I talked to Amy for a while on Wednesday and, in principle, should
have expanded the list (because it's hard, in serious conversation, to
narrow the set of topics you ought to talk about; it grows instead). I
wasn't quite organized enough to keep track, though.
Wolfgang sent me a letter in reply to
the letter I wrote her from Spring Lake.
I feel troubled and anxious today, as though things are weighing
heavily on me. I used to have that experience much more frequently,
but now, thankfully, it's relatively rare. It seems too bad to me
that I didn't choose to make a second
collage for my friend Sarah, the Fulbright Scholar in Ghana.
(My first collage was for Wolfgang; I started and finished it during
2000.) A new collage would have been a good means of expression,
and a worthwhile challenge. Maybe it's still not too late.
Zack
is right that my Owner Override idea is not expressed in the
most practical possible way. I believe it could be implemented at
a deeper level; one perennial suggestion has been allowing the computer's
owner to obtain the TCPA Endorsement Key (EK) or any of several
equivalents. Since a lot of engineering has been done explicitly to
prevent the owner from getting the EK, this suggestion might not go over
well with trusted computing vendors. A more practical problem is that,
if you really don't want to diminish the computer owner's security, you
have to provide the EK in such a way that you don't increase the chance
that it will leak to malicious software or to a malicious eavesdropper.
I don't see any way of doing that; there is a real security benefit in
many cases from the policy that the EK will never physically leave the
chip into which it's been programmed. So if we wanted to make this idea
really practical, it would take some more thought.
I expect that we'll have a meeting tomorrow with the Microsoft
Palladium folks and that
Bunnie will be
present.
Since Nick's patch fixed the build of XFree86, in the sense of at
least allowing it to run to completion, we finally have a
new
nightly build! X is still broken at run-time, but it's possible to
make it work (although I don't think it's necessarily worth the effort
for anybody else; you have to download some loadable modules for XFree86
from somewhere else, install them under /etc, and change XFree86's
module path, in addition to supplying an XF86Config). I suspect that
we've fixed things up enough that tomorrow morning's build will have a
copy of X which works, but for the need to get a proper XF86Config. (You
could try this
one.)
The addition of a working copy of X brought the size of our image up to
about 70 MB, but I think I see clearly how we can prune over 30 MB of
that away, and have a total image size near 40 MB.
Nick and I had an LNX-BBC meeting which wandered through two cafes and
into my apartment. And in regard to
the
Internet access in the second cafe, I made what I thought was
a
good copyright joke.
Valenti's
mixing his religious metaphors interestingly.
I've already talked about the restoration
question. And I said that copyright
extension will promote restoration of works with significant current
commercial value, but hinder restoration of works without such value.
As I believe Eldred amici have explained, there are many
works whose current copyright holders are not even known, but which
are still under copyright -- in some sense a result of the lack of
deposit and renewal requirements -- and the resulting uncertainty
can block any effort to use or preserve those works.
The fact is that there are lots of scholars and lots of volunteers
restoring work all the time. (In some cases, they can get new
copyrights in their restorations! That's troubling, in some ways,
but it's much less troubling than a blanket copyright extension.
Lessig suggested at oral argument that you could extend copyright
only to the extent that a copyright holder actually agreed to
restore a work -- and independent copyrightability of restorations
seems like an obvious way to accomplish that. This would, as Lessig
said, make that kind of copyright extension into a quid pro quo
instead of a giveaway. It's too bad the Justices didn't pay too
much attention to this point.)
