walser.php manpage

[Florian Cramer]

NAME
    walser.php walser.pl makewalser.php

SYNOPSIS
    walser.php

    walser.pl

    makewalser.php foo.txt

DESCRIPTION
    walser.php is a PHP script which, when executed, outputs an ASCII text
    version of Martin Walser's novel *Tod eines Kritikers*.

    walser.pl is a port of walser.php to the Perl scripting language.

    makewalser.php is a PHP script embedded in walser.php. It is a software
    construction kit which turns any ASCII text into a self-contained PHP
    script that outputs the source text upon execution.

BACKGROUND
    walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php are political and literary
    software written in reaction to one of the biggest literary scandals in
    post-war Germany.

    Martin Walser is one of the best-known living German novelist; like
    Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, his background is the postwar "Gruppe
    47" of left-wing realist writers. Since a few years, Walser has become
    controversial for having drifted to the political right and become
    controversial with his public statements that Auschwitz was a "menacing
    routine" and "cudgel of morality" against Germany. In May 2002, Frank
    Schirrmacher, publisher of the conservative newspaper *Frankfurter
    Allgemeine Zeitung*, wrote an "open letter" in which he refused to
    reprint Walser's latest novel *Tod eines Kritikers* (*Death of a
    Critic*), arguing that it was a "document of hate" full of "anti-Semitic
    clichés". Obvious for any German reader, the main character of the book,
    André Ehrl-König, was a caricature of the Jewish German literary critic
    Marcel Reich-Ranicki. (The case has been covered in English by *The
    Guardian*
    <http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,724587,00.html> and
    *Telepolis* <http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/12658/1.html>.)

    Between Schirrmacher's "open letter" on May 29th and the official
    release of the novel on June 26th 2002, a major controversy was fought
    out in the German media about the novel, but few people actually got the
    chance to read it. When Walser's publisher *Suhrkamp Verlag* - famous
    for having published German and European Jewish intellectuals like
    Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem and Jacques Derrida
    - was asked not to release the book, it decided to send out PDF copies
    of the typeset manuscript to several newspaper critics.

    As a result, the PDF file quickly spread over the German Internet and
    propagated over book warez servers and filesharing networks like
    Gnutella. When *Suhrkamp Verlag* decided to take legal action against
    Internet copies, its law firm Lübbert & Brießmann sent out
    cease-and-desist orders to several websites and weblogs which had merely
    linked to the Walser file or provided bogus copies. (Under German law, a
    web link to an illegal resource is illegal itself.)

COUNTER-MEASURES VIA SOFTWARE
    The same day *textz.com* had received a cease-and-desist order by
    Lübbert & Brießmann, walser.php was written as an algorithmic solution
    around the problem. Martin Walser's novel cannot be read when reading
    the script, however, when executing it, it generates the plain ASCII
    text of *Tod eines Kritikers*. Thus, the script itself can circulate as
    Free Software under the GNU General Public License, but it may not be
    executed without written permission by *Suhrkamp Verlag*.

    Since walser.php embeds the code of makewalser.php, an algorithmic
    generator to create algorithmic generators from arbitrary input text,
    this solution around copyright and distribution problems is available
    for anyone to use.

COPYLEFT VS. PIRACY
    Copylefts, such as the GNU GPL, are alternative copyrights which try to
    reverse - or "hack" - copyright on its own grounds. Still, they are
    legally enforcable licenses and have their own notion of plagiarism and
    illegal use of copylefted material. For example, it is illegal to change
    author attributions in a copylefted work and to integrate GPLed code
    into a non-GPLed project. In contrast, data piracy as it is popular
    today, for example, in file sharing networks, doesn't care about
    copyright or copyleft at all and simply circulates data ignoring its
    restrictions on usage and redistribution.

    walser.php is a borderline experiment with copyleft and piracy since it
    is GNU-style Free Software and pirate warez *at once*, depending on the
    mode of usage. As algorithmic source code, it is Free Software and a
    text that bears no resemblance to any copyrighted work. But as the
    product of its execution, it is pirated, copyright-infringing data.

