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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

> And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

>"Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all," ...

I’m surprised they went there, because that makes no sense. Nowadays books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and pretty much every other form of media consist of a stream of numbers, so by that argument nothing would have copyright.

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What if I can encode a movie by n^m then it becomes a crime to share that number. copyright makes numbers illegal, it's hard for most to understand since these are very large numbers. what if I can express the information as 2 numbers. (n) and (m) n^m. .... then n and m individually are not illegal, but someone telling you that you can apply ^ to it becomes illegal. or maybe that is not illegal, but if you consume it as the appropriate media it becomes illegal. ... the challenge today is that sharing these numbers or possession of these numbers are a crime. sure, you can call it a file, but it's just a number. if i take a foo.mpeg file and rename it foo.dat or encode it as a zip, gz, string of 1 & 0s, uuencoded data, the law makes all of that illegal. For now these numbers are illegal, but should numbers be illegal?

I read an article (>10 years ago so sadly I don't recall the title) about how computer science people see data differently from law people. Computers know nothing about the intent of data, it is only bits. The law (nominally) tries to figure out intent behind the data. It is possible to encode any data so it looks like a random stream of numbers; the law doesn't care what you did to the data, just if you intend to use that data to do something illegal. The user's intent colors the data.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 Colour of your bits.

Books are just arrangements of ink molecules on paper. You can't have a copyright on ink molecules, right? They're just a natural phenomenon.

Obviously that's silly — the thing with copyright is not the literal arrangement of ink molecules, it's the work represented by the arrangement.

Similarly, bits are math, but a specific arrangement of bits can represent a work with copyright.

My thoughts exactly. Of course anything digitizable can be thought of as "just numbers"; the point of copyright law is that the act of arranging such numbers is a creative work.

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