Colour does exist. It's the Second Law of Thermodynamics: information cannot be created, only lost, and creating a faithful copy of document A requires you to discard an equivalent amount of information (usually in the form of “there's usable energy over here”, in a very lossy process, but physics doesn't require this) – which you can then recover by comparing your copy A with the original document A, and discarding one.
You're not going to get the Complete Works of Shakespeare by any means other than by copying an existing copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare; the odds are astronomical. You might get a description of calculus by other means (expending the effort yourself to produce it), but it's not very likely you'd come up with it before somebody else made such a discovery public, unless:
• it's recently become obvious that such a thing would be useful; and
• it's easy enough to discover that you could figure it out in a year or two; and
• enough people were looking in that direction at the time (or one of them was a secretive sort of person).
That's not to say that authorial monopolies are necessarily a good thing. But they are a meaningful concept.
You're not going to get the Complete Works of Shakespeare by any means other than by copying an existing copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare; the odds are astronomical. You might get a description of calculus by other means (expending the effort yourself to produce it), but it's not very likely you'd come up with it before somebody else made such a discovery public, unless:
• it's recently become obvious that such a thing would be useful; and
• it's easy enough to discover that you could figure it out in a year or two; and
• enough people were looking in that direction at the time (or one of them was a secretive sort of person).
That's not to say that authorial monopolies are necessarily a good thing. But they are a meaningful concept.