Vitanuova for 2002 September
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Dave Winer's comments in the famous Winer-Lessig-various people discussion are really starting to get to me. I'd like try to explain a few of the reasons.

First, re Lessig's proposals, or ideas:

Lessig suggested that software copyright holders should have to provide their source code to the Library of Congress, in escrow, so that it could be released when its copyright expires. Winer wants to know how this is going to be enforced.

Source code escrow is enforced by making it a condition of copyright, the way there used to be a deposit requirement. The deposit requirement has now been wiped out, but in the past there used to be certain expectations of anybody who wanted the benefit of a copyright. It really ought to be called source code deposit instead of source code escrow.

Source code escrow is not enforced by making it illegal to publish binary-only software. Critics of critics of software copyright keep on saying "Do you want it to be illegal to ...?". That happens to the Free Software Foundation, too: they get accused of wanting to imprison people who publish proprietary software, or something. At most, the FSF would like to cut away some of the legal mechanisms which facilitate keeping software proprietary. (One way to do that is to abolish software copyright, and another is to limit software copyright in any number of ways. Source code deposit could be one of those; compulsory licenses could be one of those; reducing the term of software copyrights could be one of those. I can think of three or four others. All of these are just limitations on what you get with a software copyright or how readily you can receive one.)

Lessig talked about a program Winer developed called MORE (which has disappeared, having been discontinued by the company which bought it, and can't be legally obtained now for love or money). Winer replied with a claim that Lessig's proposals would have precluded MORE's creation:

Had we been forced to release the source, I don't think we could have sold our investors on taking a chance on us, or realized the great return we got from the Symantec deal, and gone on to develop more software. The system you describe just wouldn't work, you wouldn't get any of it.

But this is ridiculous: Lessig suggested that source code needed to be escrowed, not released. There's no reason that the knowledge that the Library of Congress has a copy of your source code in a vault should make it any more difficult to bargain with investors, especially if all of your potential competitors' source code is also in that same vault.

Winer goes on to quote another MORE developer, Brad Pettit, in particular support of his position. Pettit does suggest that the source code wouldn't be very useful to the public today:

Probably 99% MPW Pascal with a little C and even a bit of 68k ASM for good measure. All pre-Universal Headers. Pre-PPC. Dense code. Lots of Pascal language features taken full advantage of: nested procedures, function parameters, etc. But you know that.

Fair enough (though Pascal's an awful lot easier to read than machine code, and it's not as though there aren't Pascal programmers out there; there are even COBOL programmers). Pettit also provides some direct support for Lessig's suggestion that source code ought to be escrowed somewhere:

A few years ago, Symantec asked me where they could find the code (how f-ing irresponsible is that?). I never could quite understand because the source for every release, on multiple floppies, was to have been in some vault somewhere. Go figure. Anyway, they were going to show the source to an outside party, but I don't know why. They tracked it down when I told them about the drive.

That's right: the copyright holder almost lost the source code forever after allowing the project to die. That's a large part of why there used to be a deposit requirement for copyright in general, to prevent creative works from being lost to posterity after they disappear from the mainstream commercial market. According to Pettit, that kind of loss nearly happened with MORE.

Second, in general:

Winer repeatedly accuses Lessig and other proponents of copyright reform of threatening Winer's profession and livelihood. (Sometimes he makes this accusation very vividly, but, hey, Dave Winer's a vivid writer, and I know some others of those.) He responds with a threat of his own: if copyright (after reformers get their way) is not sufficiently protective of his interests, he'll lose his incentive to develop software, and he'll go off and become a potter!

If n years of copyright for published software are not good enough for Dave Winer and he goes off to make pottery, that doesn't mean the end of software development. There was software development long before there was copyright for software at all. There are software developers who don't rely on copyright as any part of their incentive to develop software. I surmise from some of Winer's rhetoric that he doesn't think that those developers are, in general, "innovative" or "original" and that they're all just re-doing things which, you know, the real software developers (who like copyright) actually thought up years and years ago...

This gets to me, too. I've shipped tens of thousands of physical copies of my software product, I've just now spent a couple of hours checking patches into CVS, but I feel like I'm not to be considered a real software developer (by Winer) for some reasons, which could include:

On the other hand, I did develop a software product and shipped tens of thousands of physical copies and I have a couple of dozen glowing reviews from users floating around. (They are really glowing; they say things like "indispensable" and "saved my ass" and so on.) So I say that is real software development experience, even if not in Dave Winer's corner of the programming world.

Part of my confidence that software copyright reform could be non-catastrophic comes from my confidence that the free software community is making steady and substantial progress. I recently installed Debian GNU/Linux on an iBook -- not Debian's native platform -- and I had a couple of observations:

Now, before I installed Debian on this machine, I pronounced myself impressed with MacOS, and what you can accomplish by way of integration and functionality when you have proprietary control over hardware and software. It's really well integrated, and, as people have pointed out, generally easy to use. Apple has been able to define and enforce some very detailed standards for APIs and UIs all throughout the system, and they've been able to debug extensively against a closely controlled platform. And the results of that are impressive. You can expect programs to work together; you can expect aspects of the system to have been thought out with Single Vision (notwithstanding Apple's attempts to contrast themselves with other people who exerted a lot of control over their platform and their users). So, for example, on Linux, your printing subsystem may have been provided by any of several different groups of developers. (I can think of BSD lpr, lprng, and CUPS offhand, and I think there are one or two more. It's complicated enough that, like rival superpowers, the developer groups gathered at a Printing Summit, and it's still pretty complicated, and you're likely to run into integration glitches. And that's not because the software isn't good, necessarily, but it's at least in part because there isn't a single vendor-mandated printing infrastructure that everybody uses.)

