What Colour are your bits? - Ansuz - mskala's home page Ansuz People before tribes RSS « Yon and Tinu | Home | Colour, social beings, and und... » What Colour are your bits? Thu 10 Jun 2004 by mskala Tags used: colour, copyright, philosophy As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between identical copies of things is still important; but the most salient issues today are not directly related to the verbatim copying that was a big deal in 2004 and was the main topic of "What Colour." I've written other articles about today's issues, and I wish my more recent articles would get the attention that the 20-year-old one still commands; they are more relevant now. In particular, people in 2024 care a lot about how intellectual property issues and "creator's rights" relate to material that is not actually created by humans - like the output of so-called "generative AI." I talk about that in some detail in my article on training and copyright on the Eleven Freedoms site. I don't think the copyright issues associated with generative models are actually so new after all, and they are best understood using the existing concept of fair use. Copyright holders worry about how to exercise control over the use of "their" creative material for training models; but that begs the question of whether copyright holders ever had, or should have, a right to any such control. If a human can read a book and learn from it, and then write their own books, why shouldn't a computer? Another of my recent articles, possibly my most important one ever, discusses two conflicting points of view somewhat like the views of "computer scientists" and "lawyers" below, but in the realm of institutional hiring and promotion. That is my 2021 piece on Scarcity, abundance, and lost careers. The difference between "lawyers" and "computer scientists" might be said to reflect a difference between abundance and scarcity: recognizing that a work can be copied at effectively zero cost makes works plentiful, whereas extending ownership of the original to ownership of all copies greatly reduces the supply of works, and then either view has important consequences. Similarly, institutions that see promotion candidates as being abundant or scarce will operate differently from each other and will have difficulty comprehending each others' points of views. The tension between scarcity and abundance leads to dysfunctional situations like the "elite overproduction" currently eating up some North American cultures; I think there's a way to understand that and several other current issues in a consistent framework. Now, the historical article on Colour. There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is set in an extremely repressive Utopian futuristic world run by The Computer, who is Your Friend.  Looking at a recent LawMeme posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the ideologies in these areas. An article based on this one and its follow-ups, by me, Brett Bonfield, and Mary Fran Torpey, appeared in the 15 February 2008 issue of LJ, Library Journal. In Paranoia, everything has a colour-coded security level (from Infrared up to Ultraviolet) and everybody has a clearance on the same scale.  You are not allowed to touch, or have any dealings with, anything that exceeds your clearance.  If you're a Red Troubleshooter, you're not allowed to walk through an Orange door.  Formally, you're not really supposed to even know about the existence of anything above your clearance.  Anyone who breaks the rules is a Commie Mutant Traitor, subject to the death penalty. Much of the game revolves around the consequences of the security levels.  For instance, Friend Computer might assign a team of Red Troubleshooters to re-paint a hallway that ought to be Orange but was painted Yellow by mistake the Commie Mutant Traitors.  It's quite likely in such a case that the Troubleshooters will all end up shooting each other for treason against Friend Computer, since none of them are allowed to touch the paint, go near the hallway, or talk about their mission, and they're all charged with enforcing the rules on one another. In intellectual property and some other fields we're very interested in information, data, artistic works, a whole lot of things that I'll summarize with the term "bits".  Bits are all the things you can (at least in principle) represent with binary ones and zeroes.  And very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits?  Where did they come from?  Where are they going?  Are they copies of other bits?  Those questions are perhaps answerable by "metadata", but metadata suggests to me additional bits attached to the bits in question, and I'd like to emphasize that I'm talking here about something that is not properly captured by bits at all and actually cannot be, ever.  Let's call it "Colour", because it turns out to behave a lot like the colour-coded security clearances of the Paranoia universe. Bits do not naturally have Colour.  Colour, in this sense, is not part of the natural universe.  Most importantly, you cannot look at bits and observe what Colour they are.  I encountered an amusing example of bit Colour recently:  one of my friends was talking about how he'd performed John Cage's famous silent musical composition 4'33" for MP3.  