[shasta]

Ownership of a bicycle isn't about physically controlling the bicycle. It's about the path of the bicycle through space-time, which is exactly how color operates -- it tracks the flow of information through space-time. There is no physical aspect of a bicycle that controls ownership. It's color, just like with bits.

I'm sure we both understand well enough the trade-offs that society makes in granting copyrights. Reasonable people have differing opinions, but these trade-offs existed long before computers, which have only shifted the balance of the bargain. The fact that bits encode information as numbers is irrelevant to the discussion.

[nitrogen]

The important distinction is scarcity. All of our intuitive concepts of ownership depend on it, and bits don't have it.