I do not think it does as copyrighted material usually only refers to you need a license to own a copy. Like if you buy a copyrighted pictures you need a license, or permission, to have it saves but usually that does not limit you how many replicas of the same file you can have. Like I am trying to think of a case where the issuer would have a problem with multiple copies existing if not distributed. Like maybe for software licenses it would but there it would matter if you are trying to run these software instances concurrently and it should not matter if you only have one running at all times.
Companies like Red Hat, Microsoft or Oracle do not worry about how many copies you might have stored somewhere as long as you only have one copy active. The opposite is true, restoring a server for example from a snapshot is the whole intention.
What specific files and license?
Edit: The post seems vague and might be AI feed 
But if there’s specific software in-question, we can all look into it!
Even non CoW filesystems still copy to move data. Moving data by deleting from the source before writing to the destination technically isn’t even possible because the moment you don’t have a copy of the data… you don’t have the data.
If you want to get silly you could also argue that actually using any copywritten data is a violation because everything has to be copied into memory before anything can be done with it… and nearly everyone is using at least two levels of disk cache and three of memory cache.
Without some license to copy data all anyone could do with copywritten digital material would be to stare at original physical media created by the copywrite holder. If just copying for utility rather than distribution was even slightly actionable I think volume mirroring would have come under fire years ago when they were going hard after people for using torrents.
This is why you can install a game you own on multiple OS’s of the same PC. Imagine how inconvenient and downright problematic OP’s scenario would be…
Copyright is registered to a third party and has features that makes that creation unique. Such features, usually, are not related to the meta data of a file since it can be altered without changing anything about the original creation.
Your scenario could come into play when talking about NFT I guess.
copy operations are common in computing. Stuff gets copied into memory multiple times all the times. It is technically impossible to execute something or open a document without creating multiple copies from it.
It’s BS.
If you state a licence where you can only use a single copy and even loading into memory isn’t allowed, we’ll talk. Upgrading your license for each snapshot or each backup? ludicrous proposition.
Even IF, under legal norms, this qualifies for a violation of the license, no one ever enforced it ever since computing was invented / we use the von Neumann architecture.
It’s an interested observation and why things like copyright or common sense doesn’t really account for how we do stuff.
Do I get sued because my Windows VM has like 800 snapshots atm? no. no one cares. It’s fine. That’s why we have licence per user/household/core whatever, not per “copy” created.
One thing might be wording in general…only in the english language it is misleading, while e.g. in German, this wouldn’t happen.
Now, I think you get my gist.
Apparently some creators do not like it when creating a copy to preserve the original, in case where the VHS or CD go bust but you are able to copy them still to preserve.
And I don’t think the large corporations care, they are already knee deep in violations with LLMs.
And I don’t think there is another solution technically possible unless it’s a transparent block of something with the data in it being lit up and project the information directly. So copyright should get updated.
My thoughts? You’re confused.
Well, no. A COW mechanism pretends multiple distinct copies exist and only when one of the copies changes does it save the changes to a new copy.
If the COW filesystem hasn’t copied extra data, but pretends it has until one of the pretend copies is made invalid by changes, there’s not even a copy that’s happened.
But also: plenty of copyright information flies about the internet, through temporary buffers of routers and switches, or in caching proxies to speed up legitimate access. There is either a ‘fair use’ defence that this isn’t copyright infringement or explicit exceptions added to copyright law that these aren’t infringing the exclusive control over copying protected material. And on top of that, even if it was an infringement of the copyright, being sued by someone who has evidence that you did this specific kind of copying and that you used it to make profits is ??? unrealistic.
I hope this helps with the confusion.
K3n.
You are onto something… Missionary Church of Kopimism - Wikipedia
If you had illegally acquired a copy, does it mean you must be fined for this one copy? What if you made 1000 copies locally through CTRL+C & CTRL+V? Does it mean your fine must be 1000x now? What if you burned 1000 CDs with the content. Does it qualify yet? Why?
@Rogue-agent is a rogue troll. banging the inconsistencies of the copyright law against people’s heads.
Well this was mostly a conversion of thoughts. What do you think does “you are not allowed to copy this disk” really mean?
If it’s national security: Fine (they seem serious enough to enforce it )
Otherwise: I do what I want with 1s and 0s