What Colour are your bits?
Thursday 10 June 2004, 11:54As of Summer 2024, my article "What Colour are your bits?" has been online 20 years, and people are still linking to it as a benchmark. It's clear that people still care about intellectual property in general and copyright in particular, and the difference, if any, between identical copies of things is still important; but the most salient issues today are not directly related to the verbatim copying that was a big deal in 2004 and was the main topic of "What Colour." I've written other articles about today's issues, and I wish my more recent articles would get the attention that the 20-year-old one still commands; they are more relevant now.
In particular, people in 2024 care a lot about how intellectual property issues and "creator's rights" relate to material that is not actually created by humans - like the output of so-called "generative AI." I talk about that in some detail in my article on training and copyright on the Eleven Freedoms site. I don't think the copyright issues associated with generative models are actually so new after all, and they are best understood using the existing concept of fair use. Copyright holders worry about how to exercise control over the use of "their" creative material for training models; but that begs the question of whether copyright holders ever had, or should have, a right to any such control. If a human can read a book and learn from it, and then write their own books, why shouldn't a computer?
Another of my recent articles, possibly my most important one ever, discusses two conflicting points of view somewhat like the views of "computer scientists" and "lawyers" below, but in the realm of institutional hiring and promotion. That is my 2021 piece on Scarcity, abundance, and lost careers. The difference between "lawyers" and "computer scientists" might be said to reflect a difference between abundance and scarcity: recognizing that a work can be copied at effectively zero cost makes works plentiful, whereas extending ownership of the original to ownership of all copies greatly reduces the supply of works, and then either view has important consequences. Similarly, institutions that see promotion candidates as being abundant or scarce will operate differently from each other and will have difficulty comprehending each others' points of views. The tension between scarcity and abundance leads to dysfunctional situations like the "elite overproduction" currently eating up some North American cultures; I think there's a way to understand that and several other current issues in a consistent framework.
Now, the historical article on Colour.
There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is
set in an extremely repressive Utopian futuristic world
run by The Computer, who
is Your Friend. Looking at a recent LawMeme
posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of
colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for
a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate
why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the
ideologies in these areas.
An article based on this one and its follow-ups, by me, Brett Bonfield, and Mary Fran Torpey, appeared in the 15 February 2008 issue of LJ, Library Journal.
Yon and Tinu
Sunday 23 April 2000, 21:25There are settlements in the great Western forest where people are born, live their whole lives, and die without ever seeing a road or a cleared area bigger than one household's vegetable garden. Why not? It would be more than a week's hard riding from the middle of the forest to the nearest civilized land, and the forest folk just aren't interested in the world beyond. They live comfortably on what they grow, gather, and hunt among the trees. People seldom ride out from their own settlement.
Light and speed
Sunday 2 February 1997, 12:13It's not so easy to find a primitive, backward culture anymore. Satellite constellations can lay down a gigahertz on every square kilometer of the Earth's surface and where there's a signal there will be receivers. We need not even mention the orbitals. The painters may be naked - they may be using mud pigments and hair brushes. You might mistake them for a tiny group of prehistoric people somehow cut off from the march of progress for thousands of years. That would be a mistake. Machines dug this cave, the hair for the brushes was grown by bacteria in a bottle, and the design taking shape on the wall does not represent an animal to be hunted. Not exactly.
Counting coup
Sunday 4 April 2010, 09:23First posted 21 June 2004.
Forgive me, I did not return your call
But through no fault of yours, your offer stings
I know it is not about me at all
You'd count me coup and gain a feather more
What are you saving up to, will you say?
How long until you earn your angel wings?
Or are you weaving head-dress for the day
You'll lead your painted soldiers off to war?
You say you're guilty, and you've cause to be
You say I've been deprived of many things
You'd pay your debts to someone, maybe me
But charity like that I would abhor
Please understand, no matter what was said
Your pen was dipped in blood I never shed
Rootbeerman don't care
Saturday 3 April 2010, 09:30First posted 21 April 2000.
Rootbeerman at the back of the McDonald's hunched over he chicken nuggets. He always super size it, and he always eat a cherry pie cause he don't care. Donuts for breakfast, Pizza Pops for dinner, Rootbeerman drink root beer at every meal and that how he got his name.
The sing-song of unknown Kadath
Sunday 11 August 2002, 19:25Not always was Antarctica a cold and barren wasteland, but a lush green continent of ghoulish degraded tribes. They were grey and they were rubbery and dined upon corpses. They made a nameless sacrifice and danced upon a mountaintop and called up the Lesser God Yig.
Time travel chaos game
Monday 5 April 2010, 13:19Re-posting of an article first posted in May 2007.
Okay, here's a game sketch. This idea is supposed to be a game that could live on a Web site somewhere, support a large number of players, but be fun to participate in even if you are brand new, or only connect occasionally, or if there are few or no other players. Kind of like Wikipedia - except that my idea would actually know it's a game, unlike Wikipedia which thinks it's an encyclopedia. I'm posting this here to make it harder for anyone to patent.
The UFP and the Filthy Humans
Friday 2 April 2010, 19:16Re-posting of an article first posted in September 2008.
You are an officer, say a commodore, in the military-diplomatic-exploration organization of an interplanetary nation with United Federation of Planets (UFP) membership. You've been tasked with asserting your nation's interests with respect to a certain out-of-the-way planet that happens to be rich in natural resources. Unfortunately, it's already inhabited, by a race of disgusting natives we will call the Filthy Humans.
Madonna, Bourdin, and Robin
Thursday 1 April 2010, 08:44In May 2004, pop star Madonna paid an undisclosed amount to settle a lawsuit with the estate of French erotic photographer Guy Bourdin. The Smoking Gun archived some court papers and a side-by-side comparison of stills from Madonna and Bourdin videos. The similarities are pretty significant; it looks like plagiarism.
The interesting part from my point of view is that Madonna seems to have been the victim of similar plagiarism herself in the matter of the 90-second opening sequence to the 2002 anime series Witch Hunter Robin. The Livejournal posting that everybody linked to when this story first came out, lost its image hosting after a few years and by now has also become locked. But I archived the images, and you can see them below. These are stills from the opening of WHR, stacked up next to stills from a Madonna video called "Take a bow." They're about as close as those other Madonna screenshots were to the Bourdin photos, so if that situation was plagiarism, this one should be as well. To my knowledge, however, there's been no court case here, and it's been enough years now that there probably never will be one.
Edited to clarify: as far as I know, there's been no suggestion that the video "Take a bow" in particular was one of the ones involved in the Madonna/Bourdin case. The claim is not that the WHR opening came from Bourdin by way of Madonna, but only that Madonna's general body of work seems to have suffered the same fate as Bourdin's. The stills at the Smoking Gun link, from videos in the Madonna/Bourdin case, are from other videos and don't much resemble images from WHR.
A modest proposal
Wednesday 6 January 2010, 21:24I should be allowed to set up a hidden camera at the doorstep of the Dundas West subway station in Toronto, which is across the street from the local Catholic school, and take photos up the skirts of teenage girls (or anybody else wearing a skirt) as they enter and leave the building.
