What Colour are your bits? (2004)

This is an elaboration of the idea that where data comes from is just as important as what the data happens to be. In expert systems this is related to the logical justification of a truth statement, as the statement is still true or false, but there is a Pedigree or Provenance for the data provided as metadata about the data stored.

If curious see also

2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728532

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6231992

2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506986

I think it would be better to think in terms of information theory, rather than the hypothetical color of bits. If I have a legally obtained copy of a copyrighted song (that is not permissively licensed), then I am restricted in my right to share copies. Certainly I can create a one-time pad and communicate that to someone, and I can XOR the bits of the song recording with that one-time pad, and the author would argue that I now have colorless bits. But I send it to you along with instructions for how to decrypt it, I'm using a mechanism to communicate a perfect copy. It isn't that the ciphertext is now "colored", it's that the net effect of my mechanism is that I've communicated the original song, with perfect fidelity. That's what matters: the net effect of the system as a whole. I will have created a communication channel (perfectly legal), and used that channel to share a copyrighted work without the creator's permission (not legal, depending on the details).

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.