The Laws of  A Digital World

The Laws:

1. All digital information and representations , exists as intangible objects or a collection of one or more digital bits[1].

2. All digital objects must be decomposable, into digital bits to exist within a digital world.

3. No digital objects can be scare, as they exist solely as free goods, with infinite supply and hence via supply vs demand, have a fixed price of zero.

4. No digital object can be "dated" as the passage of time cannot have any measurable, or observable affect on any digital object. There exists no functional  equivalent of 'carbon dating' within a digital world. Digital Objects are ageless, and it is technically impossible, to determine any precedence or order of existence of one digital object, from another identical digital object across a space-time or temporal  context.

5. In a purely digital world, human based reality, cannot exist as a digital world is entirely constructed from intangible digital only objects. There exists no conceptual equivalent of a tangible "photo negative, or original" image which is an fixed in both space and time.

6. Any copy of a digital object must always be a "Digital Original", the concept of a copy cannot exist inside a digital world.

7. All commodities  or works with a physical world are non-fungible by nature, all digital objects, within a digital world are fungible by the nature.

8. All Digital object can be copied infinitely at incrementally zero cost, and it is impossible to detect a copy from the original object by any known technology or process. Hence the ability to ensure or certify  the destruction of a digital object can never exist. 

9. In order to view any digital object or digital information, any device or process which enables viewing access to an digital object, via a device or process must first create a digitally ( bit wise) perfect copy of the original digital object. It is technically possible to view an object without  first creating a copy.

10. A digital object cannot be devalued by the process of viewing or copying, in fact the digital original cannot be affected in any detectable (forensic)  manner, even if an infinite digital copies are made.

11. A digital object exists outside the constraints of temporal time, and hence can be considered to exists within its own singularity with an infinite set of  space -time continuums for any observer or potential certifier of an objects existence.

12. There exists no knowable "ledger technology" which can create digital scarcity in any form, or prevent digital counterfeiting, as this is only possible with tangible objects which which exists in a non-digital world (its exitance is not predicated upon digital bits). 

13. The ability for any human to "observe the exitance of digital objects", relies upon transforms from digital bits into a form able to be cognitively understood by humans, this is typically via a GUI interface to the digital bits, this transform prevents access to the actual digital bits but rather provides a representation of the digital bits, and hence the observable state is totally dependent upon the transform itself, and may or may not be correlatable to the digital objects or the specific collection of digital bits. The human mind has no ability to comprehend  digital bits without the exitance of one or more digital transforms. 

14. Hence no form of copyright, which seeks to prevent a digital copy of any work,, can technically or legally exist within in a digital world subject to the laws of a digital world as enumerated above, as all digital objects can always be  reduced to a binary choice between  a digital 0  or a digital 1, no other possibility is passable for any digital object.

15. In order to trade a digital object, it must first  exist as a unique , non-fungible, immutable "digital bearer object", via  tangible property  (chose in possession),  or as a digital financial instrument (chose in action), via the informed, mutual agreement of both parties, to a legally enforceable contract between the trading parties. The choice is binary.

16. Where a digital object, seeks to legally represent a real world physical asset, within a digital world, it must be first legally immobilised, and codified, to achieve the required legal finality, to its transfer within a subsequent trade.

17. Real world ownership, is ownership with the force of law behind it, there exist no form of natural ownership rights or laws as we are all born free of any ownership over others or anything other than ourselves.

18. A Digital World cannot exist outside of an associated computational capability

19. Ownership is a legal concept that grants individuals the bundle of property rights. By contrast, possession refers to control over a digital onbject and the right to use or occupy it. Individuals may own a digital object without possessing it or vice versa.

20. Copyright in Digital Objects

    1. The owner of a particular digital copy of the work cannot "fix" that work in another copy. If owners of digital copies were permitted to reproduce copyrighted works, they could create, sell, and distribute additional copies of the work without incurring any of the costs associated with creating the work in the first place.  

    2. In support of the central exclusive right to reproduce, copyright law also gives authors the exclusive right to control initial distribution of copies of the work to the public through sale, rental, lease, or loan. Copyright law gives the author the ability, subject to the important qualifications, to proceed directly against the distributor of digital copies. 

    3. The generation of cryptographic key does not have sufficient authorship (i.e., creative spark) to constitute a derivative work, and hence may not be copyrightable subject matter, in which rights can exist or be exercised by the possessor of the cryptographic key.

    4. It is now settled law that the doctrine of ‘First Sale’ enshrined in s109 of the US Copyright Act does not apply to digital files protected by copyright.

