from Hacker News

Ask HN: Legality of hosting encrypted files?

by jrokisky on 3/10/13, 8:07 PM with 3 comments

Lately I've been thinking about the legal ramifications of hosting encrypted copyrighted data.

If person X encrypts a copyrighted file with some algorithm/key, posts this encrypted file on hosting site A, and then shares the algorithm/key what would be the legal ramifications to hosting site A?

The hosting site could claim ignorance and saying that they are not hosting copyrighted data. In response the owner of the copyrighted data could show that through a series of transformations the data is the copyrighted data. That being said, can't any data be "transformed" to be that same copyrighted file?

Thanks for reading and looking forward to some feedback!

  • by BrianPetro on 3/10/13, 8:14 PM

    Research the way Me.ga is getting around the liability issue. I think it may be something similar to what you proposed.

    http://mashable.com/category/kim-dotcom/

  • by sharth on 3/11/13, 5:39 PM

    I would imagine that in the USA, you just follow the DMCA. It doesn't matter if the file is encrypted or not encrypted, compressed or not compressed.