"What Colour are your bits?"
"[...] very much of intellectual property law comes down to rules regarding intangible attributes of bits - Who created the bits? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Are they copies of other bits?"
"[...] one of my friends was talking about how he'd performed John Cage's famous silent musical composition 4'33" for MP3. Okay, we said, (paraphrasing the conversation here) so you took an appropriate-sized file of zeroes out of /dev/zero and compressed that with an MP3 compressor? No, no, he said. If I did that, it wouldn't really be 4'33" because to perform the composition, you have to make the silence in a certain way [...]"
"Lawyers will ask computer scientists questions about how to determine the Colour of bits (like 'How can Friend Computer prevent the Commie Mutant Traitors from making illegal copies of files, while still allowing loyal Troubleshooters to use disk-copying equipment?'), and computer scientists will find it difficult to say anything in response that the lawyers can comprehend - because a big part of computer science is about understanding that Colour does not exist."
