Disordered Cogitations

Justin Chapweske's blog introduced yesterday swarmstreaming. My earlier post described how BitTorrent doesn't swap files, it swarms them to your local drive. Swarmstreaming is the same concept only that the files are not downloaded to your local drive, but streamed (in a swarming way) to your 'player.' The content does not coherantly exist until your player plays it.

This really pushes the notion of what exactly is copyrighted? The bits? The string of bits? The metadata that orders the bits in the string? How many properly ordered bits in a row constitute copywrighted content? What if I only possess the content one double-byte at a time (each for 1/50th of a second) as it streams through my player?