[sagebird]

It seems like a cute and irrelevant distinction that electronic software would be published in a book. If researchers created a computer that processed information using proteins in plant cells instead of electrons, and such a computer could execute programs on this book directly instead of “scanning” it, would not the textbook be software? When laws say “electronic versions” I don’t think they literally mean to refer electrons, but rather, computer-consumables/executables.

Was this tested before a court and did they accept this sort of obviously subversive behavior? (Not that I personally agree with the laws restricting crypto export.)

[croon]

IANAL, but if the distinction clashes with the crypto export laws, does it not follow that crypto export laws clash with the first amendment? Which then makes them unconstitutional and the focus should be on whether that is wanted behavior and the constitution should be amended, or not.

[JudgeWapner]

> The First Amendment made controlling all use of cryptography inside the U.S. illegal, but controlling access to U.S. developments by others was more practical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

[brandmeyer]

A bizarre intersection with this: I once had to prepare part of my employer's source code for registration with the US copyright office. They wanted "the first N pages" of the source code, for N of a dozen or so. After consulting with the lawyers making the filing, I ended up making a pdf that included main() and the first few functions that it called until I got up to N pages.

[sirsuki]

If you save digital data (ASCII) on an analog form like a cassette tape is that okay? Seems you could alternativly put metallic strips in a book. What about QR Codes? Could you have a massive QR Code on each page which contains a section of source code? Could you use an alternative encoding like dots and lines (.||.||....|.|.|..|) to represent 1s and 0s which is easy to scan (and not require OCR/checksums)?

To what extent does analog encoding fall under the illegal threshold?

[sagebird]

This is exactly what I am getting at. For the most extreme example, consider a swarm of nano bots hovering in the atmosphere that implement a computer that can understand and directly execute algorithms spoken in human speech transmitted through pressure fluctuations. There is no distinction that can universally separate speech and computer programs.