Does the "file that can be transferred, but not copied" trope have a tvtropes entry?

[Reddish Mage]

So Frankenstein is a bad parent...yes Frankenstein, in the book, abandons his creation immediately as a hidious mockery of life and never takes responsibility or shows the least bit of kindness to it (or I should say HIM since its clear the creature is male from later events, although the Frankenstein/narrator doesn't dignify his creation with personhood).

However, no critic sees Frakenstein as just being about the personal failing of Frankenstein in shirking parental responsibilities or not thinking about what he was doing all the way through...rather its about humanity as a whole being incapable of responsibly handling [certain] scientific advances, [re]introducing the [mythical] notion that there are "some places humans are not meant to go," and as cautionary criticism of Positivism, the attitude that humanity would necessarily make everything better with all the new scientific and social advances coming out of the 19th Century .

It seems perfectly clear to me what gomipile is talking about. Sometimes in a story there will exist a type of data that cannot be non-destructively copied, and yet can be transferred, even though this obviously defies how copying information normally works.

As a totally non-science fiction example, look at how spells generally work in the 3rd Edition of D&D (specified because I'm not sure how different things are in other editions). Prepare a spell from a scroll and it disappears from the scroll. Write a prepared spell on a scroll and it disappears from your mind. Cast a spell -- thereby "writing it onto reality", as it were -- and it disappears from wherever you cast it from, whether your mind or a scroll.

Being able to prepare spells out of spellbooks without erasing them is a special exception. That's why spellbook ink is so expensive; it's a valuable alchemical substance that affixes spells to pages so that they don't disappear when copied, as is normally the case for magical information.

We're not just talking about a single file, object, or character, because there's an entire category of data that can normally only be transferred. This may serve primarily as a justification as to why an important object or character can't be duplicated, but it's equally possible that no such object or character exists.

In D&D, you have the excuse that "It's magic, I ain't gotta explain $#!7." In sci-fi, you can talk about irreproducable quantum states. But the Cosmos-Enforced Copy Protection rather obviously was written into the setting for story purposes, not because it's the most plausible scenario; it isn't.

I like "Cosmos-Enforced Copy Protection" as a trope candidate although I would call it "Plot-Supporting Copy Protection."

The question is, how many examples can we find of this particular copy protection in place, and do we always also see an example of "No plans...no backup" alongside it.

So far, as far as firm examples giving in this thread, we have the Death Star plans. I mention Red versus Blue. Frankenstein doesn't have his plans or theory but Frankenstein purposely destroys his notes for reasons given in the book and so Frankenstein would be an example of "No plans, no prototype, no backup" and only that...

Other uncopiables but transferrables turned out not to be so uncopiables (the Doctor on Voyager and so on).

What other hard exmples do we have of Cosmic Copy Protection.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Other uncopiables but transferrables turned out not to be so uncopiables (the Doctor on Voyager and so on).

What other hard exmples do we have of Cosmic Copy Protection.

Voyager was generally a spectacularly inconsistent show. Far more often than not, downloading the Doctor's data meant the original copy disappeared. It was a major plot element of many, many episodes featuring him. Apparently the writers thought using him for a mission was only dangerous (therefore dramatic!) if there was potential he could die (for really-reals!). I can only off-hand think of two episodes with an actual copy, and both of them were necessary for the plot for the episode to occur at all. (Both copies were made off-screen.)

Pretty much all things that happen on Voyager are only internally consistent within the same episode, if even that. They just wrote everything to be whatever would be most dramatic at the moment.

I like the name Cosmic Copy Protection as well.

[Devils_Advocate]

So far, as far as firm examples giving in this thread, we have the Death Star plans.

That's not an example at all, though. The Death Star plans aren't ever established as impossible to copy, and certainly aren't established as somehow possible to transfer without being copied.

So, with all due respect, it sounds like you still don't understand what we're talking about. :/

Another example from Star Trek is how teleportation works. Characters don't get sent through wormholes or anything like that, but instead just taken apart in one place and put together in another, right? Obviously they have to record how all of your component particles are put together in order to be able to reconstruct you, and you'd think that they could use that information in order to construct another you. But something about the process "uses up" that information in the process of putting you back together; in essence, you get changed from material being to transporter data and back again.

