What colour are your bits? (2004)
&quot;Colour&quot; overcomplicates what could be a simple issue. There <i>are</i> bits that describe how to turn it from random data into copyrighted material (eg sound, visuals). This is easy to see. Imagine you took some copyrighted material and encrypted it. Then you posted that online. Without the public key, the file would be useless, and you wouldn&#x27;t be violating copyright. Now imagine you posted the decryption key. Now anyone can play the file, and you are infringing copyright.<p>This can be easily applied to the monolith case. If you take a chunk of data out of &#x2F;dev&#x2F;random, then this of course is not copyrighted. If you xor it with some copyrighted work, the result is also not copyrighted. If you post either of those files online, you haven&#x27;t broken any laws. If you post both online, you still haven&#x27;t broken a law. If you tell everyone to go xor those two files together, then you have suddenly infringed the creators copyright, by allowing others unpermitted access to copyrighted works.