Ansuz

Colour, social beings, and undecidability

Okay, it's been about two months since I posted my piece about colourful bits, and I really should have posted a follow-up before now, but better late than never.  First of all, here are ten other places that carried the story, in no particular order:

What Colour are your bits?

As 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.