That's still from the same franchise, but it is another example.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

That's not an example at all, though. The Death Star plans aren't ever established as impossible to copy, and certainly aren't established as somehow possible to transfer without being copied.

So, with all due respect, it sounds like you still don't understand what we're talking about. :/

Can plans of a building be copied with destroying the original? Yes.
Does the film do that? No.
The plans are a McGuffin that can only exist in one place at one time: the disk inside R2D2, even though it would make far more sense for the rebellion to make a billion copies of it and send them in all directions. The Empire knows the plans were stolen, so the rebellion gains nothing for keeping them in a single place.

Therefore, it is this trope.

Another example: Whatever was in Johnny Mnemonic's head (sorry, it's been a while since i saw that film). I suspect it was hand-waved at the start (which is more than can be said for Star Wars), but it is still this trope: it was merely (a lot of) data, and sending multiple copies through multiple couriers would make more sense.

Grey Wolf

[Douglas]

Can plans of a building be copied with destroying the original? Yes.
Does the film do that? No.
The plans are a McGuffin that can only exist in one place at one time: the disk inside R2D2, even though it would make far more sense for the rebellion to make a billion copies of it and send them in all directions. The Empire knows the plans were stolen, so the rebellion gains nothing for keeping them in a single place.

Therefore, it is this trope.

No, I think in this case it's reasonably explained as they simply never had an opportunity to copy them everywhere because the Empire was in such close pursuit and controlled all the long distance communications infrastructure.

[Kantaki]

It's made even harder when you are using1970's eratape drive technology. Keep in mind that while the technology in Star Wars is pretty awesome, what with their lightsabers and their holograms, it's also a throwback to our history.

Well, the movies do take place „a long time ago”.

[snowblizz]

Another example: Whatever was in Johnny Mnemonic's head (sorry, it's been a while since i saw that film). I suspect it was hand-waved at the start (which is more than can be said for Star Wars), but it is still this trope: it was merely (a lot of) data, and sending multiple copies through multiple couriers would make more sense.

Grey Wolf

As far as I can remember (I was thinking of this movie too) no it wouldn't have made more sense to send multiple copies. I don't think they said it couldn't be done. That there was the one copy in Johnny's head was mostly a problem *for him* because he is over capacity and hence risking his brain, and also because he cannot get rid of it as it is encrypted (or something). He can't just dump it when someone else wants to get hold of it because he can't properly extricate it, and the "bad guys" wants him because he has the data easily(relatively speaking) accessible outside it's normal protections. It is a bit like having a briefcase handcuffed to the arm and getting it stolen means someone chopping your hand off, but with more dire consequences.

But I don't recall exactly what it was Johnny had gotten, the core of the plot was he had taken on more than he could handle and needs to get rid of it ASAP, but there are all these hurdles and the clock is ticking.

As a funny aside, I tried copying an SD card from a larger to a smaller one and Windows refuses to do this easily. Raspbian? Didn't say one peep to complain. Maybe the future courier-brains run on Windows. Would explain intput/output incompatibilities.

[90,000]

In lots of fiction, mostly soft science fiction, one sees files, data, uploaded brains, etc. that may be transferred between computers and storage media, but through plot devices can never be copied, backed up, or otherwise exist in two storage locations simultaneously.

Does this trope have a tvtropes page and/or a standardized name?

Why does it matter?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

No, I think in this case it's reasonably explained as they simply never had an opportunity to copy them everywhere because the Empire was in such close pursuit and controlled all the long distance communications infrastructure.

While those are plausible explanations, they are not given in the film. They are headcanon at best (unless of course it was somehow addressed in, I'd imagine, Rogue One, which I have not seen)

Why does it matter?

Because if there isn't an entry, and it is common enough to warrant one, it should?

GW

[Reddish Mage]

No, I think in this case it's reasonably explained as they simply never had an opportunity to copy them everywhere because the Empire was in such close pursuit and controlled all the long distance communications infrastructure.

If everytime an explanation exists (we can debate its plausibility), we can say a trope isn't present, many tropes wouldn't exist.

