[2004]

I don't like this new HN trend of not adding the year of the article. This is Hacker NEWS not Hacker Old.

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.

the game Paranoia sounds really interesting, anything similar that's still around?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/paranoia-rpg this, hopefully.

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.

A GPG signature is metadata (color).

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.

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.

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!

Encode the feeling of love into bits. Look, I'm stupid. I just wanted to say that once.

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?"

In other words, a Star Trek replicator will make mincemeat of the idea of copyright...

Or the other way around. Existence of replicators will create laws forbidding you to whittle yourself a shape of a Mercedes.

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.