Reminds me of jwz's problems [1] with broadcasting music via Youtube. When broadcasting from his DNA Lounge, he was greeted with the dreaded "Warning: Your stream will be terminated if you continue broadcasting content that you are not authorized to use."
His take on it:
Because that company is run totally by robots, and there's apparently no mechanism to tell them, "Hey robot, STFU, I pay licensing fees for all of this music and it's totally legal for me to do this."
This concept of "Colour" causing difficulties exists only because of the extreme flexibility and "genericness" of digital data, currently unparalleled by anything else in the real world. If/when technologies to manipulate physical objects generically at the level of atoms become feasible and widespread, we might be asking "What Colour are your atoms?"
> This concept of "Colour" causing difficulties exists only because of the extreme flexibility and "genericness" of digital data
It predates the digital data and it has caused trouble before then. Authors who happened to publish similar stories/melodies/compositions used to bicker over the source of the "bits". It mattered whether it was a coincidentally similar creation or just plain old copying.
Or the other other way around: Star Trek style replicators will never see the light of day. As soon as the technology even REMOTELY gets close, everyone with a financial interest in keeping physical goods scarce (basically all manufacturing companies), will collectively come down on it like a ton of bricks. If you think the record and movie industry lobbying effort against sharing is powerful, imagine basically every manufacturing company in existence joining in.
Much of the article is non-sensical, but this part got my attention:
> 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.
Let's consider a slightly different hypothetical. I tell a police officer: "the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." A forensic scientist tells a police officer: "the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." Are these the same bits? By the reasoning of the article, yes, but the law rightfully treats them completely differently. The source of the bits goes to reliability.
In fact, the disclaimer on the UNSO's website explains why the data is not reliable for litigation: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/lawyers.php ("The data are computed and are not reports of observed or recorded events. The computations assume certain conditions and the data might therefore not be relevant to the facts at issue in a specific case."). The mistake made by the author is precisely why courts are wary to take judicial notice of random facts on the internet--even when the data is accurate, it is easy to fail to take account of relevant limitations arising from the nature of the data or the data collection.
And contrary of the author's assertion--computers care a lot about where bits come from. The whole point of things like GPG signatures on digital downloads is because we trust some sources and not other sources, even when the bits might seem to be the same.
Let's consider a slightly different hypothetical. I tell a police officer: "the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." A forensic scientist tells a police officer: "the blood on the carpet is that of the accused." Are these the same bits? By the reasoning of the article, yes, but the law rightfully treats them completely differently. The source of the bits goes to reliability.
Of course it does. What makes you think the author disagrees with you? They are the same bits, they have different colour. That's the whole point.
And contrary of the author's assertion--computers care a lot about where bits come from.
Where did the author assert that?
The point is that bits themselves don't have that information embedded; bits are bits. That's why they need tags - like GPG signatures - to tell where they came from.
And the tags are supposed to simulate colour, but they aren't actually colour. Colour is where the bits actually came from - where they where actually physically copied from -, the tags are simply a record of that colour, which may or may not be correct. If I write in my biography that I won a Nobel prize, that doesn't mean I actually did so. If I write a GPG signature indicating the bits were generated on my machine, they weren't necessarily so.
My string of zero and your string of zero may have different GPG signatures, but they are both strings of zero. Stripped of metadata (color) there is no way to tell who the source was.
Isn't the signature itself additional bits? This whole distinction between data and metadata is farcical: metadata is a subtype of data, they are not disjoint.
Metadata is a sticky note on a sheet of paper. It may make some statement about what the paper it is stuck to, but it is not written on the paper itself.
Metadata basically means data about data.
The core issue is that if you have a string of bits (say a long line of zeroes), you can't say from that string of bits alone where it came from, how it was created or anything of that sort. You will need metadata/color/sticky-note to tell you this.
Yes you have file formats that can carry the metadata alongside the data (id3 tags in mp3 files for instance). But even if you strip out that metadata the data itself is still there and still usable for whatever you want to do with it.
