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>And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory. No, they just become meaningless (and potentially da
by jsprogrammer 11y ago
>And laws aren't mathematical theorems; they don't become invalid just because they're self-contradictory.
No, they just become meaningless (and potentially dangerous).
The problem is that people are trying to apply the law to actual mathematical concepts (like bits). Since the law does not model mathematical reality, the law necessarily fails.
Many appear to be stuck in the fallacious belief that the law reflects reality, or at least that reality should reflect laws. Of course, this belief is incorrect, doomed to failure, and we see that failure play out all the time, including in this case.
- icebraining 11y agoA bit is no different than a letter/grapheme of a text, which was what copyright originally was designed to protect. They are both digital (discrete) encodings of information - a computer file is just a text in a language that only has two letters. The law doesn't concern itself with the specifics of the components of the work, it concerns itself with higher-level concepts like "copy" and "derivative", which still make perfect sense for information encoded as bits. As for the failure, I disagree. This case merely represents ambiguity, which is inherent to law (it's why we have courts and judges and juries).