Okay, we said, (paraphrasing the conversation here) so you took an appropriate-sized file of zeroes out of /dev/zero and compressed that with an MP3 compressor?  No, no, he said.  If I did that, it wouldn't really be 4'33" because to perform the composition, you have to make the silence in a certain way, according to the rules laid down by the composer.  It's not just four minutes and thirty-three seconds of any old silence. My friend had gone through an elaborate process that basically amounted to performing some other piece of music four minutes and thirty-three seconds long, with a software synthesizer and the volume set to zero.  The result was an appropriate-sized file of zeroes - which he compressed with an MP3 compressor.  The MP3 file was bit-for-bit identical to one that would have been produced by compressing /dev/zero...  but this file was (he claimed) legitimately a recording of 4'33" and the other one wouldn't have been.  The difference was the Colour of the bits.  He was asserting that the bits in his copy of 433.mp3 had a different Colour from those in a copy of 433.mp3 I might make by means of the /dev/zero procedure, even though the two files would contain exactly the same bits. Now, the preceding paragraph is basically nonsense to computer scientists or anyone with a mathematical background.  (My friend is one; he'd done this as a sort of elaborate joke.) Numbers are numbers, right?  If I add 39 plus 3 and get 42, and you do the same thing, there is no way that "my" 42 can be said to be different from "your" 42.  Given two bit-for-bit identical MP3 files, there is no meaningful (to a computer scientist) way to say that one is a recording of the Cage composition and the other one isn't.  There would be no way to test one of the files and see which one it was, because they are actually the same file.  Having identical bits means by definition that there can be no difference.  Bits don't have Colour; computer scientists, like computers, are Colour-blind.  That is not a mistake or deficiency on our part:  rather, we have worked hard to become so.  Colour-blindness on the part of computer scientists helps us understand the fact that computers are also Colour-blind, and we need to be intimately familiar with that fact in order to do our jobs. The trouble is, human beings are not in general Colour-blind.  The law is not Colour-blind.  It makes a difference not only what bits you have, but where they came from.  There's a very interesting Web page illustrating the Coloured nature of bits in law on the US Naval Observatory Web site.  They provide information on that site about when the Sun rises and sets and so on...  but they also provide it under a disclaimer saying that this information is not suitable for use in court.  If you need to know when the Sun rose or set for use in a court case, then you need an expert witness - because you don't actually just need the bits that say when the Sun rose.  You need those bits to be Coloured with the Colour that allows them to be admissible in court, and the USNO doesn't provide that.  It's not just a question of accuracy - we all know perfectly well that the USNO's numbers are good.  It's a question of where the numbers came from.  It makes perfect sense to a lawyer that where the information came from is important, in fact maybe more important than the information itself.  The law sees Colour. Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance.  Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way.  If so, fine.  But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on.  Exactly the same words - represented on a computer by the same bits - can vary in Colour and have differing consequences.  When you use those words without quotation marks, either you're an author or a plagiarist depending on where you got them, even though they are the same words.  It matters where the bits came from. I think Colour is what the designers of Monolith are trying to challenge, although I'm afraid I think their understanding of the issues is superficial on both the legal and computer-science sides.  The idea of Monolith is that it will mathematically combine two files with the exclusive-or operation.  You take a file to which someone claims copyright, mix it up with a public file, and then the result, which is mixed-up garbage supposedly containing no information, is supposedly free of copyright claims even though someone else can later undo the mixing operation and produce a copy of the copyright-encumbered file you started with.  Oh, happy day!  The lawyers will just have to all go away now, because we've demonstrated the absurdity of intellectual property! The fallacy of Monolith is that it's playing fast and loose with Colour, attempting to use legal rules one moment and math rules another moment as convenient.  When you have a copyrighted file at the start, that file clearly has the "covered by copyright" Colour, and you're not cleared for it, Citizen.  When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour?  It's just random bits!  Then when it's descrambled, it still can't have the copyright Colour because it came from public inputs.  The problem is that there are two conflicting sets of rules there.  Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits.  It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file.  It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator.  …