That still doesn't explain how metadata is color in this context. From the OP:
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.
Hrmf, has it really been that long since i read the article. Had completely forgotten that he touched on the subject of metadata. I stand, corrected, i guess...
Though now, after re-reading the author's statement, I'm not sure I agree with all of it. How can anything not be representable with bits? It's just a matter of finding an encoding scheme.
I guess perhaps the author's point is that this coding scheme must be communicated through some side-channel, coloring the bits. The bits themselves could tell you, for instance, which version of a given protocol to use, but couldn't indicate the protocol out of the blue without some other agreement.
And this gets back to the discussion of intent. These bits over here are colored by intent. You can codify that color in bits over there, but those are still different bits, and those bits still need to have color information. It's colors all the way down!
"How can anything not be representable with bits?"
Because copyright law (at least in the U.S.) is bat-$#!+ crazy.
"Copyrights cover copying. If you write a novel that turns out to be word-for-word the same with Gone with the Wind and you can prove you never saw Gone with the Wind, that would be a defense to any accusation of copyright infringement." -- Software patents - Obstacles to software development, Richard Stallman
Metadata is not 'Colour' as the article describes it. Colour is "Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits?"
Let's use an example: an mp3 of The Eagles' song Journey of the Sorcerer. The Eagles created the song/are 'where the bits came from' (according to copyright law). This can be encoded in metadata. But metadata can be changed. The fact that The Eagles made the song cannot be changed, and thus cannot be reliably encoded into bits. [I think that's what the author is saying.]
And in a court setting, source of evidence or testimony is also metadata. It's true that courts care very much about metadata, but so do computers: By default, my iPhone won't install apps that don't have the right signatures.
NB: The "string of zero" hypothetical at the beginning is specious, based on a misunderstanding of how copyright works. If two works are similar, but independently created, there is no infringement. But does not follow that if two works are not independently created, there is infringement. They must still be similar enough to infringe. I.e. if you start with the text of Harry Potter, then you change every single word, there is no infringement.
By default a computer will not care about the origins or meta of the string of bits fed to it. That the iPhone cares about the metadata is a behavior imposed by Apple, not a inherent feature of computers in general.
By default, a computer won't do anything with the string of bits fed to it. Any behavior of a computer is programmed, and no behavior is more "inherent" than any other.
Unreasonable suspicion about others is a mental illness only allow at Security Clearance YELLOW and above. Having a mental illness above your security clearance is considered treason. You must report to the nearest Brain-Scrub facility for Mandatory Happiness Training!
Knowledge about the tabletop [REDACTED] "Paranoia" requires Security Clearance VIOLET. Having knowledge above your Security Clearance is considered treason. After your Mandatory Happiness Training is complete, please proceed to the nearest Termination Booth.
Thank you for your cooperation. Always remember to help Friend Computer help you in th efight against the Commie Mutant Threat!
Even if it's out of print, the original game is still easy to find used and quite playable.
And it is loads of fun. One detail the author doesn't mention (as it's not really relevant to the article) is that everyone starts the game with a six-pack of clones, which basically function like lives in a video game. When you are inevitably outed as a Commie Mutant Traitor and executed, Friend Computer assumes that whatever tragic mutation or insanity afflicted you was a one-off and hasn't affected your next clone, which is promptly delivered by pneumatic tube. That means you can all play Circular Firing Squad and massacre each other and then keep playing. It's a blast. Great for cons and pick-up games.
I usually add the date when I feel the historical context is important but in this case, I didn't feel it was (bits are still bits, copyright is still a thing, the Paranoia game doesn't appear to be around anymore but it was only used to illustrate the author's point). Anyways, title updated.
I think this has surfaced again because of some of the discussion around this article on The Pirate Bay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728011. I think it's a good article whether or not it was written ten years ago.
His take on it: Because that company is run totally by robots, and there's apparently no mechanism to tell them, "Hey robot, STFU, I pay licensing fees for all of this music and it's totally legal for me to do this."
Indeed, what Colour were his bits?
[1] http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/09/03.html