But back to my experience with Debian on this Apple hardware.

My experience tends to confirm for me what I already believe: computing works well without proprietary software. Proprietary programs are still ahead in the mindshare and marketshare race, but I think they're still losing ground, and the alternatives actually work.

It's way beyond experiments with fuzz in 1990. I notice that most of the programs which Debian installed weren't even written at all when I started using Linux at home in 1995. (I used to install Slackware, and it used to show me each package it installed before installing it. It could even be instructed to prompt me about whether or not I wanted to install a package.) I noticed this because I literally didn't recognize most of their names. So people keep writing free software all the time.

Very few free software developers are relying on commercial incentives provided by copyright law. But, somehow, they're still writing software. I remember that somebody wrote, in response to a suggestion that economics would preclude free software development, that free software development is a fact, so, if a particular economic theory can't account for it, that theory is deficient; reality isn't.

Software copyright is probably promoting the progress of science and the useful arts by providing people like Dave Winer the opportunity to write software commercially. But people shouldn't be intimidated if he threatens to go make pottery. No single incentive is adequate for everybody, is it?

On the cryptography list, by Bear:

For a while I was thinking cryptographic protocols based on provables, self-interest, and the laws of mathematics (which are relatively constant and unbiased) might be a superior organizing principle for a society to laws. Under careful scrutiny and after acquiring a better understanding of protocol design, however, I concluded that such a society has probably as many problems (opportunities for tyranny and oppression) as the current nation-state concept. Its only definite advantage might be lower legal fees.

I went to David's movie night and saw a very strange animated series called Lain.

I didn't actually attend Worldcon, but I did go to San Jose to meet with a delegation organized by the UK Publishers Association, which was visiting Worldcon. So I was at least physically present at Worldcon.

The publishers were very nice to us, as were our and their hosts from the U.K. consulate in San Francisco, who helped organize the delegation's itinerary. (I got to see the business cards of some of the other people they'd met with, and I recognized quite a lot of the names.) It seemed to me that U.K. publishers are much less radical and much more reasonable about copyright than U.S. publishers, but maybe that's just because I'm still angry with the AAP about how they handled Dmitry's arrest.

(Amusingly enough, the meeting was held within sight of Adobe headquarters and our parade route from the Free Dmitry march, and in fact I walked past Adobe and walked that very parade route on my way from Caltrain to the meeting. This tended to put me in mind of Dmitry's case, not that it came up during our discussions, oddly.)

I've been feeling that there is a hierarchy of radicalism about copyright within the copyright industries. Movie publishers' trade association (MPAA) is most radical; music recordings' publishers (RIAA) less so; print publishers (AAP) again less so. There are, of course, dozens of other trade associations within the U.S. copyright industries, but none of them seem quite so outspoken as those three publishers' associations.

Print publishers do face a different situation from the entertainment publishers, in various ways. Most of their publishing is not now digital; most of their publishing is not a "recording"; most of their publishing is in a format whose physical characteristics are significant; most of their publishing is not usually considered "entertainment". The ways and reasons people buy books are different from the ways and reasons they buy other copyrighted works.

But I was saying that the U.K. publishers were nice to us and interesting to talk to. I'm glad we got the opportunity. One of the things they're working on at the moment is notice-and-takedown in the U.K.; they'd like to have it, but, it seems, they'd like it to be a little better than U.S. notice and takedown (17 USC 512). We suggested that they take a look at Chilling Effects to see a bit of the variety of the ways 512 is being used today.

What is it with these powers of two? (The CBDTPA is S. 2048.)

The publishers' delegation seemed very supportive of the right to parody and the right to excerpt for criticism, and they were disturbed that notice and takedown was being used against people who did those things. As far as they were concerned, notice and takedown was supposed to be used against people who were copying a work in its entirety.

As you might imagine, we spent a long time talking to the publishers about the evils of anticircumvention, and why any anticircumvention provision should require an underlying act of copyright infringement, or the intent to commit an infringement. We should see if the Publishers Association comments on the implementation of the EUCD.

I had the honor at our meeting of meeting Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and a little later on of meeting Craig Newmark.

(The description below is mostly cribbed from an e-mail message I wrote.)

After the meeting, and a good deal of socializing, I accidentally lost track of the person who'd offered to let me share his hotel room. (I'd missed the last Caltrain during that socializing, and Caltrain service is temporarily suspended on weekends this summer anyway, in favor of some strange bus service.) That meant that I had no place to stay in San Jose and no way home, short of a taxi.

