If that's insane, why not share all your keys and passwords in your profile? It's just numbers. A footage of what you're doing in your room is just a number. Even entire you are a number, to some precision, under some angles.

The key fact here is that numbers are just the means of content delivery in a digital world. To be clear, personally I'm not fond of Copyright status quo, but this particular logic makes zero sense.

No. Keys, passwords, all of that data is private. Not shared. It's not like I'm publishing this data for the whole world to see and then trying to regulate access to it. And if I do publish anything, I will do so with the understanding that once it's out there it's out of my control. Complete opposite of what these copyright people want which is public data that they are still able to control.

In cryptography there should be exactly one copy of a private key in the entire universe. When your keys leak due to a mistake or whatever, you invalidate it and make a new one, you don't sue anyone who might have a copy in order to get them to delete it.

By talking about privacy you clearly present that you are aware of and agree with the concept of the law. Once you're on the street it's also out of control, but we have some enforced rules of behavior on them, so you don't get murdered for your keys. Copyright contract isn't any different than any other law, and numbers and their copy-ability have nothing to do with that, because you also have natural murderability, which someone could freely exercise. It's a contract, not the law of nature, which you must respect. If you think otherwise and still expect relative safety on the street, isn't that just a one-sided view?

The social contract behind copyright used to be we'd pretend the works of creators are artificially scarce so that they could make their money for a few years. Then the work would enter the public domain.

When was the last time you ever saw that happen? Some work you grew up with enter the public domain? These companies have already made untold fortunes, several times over. So why doesn't it happen?

They altered the deal. Unilaterally. The money people paid them? They used it to hire lobbyists to change the law and rob people of their public domain rights. These monopolistic protections were meant to be limited, they had an expiration date. The corporations managed to extend copyright duration to the point it might as well be infinite. There exists a public domain but no work ever actually ascends to this mythical place. Fair use? Nobody without an army of lawyers would ever dare try for fear of being sued.

Is this the social contract you want people to respect? The one where they get everything and we get nothing? You say my view is one-sided? These corporations are the most one-sided monopolists there are.

The second people stop pretending artificial scarcity is real, it will be the end of them. Look at how Sci-Hub is shaking up the academic journals. Their end literally can't come soon enough.

I agree with all of these questions and points, this is a huge problem and not "just numbers" argumentation anymore. Also, you're speaking only of a "hot" part of this market, corporations and patent trolls. Copyright is otherwise fine, especially if you want to sell your software yourself, even if it doesn't claim any patents. Why wouldn't I respect e.g. blizzard who gifted me with starcraft, or rake in grass for jets-n-guns, or some saas whose guys worked hard but leaked their "numbers" to the internet somehow. You can't just throw them out with the bathwater.

The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain last year. The whole system stopped for many years, nothing was entering the public domain, and then just last year IIRC it started up again.

But for the most part you are right.

> All data, all computer files, are fundamentally just numbers.

That's a misconception.

To get a data-representation for stuff (like numbers, documents, songs, videos, pictures, text, etc.), we have to encode it. Then if we want to retrieve the thing, we'd have to decode it. It's not a number until decoded as such -- and you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it.

I appreciate that you're mostly just trying to object to laws restricting data, it's just that the bit about data-being-numbers may detract from it by starting with a misstatement.

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If it helps break the mental-association: even if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian? For example, is "1000" 8 or 1?

Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like [bags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(abstract_data_type)#Multi... ) (which are actually used in software, e.g. [in C#](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collectio... )). Then, what number would such data be, if the data itself fundamentally lacks a [total-ordering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order )?

Or, if we insist that unsigned binary-integers are the fundamental encoding, then how could non-terminating numbers be stored, e.g. 1/3 or pi? Or even just non-integers or negative-integers, e.g. 1/2 or -1? Or, if we argue that data for those numbers isn't numbers until decoded as such, then why should we say that other data is numbers before decoding?

(Not that each point would need to be addressed, just, different thought-experiments that might help break out of the misconception.)

It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.

Thanks for your interesting reply. I think it's the first time someone took this idea seriously and addressed it.

I don't see how it's a misconception. All data is a sequence of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers expressed in base 2. How could I be wrong here?

> you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it

> if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian?

To me this just means all data could be represented as multiple numbers. Mentally, I visualize binary sequences as big endian. It's totally possible that there is another number that represents the same data but with different endianness.

> Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like bags

There must be at least one number that represents it, that much is certain. I'm just not particularly sure how complex that number is because when I made this argument what I had in mind was discrete self-contained files.

I don't think I understand these other possibilities well enough to comment at the moment.

> It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.

I don't see the distinction. If you can decode data as an integer, it must be equivalent to that integer.

We can come up with [encoding-conventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_number_format ) where any particular bit-string could map to any number. If we assert that decoding to a number under an encoding implies equivalence, then we'd have to say that all numbers are equal to each-other.

It's easy enough to avoid such absurdities by recognizing that data's just data; that, to get stuff like numbers, text, images, etc., we need to decode the data.

Copyright is actually about making sure people have enough incentive to keep doing all that hard work of discovering cool new numbers.

People will do that regardless of incentive. It's essentially a basic brain function, it can't be turned off. I'm discovering a new number right now by posting this comment.

People create cool new numbers all the time without worring about royalties and how-am-i-going-to-make-a-living-from-this-diddly-tune. Copyright is a way to commodify something deeply human to allow capitalists to make money from it. Put it this way, in a post-scarcity money-less world, musicians would still make cool new numbers, advertising people would not be creating any advertising numbers, they would probably make music as well.