[youzicha]

The blog post writes:

> Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on.

There was a real court case in 2012 which I think is interesting because it's very similar to this example. A photographer was accused of "copying" the concept of taking a photo of a red bus in front of a grey Houses of Parliament. He defended himself by saying that that those ideas are very common and should not be copyrightable---but failed:

https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/162846191544/what-colour-ar...

[goto11]

If I understand the verdict correctly it says that it doesn't matter that the visual idea was trivial and that many other people have come up with the same idea independently. What matters is that this particular photographer deliberately wanted to copy a known image.

A very good example of "color", since the exact same photograph (same bits) would be non-infringing if the photographer had got the idea independently.