So I walked back to the hotel where we'd held the meeting and asked them if they knew a way back to San Francisco after midnight. They didn't.

I went outside to a VTA bus stop and found that there was a bus from the Caltrain station (which I considered walking distance away, since I'd walked from Caltrain to the hotel) at 6:30a which would take me to the Fremont BART, from which is merely a long BART ride home. So I thought I could possibly stay awake, maybe using my laptop at the hotel to do some writing, or some reading, or some playing video games, as long as the hotel didn't decide to kick me out -- and, if they did, I could try to sit in a public park until about 6:00a, and then walk to Caltrain. However, the "staying awake until 6:30a" part seemed kind of challenging.

So a light rail train pulled up and I asked them how to get to San Francisco. They were a "test train" (no passengers), but the train operator kindly calling in to VTA headquarters to ask them to advise me. They said "take light rail to San Fernando, take the 22 to Menlo Park, and catch a SamTrans bus there to San Francisco".

San Fernando seemed far away -- like Southern California, right? -- but I asked some other people who were waiting for light rail and they told me it was a street in San Jose, two blocks away. While we were talking about this, a 22 bus passed by us. Oops! So I waited at a bus stop where the 22 had gone by for a while until a woman waiting there for a different bus warned me that it wasn't a 22 bus stop, merely a bus stop which happened to be along the 22's route, and that I really should go to San Fernando the way everybody had advised me to.

So I walked over to San Fernando and finally found a bus stop which looked promising. After waiting there for quite a while, I caught a northbound 22 VTA bus. I fell asleep on the bus somewhere around Sunnyvale and missed the Menlo Park stop, and I only woke up at the last stop on the 22 line, which is the Palo Alto Caltrain station. Oops again.

It turns out that there is a SamTrans bus from the Palo Alto Caltrain station to San Francisco, though -- the 397. (I think that's a different bus from the one I was supposed to catch at Menlo Park, which I think was the KX.) One of those eventually showed up, and I fell asleep again, and woke up somewhere along Mission Street in San Francisco, shortly before the 397's last stop at the Transbay Terminal (1st and Mission).

There, as I'd hoped, I was able to catch a 14 Mission MUNI bus and take it (falling asleep again, as you might expect) 23 blocks to 24th and Mission, and walk home, getting in just before 6:00a.

So, my non-Caltrain trip home took five hours in all, including waiting, walking, and riding.

I'm reminded of one time I got stuck without a place to stay in Berkeley and missed not only the last BART train but the last AC Transit F bus. It turns out that there is an all-night bus from somewhere near downtown Berkeley to downtown Oakland (12th Street), and then you can wait a while for the all-night A, which has service to the Transbay Terminal. (And from there, of course, you could take the 14 Mission, although I lived within walking distance from the Transbay Terminal at the time.)

So it turns out that there is actually 24-hour service between Berkeley and San Francisco, and between San Jose and San Francisco, but you're likely to spend at least an hour waiting at bus stops, and maybe several hours. I had some good books, too, but I was too tired to focus on reading.

Matt Obert posted to crackmonkey with the subject "El-Haraty vs. Moglen":

I don't get Emad, I get Eben.

Over the weekend, I went to see Harold and Maude at the Red Vic with Biella and some other people. I first saw Harold and Maude at Biella's place last year.

I also watched Shaolin Soccer at home with Zack. This is a comedy about a soccer team which uses super martial arts powers to beat other teams. We saw it in Chinese with no subtitles, but it was still pretty easy to understand. :-)

There's a new release of Knoppix out from Klaus Knopper. If you have a CD burner and a PC which can boot CDs, you should try it out (and let me know what you think, because I don't have those things at home).

Napster sent their VP for policy, Manus Cooney, to a CPTWG meeting once, around six months ago. The really funny thing was that, after he'd introduced himself, all the participants refrained from using the verb "Napsterize", or the noun "Napsterization", ordinarily so common at CPTWG. (The same thing happened, if I remember correctly, when Manus joined a BPDG conference call.)

At subsequent meetings, and on subsequent calls, with Manus absent, people went back to talking about "Napsterization".

Dan Bricklin reiterates the argument that casts copyright infringement as malum prohibitum rather than malum in se. (I've argued that; it still seems to be the biggest issue which divides people with regard to copyright.)

Bricklin is also proliferating examples to show that there's some arbitrariness in the scope of copyright's coverage; it's not a clean and obvious thing dictated by some simple principle. Actually, it turns out that it's the result of political struggle and negotiation, and without much public scrutiny.

On Monday, I took a trip along the full length of the F Market historic streetcar line, to honor Donald Chee, who was responsible for its creation. I was on car 1007. (Take a look at the whole fleet.) I boarded at Embarcadero, rode the car out to Fisherman's Wharf, and then back again all the way down Market into the Castro.

The F Market is a great treasure of San Francisco. It turns out that it only opened a few years ago, shortly before I moved to the Bay Area. It's one of those things I imagined had been here forever.

At the end of the line, the car turned and started to follow the J Church route. I'd heard that the historic streetcars sometimes run along the J route, although I don't understand exactly how or when they decide to do it. This was very nice, too, because I got to see the wonderful view where the J ascends behind Dolores Park on its way into Noe Valley, and it was very convenient because the J route runs by 30th and Mission, pretty easy walking distance from my apartment.

