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More on Colour of bits

AJ says:

I don’t really think that view’s helpful: colours that you can’t actually see don’t make things easier to reason about; and while sometimes you have to come up with terms to describe things because there’s no more meaningful way to look at things, this isn’t one of those cases.

The word colo[u]r is reasonably well established in science for things that you can't actually see: consider page coloring or quark colors. Part of the charm of Matthew's essay is that it maps copyright into a concept that is both strange but familiar to computer scientists: suppose there are colors you can't see. (We use magic in a similar sense, without implying belief in the supernatural.)

Matthew says, correctly(?) that you can't determine whether a particular bit string is copyrighted just by examining the bits. AJ thinks

It’s not irrecoverable though – there’s no reason why you can’t just provide the software with all the information it actually needs: working out who the current copyright holder is could be made as easy as querying the Library of Congress’s website, or some similar body, governmental or private as appropriate. As long as you have the information your function actually needs, determining the copyright status of some bits is straightforward.

This is a decent practical approximation but not actually true: it's possible that you could have independently recreated the bits without copying them. Checking whether the string was previously registered for copyright doesn't imply the string was actually copied. Conversely, the fact that a string is not registered with the Library of Congress doesn't mean it is not copyrighted.

So this is to say: we can have an external lookup table which, given a string of bits, indicates what colour they are likely to have. But it will give false positives (independently recreated) and negatives (copyrighted but not registered).

Of course, as we see on Mediawatch, for nontrivial strings the chances that a string would be spontaneously reinvented become low. All this says though, is that there are some domains where the heuristic is accurate. Copyright is still not a function of the bits, nor even a function of the bits and the LoC.

The colour of copyright persists on bits across arbitrary transformations: consider human translation into a different language. AJ's oracle could not detect the colour, but the law could. It would similarly fail on the XOR-pad thought experiment Matthew describes.

I think AJ demonstrates Matthew is right: even computer scientists who know a lot about IP will get mixed up as long as they think of copyright as an attribute of bitstrings.

David Starkhoff has more links. The essay provoked an ANSI-standard Intellectual Property flamewar on copyfight,

posted Fri 25 Jun 2004 in /issues/copyright | link

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