Rogue one explains that

Spoiler: End of Rogue One

Show

every copy before Tantive IV was destroyed because every place in that chain gets blown up.

. That's not exactly the most natural way it could have gone.

Also Legends has something called the Holonet, which the Rebels could publicly release information to theoretically. Why they can't simply broadcast the plans everywhere is another question. The Tantive IV gets to skip quite a few star system, but it's communications are jammed....again far fetched.

Regardless of the explanation, the plot is clearly being structured as if by an invisible authorial hand, to prevent the existence of a back up. That is what the trope is, in essence.

Also, I ask for examples of the trope Cosmic and/or Plot Copy Protection, and what I hear are from Star Trek and Star Wars and is more of a "...No Backup" variety and is also debatable or debated. We really need some more meat to get it going.

The OP wants examples where data gets TRANSFERRED but not COPIED, and I think Stat Trek teleporters, holograms, and what happens to Data at the end of the last Not-Nu Trek movie, are all examples as well as the Death Star Plans. I'm at a lost for other shows. Red v Blue has this thing where AI's cannot be copied, only "fragmented," but it turns out one of the fragments will always be the memory aspect and hence have everything...Also Cortana in Halo can't really be copied for the most part, but we see she transfers herself into enemy computer systems a lot. But then there is then their is the one time in Halo 4 to create lots of copies that have a very very short life.

So every example I have is both 1. problematic because copies do exist sometime in some fashion and 2. Still the trope works because there's a lot of cases where copies don't happen when they should and most importantly 3. Each case is also a case of "No Backup" as no trace remains in the old systems.

Whatever the In-Universe explanation (if there even is one), it is obviously contrived and constructed in support of the plot not wanting more than one of the particular data set around.

[Douglas]

While those are plausible explanations, they are not given in the film. They are headcanon at best (unless of course it was somehow addressed in, I'd imagine, Rogue One, which I have not seen)

Yes, it's shown in Rogue One, which is explicitly the story of "how Leia got the Death Star plans". The Rebels do a raid on an Imperial archive, force a gate in the local planetary shield to open, and transmit the plans through that gate to the rebel fleet in orbit. Said rebel fleet is engaged in battle at the time, as the planet is defended by multiple star destroyers. Near the end of that battle, Darth Vader's flagship shows up, and proceeds to start wrecking things. The rebels frantically transmit the plans from one ship to another a time or three, trying to get them to a ship that is in position to flee. Finally, the Tantive IV (Leia's ship) escapes with the plans on board. Cut to the start of A New Hope.

Even without that, the opening sequence of A New Hope shows that a) Leia is trying to get the plans to the Rebel Alliance any way she can and b) the Empire caught her. Those two facts pretty strongly imply that she only very recently acquired the plans, that she had no way to simply transmit them long distance to the rebels, and that the Empire (the dictatorial and overwhelmingly dominant power in the galaxy) was right on her tail about it.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

The rebels frantically transmit the plans from one ship to another a time or three, trying to get them to a ship that is in position to flee. Finally, the Tantive IV (Leia's ship) escapes with the plans on board. Cut to the start of A New Hope.

Why didn't they broadcast it to all the ships at once? Why send them from one ship to the next? Parallel transmission to every* ship, and then a "sauve qui peut" order would have far more likely lead to at least one copy of the plans making it out of there, and dividing Vader's attention on who to pursue to recover it. Except because the plans are treated as a unique MacGuffin, no-one considers this - thus, the trope being discussed.

Grey Wolf

*I do mean every ship: no reason not to send a copy to any neutral ship in broadcast range. Many might purge the data, but it only takes one with a grudge with the Empire or an eye to make a profit to pretend to have purged and then just send it/sell it to the rebels

[GloatingSwine]

. But something about the process "uses up" that information in the process of putting you back together; in essence, you get changed from material being to transporter data and back again.

Except when it doesn't and you get Tom Riker.

Or evil duplicates.

Or worse, Tuvix. (But Janeway murdered him to get Neelix back for some damn reason).



The fact that it's turning out rather difficult to come up with any examples of this probably explains why it doesn't have a TV Tropes entry....