I also drank some lemonade that evening in honor of Mr. Chee.

I got a haircut.

FISA appeals court

Via RRE: the SF Gate covers the existence of the FISA appeals court. This is the court which Bamford pointed out is the only court in the United States which has never heard a case. It will meet for the first time soon in order to hear its first-ever case. If only the session weren't secret and if only people other than the U.S. Justice Department could attend it, it would be very interesting to hear the oral argument.

But oral argument has got to be really different when you don't have to argue against anybody. You would think that the FISA law would at least have appointed some kind of office of advocati diaboli who would be responsible for arguing against the DOJ. (One obvious choice would be to permit the Federal Public Defender, say, for the District of Columbia to come in and argue against the DOJ. Or to allow the Federal Public Defenders of all districts to form a committee. Or just to appoint a special counsel responsible for trying to rebut the DOJ's arguments. But no, it's just the DOJ and the judges. And you'll never get to hear what the DOJ has to say in its defense.)

As I was eating lunch today, I got up and turned around to go purchase another anise cookie. My action was an example of anise-otropy.

I want to tell you not to buy this thing. But the problem is that nobody, but nobody, who reads my diary was thinking of buying one. That means that my admonition isn't going to have any effect. That's depressing.

The good news is that HP shipped a somewhat similar thing last year and (I'm told) it was a colossal failure. Maybe they'll give up in a few years.

Seriously, get a PC with a general purpose operating system, and get some Hauppauge and Creative cards, and you win. You can even have a spiffy Ogg Vorbis player at no extra charge!

I think Leonard pointed out that the parables about certain things are getting a bit repetitive, or at least a bit predictable, but we found the campaign against carpools well-done.

It seems that Microsoft in Bulgaria is collecting a bunch of disparaging quotations about the GPL.

It's interesting how ecumenical they've been about this, featuring BSD proponents who are still shunning proprietary software alongside proprietary software advocates alongside copyleft advocates who are just pointing out how copyleft works.

The biggest frustrations I found in reading this were two. The first is a matter of terminology.

Briefly: the GPL is a free software license. Free software licenses include both copyleft and non-copyleft licenses. Free software licenses are not more or less "pure" than one another (although they might be more or less political, or more or less radical).

"Open source" is intended to have the same denotation as "free software". To the extent that there is any basis for distinguishing between them, we could say that open source software is software which is licensed or distributed in accordance with the Open Source Definition and that free software is software which is distributed in a way which gives the public the "Four Freedoms" identified by FSF. Historically, these were not supposed to be distinct from one another.

It's totally incorrect and ahistorical to use "free software" to refer to copylefted software in contradistinction to "open source" used to refer to non-copylefted software, which some authors have started to do. (There are definitely political reasons why people favor one term or the other, but that does not imply that the terms refer to different kinds of software or licenses.)

The second thing which bothers me is the kind of anxiety and uncertainty about copyleft and the "viral" nature of copyleft. Proprietary software developers don't make a habit of incorporating random code written by other people without understanding the legal status of that code. If they do that, they're already in deep trouble, GPL or no GPL. Using work without permission, absent some defense, is simple copyright infringement. Those responsible developers who want to follow the law therefore don't use code without obtaining permission, and they pay attention to the nature and terms of that permission.

Now, maybe if you infringe the copyright of a non-GPLed program by incorporating it into your work, the copyright holder of that program might settle with you for money, whereas if you did the same thing with a GPLed program, the copyright holder might only settle for your source code. (I've seen this happen several times.) So there is a difference in motivation of some people publishing GPLed software which may make settling a copyright infringement claim by them harder. But if you weren't infringing a copyright in the first place, you wouldn't be running this risk.

The quotations collected repeat the suggestion that copyleft is anti-commerce or anti-business. It's not, but it does attack a particular business model; if you use that business model, then the GPL, by design, prevents you from using GPLed code in certain ways. (You might still be able to use it in other ways.) I don't understand why this is something to be particularly anxious about.

Copyleft critics like Brett Glass who are quoted there do have a point, to the extent that they disagree with the goals of copyleft. Because copyleft has been fairly effective at achieving its goals, if you disagree with those goals, it makes sense to criticize copyleft for its very effectiveness. But this has nothing to do with whether copyleft is a legal risk to you as a business or software developer.

(Brett Glass has a second point, which is that some people who have heard of free software don't understand copyleft or haven't learned the consequences of a particular copyleft license. It occurs to me, for example, that a lot of articles about free software in the press seem to suggest that all free software can be used by anyone in any way with no conditions -- as though it were all in the public domain. If that were the only thing you had heard about Linux, it might be surprising to you to learn about the obligations in the GPL!)

Take a look through the collection of quotations and see for yourself what you think of them. (Sorry, they're in Word format!)

I attended the oral argument of DVD Copy Control Association v. Pavlovich before the California Supreme Court. It was interesting.

I think both sides made some technical errors in their descriptions of what DeCSS is and does.

