Ansuz
Ansuz is the personal blog of Ben Sooke, covering software, copyright, fonts and social topics, best known for an essay on bits.
What HN says
HN commenters repeatedly cite 'What colour are your bits?' as a classic essay explaining why copyright depends on a work's origin and intent, not its bits.
Stats for nerds
215HN people shared it
50linked in comments
670story points
Aug 2024last shared
Top posts on HN
- 1What colour are your bits? (2004)179 people · 309 points · first shared 2010 · 35 comments on HN
- 2Mastodon WTF timeline (2017)3 people · 126 points · first shared 2017 · 144 comments on HN
- 3Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease1 person · 81 points · first shared 2017 · 73 comments on HN
- 4What Colour are your bits?21 people · 55 points · first shared 2007 · 11 comments on HN
- 5The fundamental attribution error (2013)1 person · 46 points · first shared 2018 · 3 comments on HN
- 6Mountain-climbing addresses for code lines1 person · 16 points · first shared 2015 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Alden: Detachable terminal sessions without breaking scrollback2 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 8The Terrible Secret of OpenType Glyph Substitution (2010)3 people · 7 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
- 9What Colour are your bits? Why XOR can't circumvent copyright [2004 classic]1 person · 5 points · first shared 2010 · Discussion on HN
- 10Take It to Zdrabko1 person · 3 points · first shared 2020 · Discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
- abetuskApr 2023
This was inevitable. Copyright law has always used a "color of your bits" argument [0]. GPL and other libre/free/open licenses were a great hack to circumvent draconian copyright laws but the laws themselves are not designed for a rigorous treatment of similarity (maybe even by design?).
Also, it's worth noting in the example of ChatGPT emitting LGPL code without attribution or license, the code is actually different [1]. Is the difference enough to circumvent a copyright violation claim? I don't know but a big part of determining whether it does is now muddled because of the way the system was designed. Even if we could get an entropy distribution on which training data was used to generate the text, it's not even clear the courts could use it in any meaningful way.
[0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
[1] https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554
- jameshartOct 2023
That’s a naive ‘what color are my bits’[1] mistake - classic software developer mindset.
Level one programmer naïveté is just ‘bits are bits, it doesn’t matter where they come from. Bitwise identical things are indistinguishable’.
Level 2 naïveté is when you accept that bits have color depending on how they came to be arranged thus, and that there are processes that get rid of the old color on some bits, and replace it with a new one. But then you figure - like a programmer - that if you compose that process with some other process you can get rid of the colors you don’t like.
Enlightenment is realizing that the law cares not one jot for the specific processes you apply to bits or their colors but criminalizes (or at least proscribes) particular actions and cares about things like intent.
[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- yifanlAug 2024
This reminded me of the classic blogpost: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
There's intent that can't be stored: I can write down the word potato on a shopping list, and again on a recipe, and they represent totally different ideas with exactly the same characters. I interpret the first by going to the market, the other in the kitchen.
I'm sure there are many people eagerly trying to solve this problem by just storing more metadata so we can interpret which interpreter we want, but now we need increasingly more layers of interpreters, and now you're asking for a machine that simulates the universe. I find myself aligning that just processing "data" forever has limits, and our continued refusal to recognize that is going to be very costly.
- greenshackle2May 2020
> No block can be copyrighted without logical contradictions, because blocks used for re-assembling a source file block are re-used for re-assembly of other source file blocks. It is undecidable who would have copyright on a block, which has several meanings. Everyone would have copyright on everything.
That's a hopelessly naive, almost sovcit-level take on law. The lawyers and judges will not give an iota of a fuck for this argument. The facts are, someone uploaded a copyrighted work to the system. Someone else downloaded it out of the system.
The classic "What Colour are your bits" is relevant here:
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- gowldApr 2018
What is the false premise? The linked article http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 is saying the same thing you are, with an in-depth explanation.
The article isn't great in how it explains, and it's unfriendly toward the legal profession, but it makes the same claims you do.
rayiner:
> If you can prove that the bits came from an RNG that’s not copyright infringement.article:
> It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. - Analemma_Jul 2016
And the follow-up article, which discusses the usual objections that programmers have to the original article: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/24 . Particularly noteworthy is a comment from a lawyer that a key misunderstanding among programmers is that in law, the humans and their social interactions are the first-class entities of the system, not second-order distractions as they tend to be in engineering. This was a very enlightening moment for me in my journey towards understanding why the law seems so absurd from a mathematical perspective.