    5.  Under copyright law, there is no such thing as a unique digital media asset, that can be bought and sold on a secondary market, because media files are essentially fungible. In order to achieve a non-fungible state, the original or copies of the digital work must be qualified as something that exists both digitally and physically within in the same electronic device or container, that is itself subject to a resale for it to benefit from copyright exhaustion.

    6. Copyright law expressly recognize an unlimited right to access digital copies in one's legal possession, and a more limited right to transfer such copies, under specific circumstances, as copies of copyrighted works can now be distributed in digital form, without the exchange of any physical object, without any title in physical property changing hands.

21. No contract can be formed between any two parties within a digital world as no concept of legal jurisdiction or enforceable 'chose in action' exists inside a digital world.

1. Within common law jurisdictions, a digital world is not an evolution of the physical world, it is an entirely different domain which in most cases cannot translate directly to the laws of the pre-existent physical domain. As an example it is technically, and hence leally, impossible inside a digital domain to replicate the functionality or achieve the identical legal effect  of a "wet signature" on Valium , parchment or even modern day paper.
2. Contract Law within common law countries will require the accumulation of sufficient evidence which can be presented to ac court to support a determination that prevents repudiation of execution by any party. Potentially only the affixing of a Seal can attain a sufficient standard of evidence.
3. A digital object must exist exclusively within a digital world, it is impossible to move a digital object from a digital world into a object in the rules of a physical world, without a loss of integrity and purpose. As an example, one cannot print on paper a digital signature as the process of the printing destroys all technical security, and all forensic data embedded within the digital object.
4. With a digital world it technically, physically and hence legally impossible to assert that any human signer, who can only exist in a physical world, can affix a digital signature to a digital object.
5. Only a device which exist, within a digital world, has the capability, as an agent of the signer, to affix a digital signature to a digital object.

19: Digital Signatures exist entirely inside a digital world.
    1. A human readable transformation from the digital world is required to move from a digital world to a physical world to enforce a chose in action based claim. 

    2. The simplest and hence most legally reliable transform is the ASCII text representation of the digital document.

    3. A X.509 Digital Certificate can be used to bind a public key-pair to a named entity that exist entirely inside the physical world(Subject).

Notes:

1. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as either "1" or "0". In information theory, one bit is the information entropy of a binary random variable that is 0 or 1 with equal probability.

2. A hash algorithm has a sole characteristic of being irreversible or exist solely as a one way function, it has no ability to create a unique one way transform result  from multiple digital objects. Hence more than one digital object may have the same  hash value, a unique value cannot be guaranteed[3] and  hence a hash cannot be used as  a unique representation of any digital object, this is not a design feature or even design requirement of any Hash Algorithm.

3. In computer science, a collision or clash is a situation occurs when two distinct pieces of data have the same hash value. Collisions are unavoidable whenever members of a very large set  are mapped to a restricted hash bit string. This is merely an instance of the pigeonhole principle[4].

4. In mathematics, the pigeonhole principle states that if n items are put into m containers, with n>m, then at least one container must contain more than one item.

5. Any good whose supply is greater than the demand if their price were zero is called a free good, since consumers can obtain all they want at no charge.  All digital objects have infinite supply, and hence must have zero market price. Free goods cannot be traded because nobody would pay for a free good – there is no point. Hence free goods cannot become a collatable, or become subject to trade.

6. Financial instrument: is a contract that gives rise to a financial asset of one entity and a financial liability or equity instrument of another entity (IAS32.11).

7. Immutable: unchanging over time or unable to be changed. 

8. Non-fungible: a unique digital object that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided.

9. Tangible property: property that has a physical form and substance and is not intangible. 

10. Immobilize: to prevent the use of, access to, or any activity, or movement of.

11. A derivative is a contract between two or more parties whose value is based on an agreed-upon underlying financial asset. 

12. In his book Cybernetics, the mathematician Norbert Wiener remarked that “information is information, not matter or energy.” The information that makes a difference in the real world is not disembodied information.