What most frustrated me about what the other side had to say was this. The DVD CCA's attorney first accurately said that Pavlovich intended to create an open source DVD player. (That was a great improvement over some of what they've said in the past.) DVD CCA then went on to argue that, because creating an open source player "defeats" or "undoes" or "destroys" CSS (by necessarily involving publishing it contrary to DVD CCA's rules), the decision to develop such a player shows a intent to harm technology companies and movie studios (and that this intent is malicious).

After all, DVD CCA said, the nature of CSS as intended by its creators was that it could not be published in an open source form (otherwise people would be able to do copying of DVDs, because they would know how to implement CSS without being contractually bound). Therefore, Pavlovich would have known that publishing a CSS-implementing player in an open source form would undermine the security of CSS and would hurt the various California industries which had developed and relied on the security of CSS.

DVD CCA just kept on claiming that Pavlovich knew he was doing something wrong because he knew that the development of LiVid was contrary to the intention of the tech companies and the studios, and would harm their business. One of the justices (Justice Brown) asked a great question, roughly

So, if I'm here in California, and I start to picket in front of my house, saying "The U.S. automobile industry sucks!", can I be sued in Michigan because I deliberately acted in a way I knew would have effects on an industry in Michigan?

I'm biased on this point, but I thought DVD CCA's answer was evasive. It dodged the suggestion that there are legitimate activities which can be expected to harm someone's business, and promptly went back to an earlier analogy which compared Pavlovich's conduct to that of somebody firing a rocket.

(Shannon Lafferty covered this hearing for The Recorder, and reports that Brown asked "What is it about what he did that makes it appropriate for California to exercise jurisdiction? If I picketed in front of my house with a sign, 'American car companies are terrible,' I can be sued in Michigan?".)

I found something which DVD CCA's attitude reminded me of. (I fear that a whole bunch of law students will start finding this page through searches, because of what I'm about to reproduce below. Maybe that's not a bad thing.)

Two masters of a grammar school at Gloucester brought a writ of trespass against another master, and counted that the defendant had started a school in the same town, so that whereas the plaintiffs had formerly received 40d. or two shillings a quarter from each child, now they got only 12d., to their damage, & c.

TILDESLEY. His writ is worthless.

SKRENE. It is a good action on the case, and the plaintiffs have shown well enough how they are damaged; wherefore, & c.

HANFORD, J. There may be damnum absque injuria [a loss without a (legally cognizable) injury]. As if I have a mill, and my neighbor builds another mill, whereby the profit of mine is diminished, I shall have no action against him; still I am damaged, quod Thirning, C.J., concessit, and said that the instruction of children is a spiritual matter; and if one retains a master in his house to teach his children, it is a damage to the common master of the town, yet, I think, he will have no action.

SKRENE. The masters of Paul's claim that there shall be no other masters in all London except themselves.

HORTON demurred because the action was not maintainable.

HILL, J. There is no ground to maintain this action, since the plaintiffs have no estate, but a ministry for the time; and though another equally competent with the plaintiffs comes to teach the children, this is a virtuous and charitable thing, and an ease to the people, for which he cannot be punished by our law.

SKRENE. If a market is erected to the nuisance of my market I shall have an assize of nuisance; and in a common case, if those coming to my market be disturbed or beaten, whereby I lose my toll, I shall have a good action on my case; so here.

HANKFORD, J. Not the same case, because in the case put you have a freehold and inheritance in the market; but here the plaintiffs have no estate in the schoolmastership, & c., but for an uncertain time, and it would be against reason for a master to be hindered from keeping school where he pleases, unless where a university was incorporated or a school founded in ancient times.

And the opinion of the court was that the writ would not lie. Wherefore it was awarded that they should take nothing, & c.

("The Schoolmaster Case", Y.B. 11 Hen. IV, 47 (1410).)

What I would have loved to have seen in Pavlovich was one of the Justices declaring that, "though another equally competent with the plaintiffs comes to publish independently-developed DVD player software, this is a virtuous and charitable thing, and an ease to the people, for which he cannot be punished by our law". Of course, since this was just an argument about jurisdiction, the Court wasn't actually considering the merits of the case.

But they sure liked to talk about the damnum and not so much about the injuria.

DVD CCA is still pushing this idea that Matthew Pavlovich knew that "there was a licensing entity for CSS" or "there was a licensing process for CSS" or something. Their theory seems to be that, since Matthew allegedly knew that such a process existed but chose not to participate in it, his intent must clearly have been wrongful. (The idea that he wanted to compete with them and, like the new school master in 1410, didn't properly require their permission to do so seems foreign to DVD CCA.)

I'm not feeling creative enough to attack this reasoning with actually creative analogies, so I'll just give a boring analogy.

I hereby declare that there is a licensing process for learning the prime factors of 402596090603198404541749. Whoever wants to incorporate these factors into a new product should send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to:

NTILO Factors of 402596090603198404541749 Licensing Division
1022A Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110-4086

ATTN: Licensing Co-ordinator

along with a check for $80 (payable to "Number Theory Interim Licensing Organization") and a signed copy of the following agreement.