[hamishspence]

The Rebels do a raid on an Imperial archive, force a gate in the local planetary shield to open, and transmit the plans through that gate to the rebel fleet in orbit. Said rebel fleet is engaged in battle at the time, as the planet is defended by multiple star destroyers. Near the end of that battle, Darth Vader's flagship shows up, and proceeds to start wrecking things. The rebels frantically transmit the plans from one ship to another a time or three, trying to get them to a ship that is in position to flee. Finally, the Tantive IV (Leia's ship) escapes with the plans on board. Cut to the start of A New Hope.

The ship in orbit receiving the plans was the Mon Cal ship Profundity - the plans were downloaded onto a tape, the tape was carried from the Profundity to Leia's ship Tantive IV (which was docked with it) - and the Tantive IV undocked the moment the tape was carried aboard.

I didn't see any references to attempts to transmit the plans from the Profundity to the other ships in the fleet though.

[Douglas]

Why didn't they broadcast it to all the ships at once? Why send them from one ship to the next? Parallel transmission to every* ship, and then a "sauve qui peut" order would have far more likely lead to at least one copy of the plans making it out of there, and dividing Vader's attention on who to pursue to recover it. Except because the plans are treated as a unique MacGuffin, no-one considers this - thus, the trope being discussed.

Grey Wolf

*I do mean every ship: no reason not to send a copy to any neutral ship in broadcast range. Many might purge the data, but it only takes one with a grudge with the Empire or an eye to make a profit to pretend to have purged and then just send it/sell it to the rebels

I'm actually not sure that they don't do an all-ships broadcast. It's just that the movie only shows a "receiving the plans" scene once (well, twice if you count the initial planet-to-fleet transmission, which had to be directionally targeted to get through the shield), and only one ship escapes the battle. It's been a while since I watched the movie, I might have forgotten some relevant details.

[Reddish Mage]

Regardless of the mechanics that happens in Rogue One (it was clearly a case one the info going from one single-storage to another, in one case physically in the hands of a rebel running and passing the data like a torch), it is clearly contrived so that only one copy ends up existing aboard the Tantive IV.

The point of naming a "No Backup" trope is to put a name to that plot contrivance.

If you want to focus on the mechanism being transfers are made but not copies, that's all fine and well. However, its an overly geeky distinction that revolves around story-explanation minutiae.

I understand the desire to talk about all these funny "transfers that are somehow not and cannot becopies" going on, I don't understand labeling it as a TV tropes as the trope page is properly more about plot-devices and cliches and not about as much contrivances in the Science-Fiction minutiae.

Its interesting that transfers are made that aren't copies (when a copy would be desirable), because, the way data moves in real world computers systems is that data is transferred by copying it and then destroying it in the original location. The act of destruction is optional and purposefully made. Making a copy, is easier than making a transfer, because to make a copy one just skips the part of destroying the original data in the original location.

Sci-Fi tends to ignore this basic computer-science fundamental in order to have copy-protected transfers of data for plot reasons. Those plot reasons are the same regardless of whether the data is explicitly "transferable but not copiable" or, as in Star Wars, the data is actually being copied one time after another, but the copies are all getting destroyed or captured by the Empire, so we end up with no backup.

[GloatingSwine]

Sci-Fi tends to ignore this basic computer-science fundamental in order to have copy-protected transfers of data for plot reasons.

Except nobody's actually come up with any real examples of it so far, so it kinda doesn't.

Even the thing about not being able to copy minds is variable between and even within series.

[Devils_Advocate]

If you want to focus on the mechanism being transfers are made but not copies, that's all fine and well. However, its an overly geeky distinction that revolves around story-explanation minutiae.

I understand the desire to talk about all these funny "transfers that are somehow not and cannot becopies" going on, I don't understand labeling it as a TV tropes as the trope page is properly more about plot-devices and cliches and not about as much contrivances in the Science-Fiction minutiae.