13. Where a digital object represent a dematerialised  physical object, and the ownership is transferred via a 'book-entry' system, via an indirect holding system with two key features: immobilisation and dematerialisation.  The book-entry system breaks the link between the issuer (of the security)  and the owner (of the security), as book entry system enable transactions to be effected without the delivery of digital object (share  certificates). ‘Immobilisation’ refers to the fact that an intermediary or clearing house holds all of the digital objects in custody, either in its own name or in the name of a nominee, and simply records transactions in relation to those shares. ‘Dematerialisation’ refers to the fact that physical object (share certificates no longer exist), because transfers of ownership are made simply by the intermediary changing its records, which are usually held digital in a register or ledger. As a result of these features of the system, the digital object purchaser is, strictly speaking, no longer a ‘owner’ because one never owns or possesses the digital objects and thus has no direct entitlement against the issuer. Additionally the choice of law may now apply not to the issuer or owner but the registry itself. Obviously, the lex situs rule is profoundly ill-suited to an indirect holding system because the situs of the share no longer has central significance in practice.  On the case of a anonymous blockchain based ledger , there is no ability to form a contract between any parties, hence  the owner is indeterminate and perhaps self deprecates to the "possessor" of the digital object (ownership is hence potentially legally indeterminate).

14. Copyright confers a limited bundle of rights: the rights to reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, publicly distribute, and make derivative works.  Under the common law, restraints on the free alienation of physical property are generally disfavored. In copyright law, this disfavoring finds doctrinal expression in the "first sale" doctrine, which generally bars copyright owners from exerting certain types of control over copies of their works once they have parted with title over a particular copy.

15. The U.S. Copyright Office in 2001, concluded that transmitting a digital file, from one user to another, creates a new copy of the copyrighted work, and  hence the first sale doctrine does not apply to copyrighted materials in digital form. The the first sale doctrine applies only to a particular copy. The copyright holder remains the "owner" of any and all distributed copies. 

Digital Objects

The modern economy relies more and more on digital objects, whether financial assets (ultimately a form of debt, particularly in its most significant version: fiat ledger money), or intellectual property and data, while the production and sale of physical goods and assets becomes less important. In fact, an underlying concept of modern property law systems appears well-equipped to meet these new challenges it is in reality impliedly accepted: the concept of dematerialised property. All real rights, particularly the most extensive and most important one, ownership, can be analysed as having an internal side (broadly, the right to use) and an external side (broadly, the right to exclude).

Different legal systems have different definitions of property rights, but historically property objects or ‘things’ in law have generally been regarded as being physical things,. Property objects can be corporeal as well as incorporeal, or, in the terminology of English law, tangible, intangible and purely intangible. ‘Pure intangibles’ denotes property created as legal concepts, for example debts or intellectual property rights, while ‘intangibles’ can also mean intangible objects of the physical world. In a digital world property is not primarily a connection between a person and an object, but a legal relationship between persons with regard to things. The law determines what this proprietary relationship consists of, by essentially ordering a specific behavior towards persons in respect of things which makes them ‘their’ things.

This is commonly referred to as the property right (or ‘real right’16), the subjective exclusive right to a res, enforceable rights‘ a property right binds the world, different from, and independent of, an underlying contractual relationship that would only bind the contracting parties. The property right of ownership, being the most extensive property right, is enforced by the owner against all others. Thus ‘property’ is the creature of the law; there are no ‘natural’ property rights'.

The practical effect of the property right to which data object is to be subjected to: (i) what exactly is the property object (the res, or its reification in a given concrete example), (ii) what is the content of the real right in relation to the data object? (iii) who is the property right allocated to? (iv) how can this allocation be changed, that is, how can ownership in the data object be transferred?

If a digital object cannot be serrated and uniquely distinguish from all other data objects ( or an infinite set of copies of a data object) it would be imposable to crate an unambiguous allocation to a certain right-holder or owner. Furthermore, the incorporeal nature of data prevents possession as it can be exercised with regard to physical things. Possession supports in defining the object of the property rights in question. It must therefore be clear and unambiguous which data object within a universitas rerum the specific set of property rights, via ownership,  legally applies to.

In essence for property rights to be applied to any digital object, the object itself must meet the principle of specialty , for the grant or transfer of property rights and enforce legal ownership over the digital object. In essence this requires that the digital object meets the requirements for legal dematerialisation, which requires an unique and  identified  owner, the beneficiary of the rights . This requires that a immobilised  digital object is bound  at at the point of creation to the rights owner.  The act of  legal immobilisation of the object, is required to prevent any and all forms of digital copies of the digital data  within a universitas rerum  of  potentially identical digital objects. Additionally one cannot transfer any rights greater than that which one legally possesses, as property rights are creature of law alone.