THIS IS A LEGAL AGREEMENT between parties ____________________ (hereinafter "Licensee") and Seth Schoen dba Number Theory Interim Licensing Organization (hereinafter "Licensor").

The parties agree as follows:

RECITALS.

  1. Licensor has developed, and desires to license to Licensee, valuable trade secret information and data, namely a mathematical "factorization" of the integer 402596090603198404541749 (hereinafter "Factorization").
  2. Licensee, a (natural person) (corporation) (____________) located in _____________________, desires to obtain, for its own use in mathematical research and/or product development, a copy of Factorization from Licensor.
  3. The development of Factorization required intense efforts on the part of Licensor for several minutes on September 6, 2002.

CONFIDENTIALITY. Licensee understands that Factorization is unique and cannot, if compromised, be replaced by any other factorization. Accordingly, Licensee acknowledges that Factorization constitutes valuable proprietary trade secret information. Licensee undertakes and agrees not to publish or disclose Factorization to any party without prior written content of Licensor. Licensee agrees that Factorization is provided only for its own use in mathematical research and/or product development and that, by this agreement, Licensee acquires no proprietary right or interest in Factorization.

LICENSE FEE. Licensee agrees to pay a license fee of $80.00 (eighty dollars) ("License Fee") to Licensor, in consideration for Licensee's license to possess and use Factorization.

ENFORCEMENT OF AGREEMENT. If Licensee shall breach this agreement, Licensor shall suffer immediate and irreparable damage for which it has no adequate remedy at law. Therefore, Licensee and Licensor agree that Licensor may be entitled to equitable relief in addition to any remedy at law. Licensee agrees that, in the event of unauthorized disclosure or publication, Licensor shall be entitled to an injunction to prevent further disclosure.

ENTIRE AGREEMENT. This is the entire agreement between Licensee and Licensor and supersedes any prior agreement. This agreement may not be modified other than by subsequent written agreement between Licensee and Licensor.

GOVERNING LAW. This agreement shall be governed by the laws of the State of California. Exclusive jurisdiction and venue for all matters relating to the enforcement of this License shall be in courts in the county of San Francisco, California, and the parties hereby consent to such jurisdiction and venue.

SEVERABILITY. In the event that any of the provisions of this agreement shall, for any reason, be held by a court of competant jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable in whole or in part, such invalidity, illegality, unenforceablility, or other defect shall not affect any other provision of this agreement, but this agreement shall be construed as if such invalid, illegal or unenforceable provisions had never been contained in it.

By: ______________________________
Title: _____________________________
Date: ______________________________
Licensee ____________________________

By: ______________________________
Title: Licensing Co-ordinator
Date: ______________________________
Licensor NTILO

Now all of you know that "there is a licensing procedure" which you must follow if you want to know the factors of 402596090603198404541749 or use them for any purpose. Don't let me catch you misappropriating my factors!

Anyway, the California Supreme Court sits in San Francisco, not Sacramento, and has a beautiful courtroom in the Civic Center not at all far from UC Hastings. You can take BART to their arguments. (You'll have to pass through two metal detectors and surrender any weapons or electronic devices -- pocket knives would actually pose an interesting problem because only the 2nd metal detector's operators are equipped to check personal possessions.) Admission is free and open to the public; most attendees dress up.

I personally wore my suit to court, and I looked something like this:

Seth on the day of the Pavlovich argument

If I'm very lucky, I'm going to be hearing an argument in the Supreme Court of the United States not long from now. I have to make some arrangements first, though.

On the same day -- Thursday -- I went to Pigdog night at Zeitgeist.

There I saw Mr. Bad, making a special guest appearance from Montreal!

Drew Clark published a useful article about technology and copyright.

Praveen took me to the ACCRC, which is a computer recycling center out in Alameda, where a group of people were working on preparing some computers to be sent to Ecuador. The ACCRC has a huge space full of all kinds of computers and computer parts -- hundreds of monitors on pallets, hundreds of computers stacked up everywhere, racks, servers, hard drives, modems...

It reminded some of us of Weird Stuff's warehouse. In fact, the two places have a lot in common.

It was really very impressive to see the scale on which they operate. Since computers are now classified as hazardous waste, on account of the heavy metals, people are actually paying ACCRC to take their old computers. (The rates are very reasonable.) ACCRC, in turn, is able to pay salaries to people who work on the recycling projects, and the computers are eventually donated to a huge range of schools, organizations, and poor communities. Parts which are completely broken are sold for scrap to scrap dealers who, I'm told, will dispose of any resulting waste according to the best current practices.

Hey, what rhymes with "copyright"? one attempt is "haughty might". You can do it by rhyming "copy" and "right" individually -- e.g. "choppy light", "sloppy kite", "poppy bite", etc.

Sometimes copyright law requires levies, or taxes, on a particular technology in order to compensate copyright holders for infringement which is likely to occur using that technology and which (it's argued) is impossible or impractical to regulate any other way. Often, this approach is coupled with a compulsory license, or a rule saying that certain kinds of copying or other activity using equipment or media on which a levy has been paid will not be copyright infringement -- because copyright holders have already been compensated by the levy for that activity.

