The Conceptual Crisis ... is a screenshot (crisis.png) that shows, among various other things, the source code of a piece of software (crisis.php) and its documentation (crisis.txt). The code, once executed, will transform the screenshot into the full text of Neal Stephenson's novel "Cryptonomicon".
The Conceptual Crisis ... is not an actual, but a virtual computer program: an image of piece of software that still has to be created by copying, saving and running its source code. While the screenshot may be the "intellectual property" of Robert Luxemburg, the program itself is free software and may be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
The Conceptual Crisis ... is part of a series of copyright circumvention devices - walser.php, pngreader - that try to exploit the structural flaws in the concept of "intellectual property". It is intended to practically illustrate the assumption that digital data will always escape copyright protection and that "digital rights" will never be "manageable".

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