    Any computer program is a hybrid code made up of source instruction and
    execution. In scripting languages, instruction and execution even have
    the same media format of ASCII text. The possibility to write texts with
    contrary legal, aesthetic, moral, political implications depending on
    the format of execution yet remains to be explored. By choosing Martin
    Walser's novel as a popular and controversial target - and running a
    high risk of legal persecution -, Project Gnutenberg intends to put this
    issue up front as an artistic and politic challenge.

ENCODING AND DECODING
    walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php decode and encode text using a
    simple internal XOR algorithm. As opposed to cryptography schemes like
    PGP/RSA, there is only one, fully transparent and public key. After all,
    the intention is not to encode files for single recipients, but provide
    a format that simply turns a text into another text while allowing any
    reader to reverse the process. This reversal is entirely optional. Since
    there is no copyright infringement as long as readers choose not to
    reverse the encoding, there is also no copyright infringement in the
    entire public distribution chain of a walser.php, walser.pl and texts
    created with makewalser.php, regardless the copyright status of the text
    encoded.

    With their transparent encoding scheme and executable code, walser.php
    and makewalser.php superficially resemble self-extracting archives (such
    as self-extracting "Zip" or "StuffIt" files), there are however three
    crucial differences:

    1. walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php are cross-platform
    executables.
        Conventional self-executing archives are binaries which can be used
        only on one operating system and one computer CPU architecture:
        Self-executing Zip archives only run on Intel-PCs with DOS/Windows,
        *.sea files created with StuffIt only run on Apple Macintoshes with
        MacOS.

        In contrast, walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php run on any
        hardware and any operating system that supports either PHP or Perl.
        This includes practically all existing PC operating systems:
        Windows; the classic MacOS and MacOS X; all flavors of Unix
        including SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, Irix and AIX; GNU/Linux and GNU
        Hurd; FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD; BeOS; OS/2, VMS, Plan 9/Amoeba,
        AtheOS and many more.

    2. walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php stay within one medium: they
    encode and decode text into text.
        Conventional self-executing archives are not only limited to one
        computing platform, they also encode everything, including texts, as
        non-human readable binary data.

        In contrast, walser.php, walser.pl and makewalser.php only encode
        text as text, and decode text back into text. The point of the
        software is that there is no change of the medium, or file format,
        in the process. A (copyrighted) text encoded with makewalser.php
        into an executable PHP script still is a human-readable text which
        can, for example, be printed out in books or on t-shirts or sent as
        conventional, non-attachment E-Mail.

    3. Each walser.php "archive" can thus be considered a literary text of
    its own.
        The decision of considering walser.php, walser.pl or any other text
        generated with makewalser.php something that can be run through a
        Perl or PHP interpreter is entirely up to the reader's viewpoint and
        imagination. The text may just as well be considered literary works
        of their own, resembling concrete poetry and conceptual art. As a
        matter of fact, nobody can rule out the possibility that a text file
        of, say, the farytale "Cinderella" executes as algorithmic
        sourcecode on some programming language interpreter or compiler and
        generates de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" as its output. Given this
        possibility, Project Gnutenberg can't be held liable if somebody
        executes its beautiful sourcecode poems into some ugly anti-semitic
        novel.

REQUIREMENTS
    walser.php, makewalser.php : Operating system / webserver with the PHP
    scripting language

    walser.pl, gut2gnut.pl: Operating system with the Perl 5.x scripting
    language (see respective manual pages)

COPYRIGHT
    All code copyleft C 2002 *project gnutenberg*

    This is Free Software under the GNU General Public License, see
    accompanying file COPYING.

RELEASE
    1.05, codename "lucifer"

SEE ALSO
    walser.pl, gut2gnut.pl, PHP4, Perl