The most standard U.S. example is the Audio Home Recording Act, which provides for levies on certain technologies (defined as "Digital Audio Recording Media" (DARM) and "Digital Audio Recording Device" (DARD)); there is a corresponding rule that, roughly, the use of these technologies for home recording of copyrighted musical works is not an infringement of copyright. (That was likely true anyway under pre-existing copyright law, but AHRA at least clarifies this so people can have some certainty about it.)

I have right here a DARM on which I paid a levy (or at least on which somebody paid a levy, and the cost was certainly passed along to me) -- an MPO MiniDisc, which amusing advertises "Extra High Digital Grade" (as opposed to that low-quality digital recording regular MiniDiscs offer?).

These levies are unfair, because they punish everyone for some people's copyright infringement (and, in some sense, they punish all people who commit less-than-average amounts of copyright infringement as though they had committed an average amount of copyright infringement). In some cases, there might be no way to get out of a levy even by showing that a technology would be used for a strictly non-infringing purpose.

However, levies are an extremely interesting proposal to consider in contradistinction to harsh technology regulatory regimes advocated by some copyright holders. As most readers of this diary will be aware, some copyright holders have been advocating for years that technology which can likely be used to infringe copyrights (or which turn out to be used frequently to infringe copyrights) should be banned -- or be required by law to be redesigned in a way which would make them less useful for copyright infringement. (The part you don't hear about is that this always ends up making them less useful for other things, too.)

Those proposals are a particularly terrible thing,

I think the levy approach is inherently far less restrictive, because a levy need not be combined with a technology design mandate. (The AHRA levy was -- it's called SCMS, or Serial Copy Management System. SCMS has led to a pretty substantial dissatisfaction with AHRA-regulated DARMs.) You can say that something is subject to a tax without saying that it's illegal to sell it. And then people who want that thing can still purchase it, by paying the tax.

Under a mandate law like the CBDTPA, or other mandates like the broadcast flag mandate, the most functional technology, which I want most and which I think most technology users want most, is not legally available at any price. You can't say "Not only will I not infringe copyrights but I will pay the copyright industries $5,000 to compensate them for the infringement which they believe I will commit because they don't trust me"; no, there's no provision for doing that.

(The DMCA is the same way, even though the electronics industry doesn't call it a "mandate" because they haven't quite realized that trying to interoperate with something, or modify something, without permission from its manufacturer is virtuous and not vicious. Although maybe they're getting there [see "Oops"].)

European electronics industries are suggesting exactly the reverse, that DRM is better than levies. (To be fair, they're not necessarily facing legislative design mandates as urgently as are U.S. industries, so the "alternative" to levies which threatens the electronics industries there may be a simple boycott by the entertainment companies, and not legislative controls.)

I think this is silly when the alternative is a government technology mandate. In the DRM scenario, your equipment is broken and doesn't do what you want, and, if the DRM vendor has done a good job, you can't fix it. That's true whether the impetus for the DRM came from a mandate or from a desire to make publishers feel comfortable. In the levy scenario, you have to pay extra because you're being punished for someone else's infringing activity (or for your own infringing activity, if you are actually an infringer).

In the levy version, though, you have a choice about what to buy; you can buy regular fully-functional unrestricted equipment. There is still competition and there is still the possibility of getting technology which is user-serviceable (if the levy is unaccompanied by a "robustness" mandate). There is still the possibility of not having someone else decide which uses you can make, which attempts at interoperability will actually interoperate, which software you can write, etc. (Note to trusted computing advocates: I realize that you can write arbitrary software in a trusted computing environment. On the other hand, you couldn't necessarily write an arbitrary media player, not because you can't write the player itself but because you can't get your media in cleartext form into the particular virtual machine where your arbitrary media player is running.)

When I mentioned levies to some entertainment lawyers at BPDG, they tended to repeat the argument that levies are unfair, because you're being punished for what someone else is doing. I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say that the entire BPDG process, from beginning to end, was about punishing people for what someone else was doing. (Losing capabilities you otherwise would have had, against your will, is a punishment, isn't it?)

I can't understand how entertainment lawyers who are busy advocating for you not to be able to buy particular technologies at all think that it would be "unfair" for you instead to be taxed if you buy those technologies. Who's constraining consumer choice more here?

If you used an international trade analogy, you could imagine advocates of banning something responding to a proposal to tax imports of it instead: "But tarriffs are unfair!". Granted.

Again, perhaps EICTA and other levy opponents who are DRM proponents are imagining a world in which DRM and non-DRM technologies compete freely (although I think really free competition would require obliterating anticircumvention rules). And in that vision, perhaps some publishers are distributing things in an encrypted form which they expect will work only with the DRM equipment.

So perhaps that's an artifact of a European climate in which levies are seen as a real political threat and tech mandates aren't.

Die Logik ist zwar unerschütterlich...

(That bug seems surprisingly subtle. When does "if not A" fail to be equivalent to "unless A"? Read the bug report and find out!)

I went on Saturday to the book fair put on the by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, and there I found a lot of great used books at very cheap prices (typically around $2 apiece). People who know about other things like that should let me know about them (thanks, Gwen, for the news of this one), and people who want to hear about them might consider joining seth-trips or following its archives.

