> This is limited to digital representations of information
All information is bits and all bits are numbers. How the numbers are represented is just an implementation detail. One could print a book containing all 50 thousand digits of the numeric representation of the 20 KiB picture I mentioned. That number is the picture! It's just represented in a very inconvenient form.
It may be hard to believe but there exists software which does exactly this. Paperkey, for example, is designed to create printouts of OpenPGP secret keys so that they can be kept offline. It quite literally dumps out the bytes as rows of numbers and you print them out. Imagine reading hexadecimal characters from a paper and entering all 4096 bits into the computer one by one by hand via text editor. I've actually done it. Yes, it's as nightmarish as it sounds like. Yet it works.
The point of this argument is to show how utterly absurd copyright is. It logically reduces to numeric ownership and illegal numbers. It's quite literally illegal for you to write down a certain number on a paper and give the paper to someone else. I think that's just delusional.
It just can't be refuted. If the copyright monopolists try to argue that the number isn't the picture, they only hurt their own interests in the process. Such an argument automatically creates a channel where infringement of their copyrights may occur. It's illegal to copy the image directly but it's okay if I transform it into a number first and then copy it? That makes no sense whatsoever. They would never make such a self-defeating argument. Therefore they do believe that the image equals the number and that they have monopoly rights to the number.
> They are not the underlying truth.
I believe they are. All of information theory is bits. On/off states is just a digital mechanism humans created to store the information. If you group the bits, it becomes possible to encode larger and larger amounts of data. And any group of bits forms a number pretty much by definition.
All information is bits and all bits are numbers. How the numbers are represented is just an implementation detail. One could print a book containing all 50 thousand digits of the numeric representation of the 20 KiB picture I mentioned. That number is the picture! It's just represented in a very inconvenient form.
It may be hard to believe but there exists software which does exactly this. Paperkey, for example, is designed to create printouts of OpenPGP secret keys so that they can be kept offline. It quite literally dumps out the bytes as rows of numbers and you print them out. Imagine reading hexadecimal characters from a paper and entering all 4096 bits into the computer one by one by hand via text editor. I've actually done it. Yes, it's as nightmarish as it sounds like. Yet it works.
The point of this argument is to show how utterly absurd copyright is. It logically reduces to numeric ownership and illegal numbers. It's quite literally illegal for you to write down a certain number on a paper and give the paper to someone else. I think that's just delusional.
It just can't be refuted. If the copyright monopolists try to argue that the number isn't the picture, they only hurt their own interests in the process. Such an argument automatically creates a channel where infringement of their copyrights may occur. It's illegal to copy the image directly but it's okay if I transform it into a number first and then copy it? That makes no sense whatsoever. They would never make such a self-defeating argument. Therefore they do believe that the image equals the number and that they have monopoly rights to the number.
> They are not the underlying truth.
I believe they are. All of information theory is bits. On/off states is just a digital mechanism humans created to store the information. If you group the bits, it becomes possible to encode larger and larger amounts of data. And any group of bits forms a number pretty much by definition.