It seems like you're suggesting that the distinctions between fantasy, soft sci-fi, and hard sci-fi aren't tropes and are unworthy of TV Tropes' attention. The Planetville page is all about how certain "sci-fi" stories are essentailly just reflavored non-sci-fi stories. Is it inappropriate to talk about the details of faster-than-light spaceships and ray guns in those sorts of works? Because not only do those things fill the same story roles as oceangoing ships and firearms, the fact that they're made to fill the same story roles is what we're talking about in the first place. I personally think that it's worthwhile to talk about how soft sci-fi things fill the same narrative purposes as they do in other genres, and how that's what makes it soft sci-fi; information being made to function like physical objects is just one more example of that.

So... should FTL travel, single-biome planets, etc. not have TV Tropes pages either?

Regardless, if you tell us that we aren't talking about the specific thing we're talking about, but instead are talking about something broader, it seems to me entirely appropriate to reply that, no, we are talking about what we're talking about. If you want to argue that what we're talking about isn't a trope, fine, but not only does that seem like an even geekier distinction, I'm pretty sure that you're wrong in this context. I'm pretty sure that TV Tropes uses the word "trope" in an especially broad sense.

Its interesting that transfers are made that aren't copies (when a copy would be desirable), because, the way data moves in real world computers systems is that data is transferred by copying it and then destroying it in the original location. The act of destruction is optional and purposefully made. Making a copy, is easier than making a transfer, because to make a copy one just skips the part of destroying the original data in the original location.

Sci-Fi tends to ignore this basic computer-science fundamental in order to have copy-protected transfers of data for plot reasons.

So we're clear: THE ABOVE QUOTE SUMMARIZES WHAT THIS THREAD IS ABOUT.

"The plot requires that no copies exist" is a Doylist explanation. And that's fine, but tropes are allowed to be about Watsonian things too, or even about the apparent lack of Watsonian explanation (in the case of, e.g., Idiot Ball). If you refuse to engage with fiction as hypothetical scenarios (that is to say, from an "in-universe" perspective), that's your prerogative, but lots of people don't, and the fact that they don't influences how stories are written by authors as well as received by audiences. So the Watsonian perspective is important from a Doylist perspective.

[Reddish Mage]

It seems like you're suggesting that the distinctions between fantasy, soft sci-fi, and hard sci-fi aren't tropes and are unworthy of TV Tropes' attention.

No, I'm just saying one particular deep-geek on data-transfers in Sci-Fi (Why no copy?) is already adequately represented by the "...No Backup" trope, to which it appears to be a subset.

I thought the thread was about finding the TV Trope about "can be transferred, but not copied."

In either case, we are short for more examples about transfers that aren't copies. I've provided more than anyone else in this region and I still think its just a subset of the "...No Backup" trope .

WE NEED MORE EXAMPLES

MORE STORIES!

MORE STORIES!

Once we get the stories, I think it'll be pretty clear there is no Watsonian or In-Universe "copy-protection" mechanism in play. We'll just have a bunch of examples where no backup was made or the original file wasn't kept in place, and we'll be left analyzing the story and saying the transfers were contrived to prevent backups existing.

In otherwards, exactly what happens in the "...No Backup" trope.

Alternatively, there's enough sufficiently robust examples of transfers where they go (in universe) and say ",DARN IT!, we just can't copy that thing! but it transfers" and then we can call it the "Voyager Doctor phenomon" or something.

[BeerMug Paladin]

It has occurred to me that there is a more general description of this sort of thing.

Treating virtual objects as if they had the same properties as physical objects. There are a couple of tropes that seem to only exist because of the writer not understanding the distinct differences between a virtual object and a real object. Or rather, know basic facts about computers.

It seems to me like this is an example of the general idea.

It would also fit for those greatly zoomable digital photographs.

[Reddish Mage]

Treating virtual objects like they were real objects, as well as virtual space like real space, is many, varied and huge. And there's always a viewer-friendly graphical interface that makes everything an ultra-realistic virtual object.

It's like every hacker movie, and massive-scale penny shaving is also a thing, often by stealing by the thousandth or millionth of a penny despite the fact that there isn't that many bank accounts to acquire the vast fortunes it is used for. Maybe if you took a micro-slice of every transfer, but not a vanishingly small fraction of the account interest due that the banks "illegitimately keep."

Now if only someone could show us that physical style file transfer (no leaving the first copy behind!) is also a thing by robust example...