Reminds me of jwz's problems [1] with broadcasting music via Youtube. When broadcasting from his DNA Lounge, he was greeted with the dreaded "Warning: Your stream will be terminated if you continue broadcasting content that you are not authorized to use."<p>His take on it:
<i>Because that company is run totally by robots, and there's apparently no mechanism to tell them, "Hey robot, STFU, I pay licensing fees for all of this music and it's totally legal for me to do this."</i><p>Indeed, what Colour were his bits?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/09/03.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2014/09/03.html</a>
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?"
Much of the article is non-sensical, but this part got my attention:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>In fact, the disclaimer on the UNSO's website explains why the data is not reliable for litigation: <a href="http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/lawyers.php" rel="nofollow">http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/lawyers.php</a> ("The data are <i>computed</i> and are not reports of <i>observed or recorded</i> 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.<p>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.