Conclusion
Debts, money, intellectual property, and – to the extent to which one is able to or wants to recognise property rights in them – data and digitised objects, are all versions of the general principle of dematerialised property. ‘Property’ is a creature of the law: the exclusive rights to a thing or res, the property rights or real rights, actually create the property or res by protecting it erga omnes. The physical objects in the natural world (natural or man-made ones) are only recognised by, and incorporated in, the system of the law by attaching property rights to the unique physical object: only then they are objects or ‘things’ for the purpose of the law, otherwise they are non-existent for the law. An intangible object, such as an intellectual property right, is also created by the law, there must exist an identifiable digital object which represents this res.

Digital Seals and Signatures

The laws of a digital world (above) prevent the direct translation of a physical Seal and Signature into a digital world. As these laws are "natural laws" they cannot be altered, or changed by any national statues.

In a digital world it technically and legally impossible to assert that any human signer can affix a digital signature, only a device that exist solely in a digital world can act as an agent of the signer has the technical capability to affix a signature in a digital world.

What You See Is What You Sign (WYSIWYS) refers to the part of any signature process, where you read a document, you intend to sign, and ensure that you only sign it once you know it is the right document and agree with its terms. When you read something in your web browser, how can you be sure that the text you read is genuine, from the right source, and agree on the content it displays?

In the digital world, the WYSIWYS experience is part of a larger signature process involving several steps:

·       The document or transaction is prepared

·       The signatory views and reads it

·       The signatory approves it

·       The signature is created

·       The terms in the document or transaction are executed

The first and last steps are about the business that needs something signed to proceed.

It can be pretty much anything including contracts, tax declarations or financial transactions. Once it has been signed, the applications requiring the signature can use the document and proceed with the business, e.g., open a bank account, buy a house, check declaration or transfer money.

The second step is where the user is presented with the document, that requires a signature, through a Graphic User Interface. This interface has an in-built transformation which is unknown by the user and generates no forensic data which can be presented to a court to ensure What was signed was in fact what the GUI displayed to the signer.  Using the most common form of document specification Adobe PDF, the actual document transform complexity is beyond any human comprehension and there exist no “trusted path” between the binary bits in a PDF document and any GUI that the signer make sues of in order to have an “informed consent” to the document contents.

In all physical paper or parchment documents aa trusted path always exist as the transform is always zero. What You See Is What You Sign is imposable to achieve in a digital world using any device or technology which does not have a “trusted path” between the digital bits and the GUI.

Additionally, as no human being can comprehend the semantics of collections of “digital bits” it is imposable for the average human being to ensure a complete comprehension if the transform between the document and the GUI has a complexity greater than ASCII, a 127-char table lookup.

Additionally, if the document contents are viewed over a communications channel, then the trusted path must be extended via mutual authenticated endpoint which generate and preserve sufficient forensic data which can be presented to a court as forensic evidence.

Existence Proofs

An existence proof shows that an object exists. In some cases, this means displaying the object, or giving a method for finding it...

Suppose you have a squirrel named Flufftail as a pet. One day, while you're talking to a friend about Flufftail, a stranger overhears you and points out that a squirrel is a rare animal to have as a pet. He then goes on to tell you that because it is so rare, he doesn't believe that Flufftail exists. To which you reply that Flufftail certainly does exist, and you can prove it! Believe it or not, this scenario has some mathematical significance. You see, in mathematics, proving that Flufftail exists would be considered an existence proof.

When a theorem states that an element, call it x, exists that satisfies a certain property, we call that theorem an existence theorem, and the proof of the theorem is called an existence proof. For example, consider these existence theorems:

• First, there exists a real number x, such that 2x - 6 = 8.

• Second, there exists a prime number p, such that p + 8 is also a prime number.

• And, finally, a function f exists, such that f(x) = f ' (x).

This is just the tip of a very large iceberg. There are many more out there! Since these types of theorems show up so often in mathematics, it's really helpful to know how to perform existence proofs.

How to Prove Existence Proofs

Back to Flufftail. You told the stranger you could prove that Flufftail exists. Do you have any ideas on how to do this? Common sense is probably telling you to prove it by simply showing Flufftail to this stranger, and common sense is correct. Proving existence theorems is as simple as showing that there is an element that satisfies the theorem.

Technically, existence proofs are carried out by finding or constructing an element, x, that satisfies the theorem. Because of this, these types of proofs are also commonly called constructive proofs. Let's give it a try. Consider the first existence theorem that was previously used.

• There exists a real number x, such that 2x - 6 = 8.

To prove that this statement is true, find or construct a number x that satisfies the equation 2x - 6 = 8.