What Colour are your bits? (2004)
This essay is written to create the impression that it&#x27;s imparting something profound, but it&#x27;s really just identifying the existence of side channels.<p>We encode bits in all kinds of things. You can store some bits on a flash drive. Then you can write some words on the outside of the flash drive. They&#x27;re both just bits.<p>Whether you own a flash drive with some bits on it which is in a safety deposit box at a bank may depend on the bits in the bank&#x27;s computer and not the bits on the flash drive, but it&#x27;s still bits that it depends on.<p>The examples it uses aren&#x27;t accurate:<p>&gt; 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 &quot;your&quot; article by cutting and pasting from &quot;mine&quot; - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about &quot;derivative work&quot; status under copyright law and so on.<p>As it turns out copyright law <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> really care about this, even if people might expect it to, because the law is too pragmatic for that. Proving that you came up with some particular phrasing is hard. Disproving it is hard too. So in practice the courts don&#x27;t look at whether you actually copied the bits. They look at whether you could have copied them (&quot;access&quot;), which they then go on to assume is the case for anything widely disseminated (since establishing that would be hard too), and then whether the bits are similar (&quot;substantial similarity&quot;):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theiplawblog.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;02&#x2F;articles&#x2F;copyright-law&#x2F;the-complexity-of-proving-copyright-infringement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theiplawblog.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;02&#x2F;articles&#x2F;copyright-law&#x2F;...</a><p>Whether you <i>actually</i> copied the bits doesn&#x27;t come into consideration, apparently.<p>Because the courts can only take into consideration the information they have available to them. Which is all bits, because all information is bits.<p>&gt; 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.<p>There is still no Colour here, and the essay is missing a rather decent practical attack on the &quot;Colour theory&quot; version of the copyright system.<p>Suppose Alice publishes R1 and Bob publishes R2. R1 is Alice&#x27;s message xor Alice&#x27;s one time pad. R2 is Bob&#x27;s message xor Bob&#x27;s one time pad. The one time pads are &quot;random&quot;.<p>Then it&#x27;s discovered that R1 xor R2 generates a third party copyrighted work. Which is statistically impossible unless either Alice or Bob (<i>but not necessarily both</i>) chose their one-time pad specifically in order to cause this.<p>According to &quot;Colour theory&quot; the one who chose their one-time pad specifically in order to cause this has given their ciphertext the &quot;Colour&quot; of the copyrighted work. But that&#x27;s a real problem <i>in practice</i> when there is no way to tell which one it was. The other person may not even be in on it. So which one do you haul into court when you don&#x27;t know that? Which one do you take down?<p>In real life if something like that becomes popular what happens is not that they figure out who it really was that created the derivative work, it&#x27;s that they come up with some kind of disgusting hack like the DMCA takedown process which imposes no practical consequences on fraudulent takedowns, and hope that the innocent victims of the collateral damage don&#x27;t have enough political clout to do anything about it.<p>It seems like the same fallacy as the model of the law that we teach to high school students. Computer scientists understand that it&#x27;s wrong. Lawyers understand that it&#x27;s wrong. But certain people benefit from pretending that it isn&#x27;t in front of the general population because the misleading abstraction is prettier than what actually happens under the hood, and a better understanding of the latter would make people upset.