https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...

I was always struck that one of the letters in opposition to Berry's view was written by Nathaniel Borenstein, the co-inventor of MIME.

It was an odd experience for me because it was coming from such a different worldview that I generally felt I couldn't relate to what Berry was saying at all. (I could contrast that with some of Cliff Stoll's writings about his skepticism of computers, which are always coming from a culturally familiar place and are at least readily comprehensible for me.)

I also have a book Berry wrote as a rejoinder to E. O. Wilson's Consilience (called Life is a Miracle). I put the two next to each other on my bookshelf!

I could see companies wanting to try to fit their activities into the same contours that the court approved there, since they could then argue that they should be just as protected as the defendant in that case was (that is, it may have inadvertently established a set of practices that companies would like to copy). However, it doesn't seem to me that the court concluded that destroying books was necessarily required (in particular because the contrary scenario wasn't examined there). That is, the court felt that destroying scanned books made the fair use argument stronger, but didn't say, as far as I know, that the fair use argument would necessarily fail without it.

But indeed, I guess it might take a lot for a company to decide to create a different and untested fact pattern and then defend it from scratch in new litigation.

Edit: it's covered on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Refund_Day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....

I'm not sure if this doctrine has continued to be applied to anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3

Spoiler: gur jbeyq va juvpu gur ynj fhccbfrqyl rkvfgf vf n fvzhyngvba, perngrq ol be sbe cbyyfgref!

There's also a fair use consideration that favors noncommercial use compared to commercial use, but that's not the only question, and the statute doesn't say clearly how to combine the fair use factors.

But it's possible under the Copyright Act that some commercial uses of copyrighted works could be considered fair uses while some noncommercial uses could simultaneously not be considered fair uses.

Edit: Someone else linked to an order in Bartz v. Anthropic which appears to emphasize that destroying the original copies improved the defendant's position with respect to the fair use analysis. Is that the decision you're thinking of?

This setting is generally "proof of attribute" or "proof of group membership" although in practice it is most often more like "proof of possession of a credential". An interesting example demonstrated a few years ago is that you could prove that you possess a passport from a certain country without revealing anything else about your identity (as the passports are digitally signed by their issuing authorities using publicly-known keys). You could then have, for example, an online forum or poll that only allows participation of people with a certain credential, yet the forum or poll operator never learns the offline identities of the members or participants.

There are some logistical issues with this depending on the purpose for which the verifier is relying on the statement, including what happens if a prover submits the same credential twice, and what happens if a prover borrows a credential from someone else. In some settings this is OK or unlikely, while in other settings it might effectively blow up the whole application!