I know there's a smaller antiquarian fair coming up in Northern California this fall, but I've misplaced the flyer for it. Can anybody remind me of the details?

I like this joke by Leonard.

It seems that the leadership of SONICblue suffers from a public goods problem: having somebody courageous in charge of SONICblue creates benefits for everybody but costs mainly for SONICblue. (This problem is constantly popping up in business -- there are so many opportunities for businesses to do good things, as SONICblue has done, which might not maximize their short-term revenues.)

I went with several people (Michelle, Anirvan, Nandini, Ben) to the Noe Venable concert at the Freight and Salvage, and there I also saw Fred and Cindy. That was a nice time.

Happy birthday to Sumana.

My comments were mentioned in the Boston Globe.

I went to Berkeley and heard Michael Newdow speak before SANE. Newdow was just great; he's really funny, he's a singer-songwriter (I bought his CD of songs about the pledge of allegiance and politics!), and he's got useful things to say. I hope more people get the opportunity to hear him.

I went to that event with Sumana, whose birthday we were celebrating.

I pause in memory of Christoffer M. Carstanjen, who was a lovely man, and of all the dead, fidelium and infidelium: Ne absorbeat eas Tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum!

If you haven't read "110 Stories", please take a look at it.

Michael Newdow was asked on Tuesday about prayer at public school graduations. He said he opposed having a school sponsor or set aside time for a prayer at any school-organized event. (I understood that to include cases where students led the prayer, as in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, presumably because the school was still endorsing or encouraging prayer by inviting the students to do that, or by putting it on the schedule.)

Newdow then mentioned a case where a student who was valedictorian of his class had sought to talk about and praise Jesus in a valedictory address. The school prohibited and prevented this.

Newdow said the student had been wronged, because it was inappropriate for the school to decide that a religious message on the part of a student was less valuable or less deserving of expression than some other message on the part of a student. If, he argued, the school had decided that whoever was the best or highest-achieving student had thereby earned the right to give a message of his or her choice to the whole graduating class, the school was not entitled to say that a particular viewpoint should not be expressed. If the school would not say that a valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or against the war in Afghanistan, the school should also not be allowed to say that the valedictorian's speech shouldn't advocate for or against religion. To do otherwise would imply that religious speech is less permissible or less protected than other speech, or that religious views are less permissible or less protected or favored than other views. So in a case where a school permits someone to express a personal view, the school shouldn't say that this can't be a religious or anti-religious view.

So Newdow said that religious valedictorians ought to be able to express their religious beliefs in a graduation ceremony if it was the policy of a school that valedictorians ought to be able to express their own views. This was important in order to ensure that the school didn't discriminate against anyone's views.

In discussing this with people, he kept pointing out that valedictorian are routinely permitted to say extremely controversial things which offend many audience members. His favorite example seemed to be the fact that schools permitted valedictorians to oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan (and past or prospective war with Iraq). They would not usually say that this kind of view couldn't be expressed simply because it might offend people. Critics would argue that the audience at a graduation was "captive" and was being forced by the school to listen to a particular message. And Newdow would reply along the lines of "So, are they any less captive when the speaker has an antiwar message, and the school is forcing them to listen to that message?" He considered it essential that, under the first amendment, religious expression is not in any way inferior to non-religious expression, and that people ought to freely and openly express their religious beliefs.

I thought that point of view made sense and provided evidence that Newdow's campaign is a campaign for the first amendment and not against religion. Do Newdow's critics know that he is defending the rights of religious students to speak against the objections of non-religious students who might be offended by religious speech? Do they know that?

(The student whose cause Newdow supported was Jason Niemeyer.)

Sometimes institutions make it hard for people to do good things, even when they have good intentions.

This observation seems commonplace, but it still seems puzzling when institutions made up of basically good and decent people end up doing a lot of harm. I keep wondering why that should be.

On the other hand, there is still room for people to use their abilities, powers, and access for good. There are movies made about particular acts of heroism (my mom used to be particularly fond of exciting movies about environmental whistleblowers, of which there are several, some of them based on true stories), but most good deeds conceived in secret go unreported and unrewarded.

One of the most poignant lines in the Dar Williams song which celebrates Daniel Berrigan (after "we burned them [draft records] in the parking lot: / better the files than the bodies of children") is "God of the just, I'll never win a peace prize". This is a poetic way of expressing, in one breath, on one foot, the terribly long-winded conclusion that public honors most often come to people who did good deeds in conventional and popular ways. It's true, though. Michelle has often pointed out to me that only certain kinds of activism and only certain kinds of achievement are likely to win awards. That doesn't mean that those activities are ultimately the best or most effective. There's so much politics in who gets an award and who's passed over; in the same way, there's so much politics in who becomes a celebrity.

But it's important that people continue to do good things where they have no hope of reward or recognition.

Shene'amar:

In the place where there are no men, strive to be a man.

(Pirke Avot 2:6)

If necessary, you may substitute any other kind of plush python for the plush python I've ordered.

I've been very sociable this weekend. On Friday, I had lunch at the Internet Archive and then dinner with Kragen, Beatrice, and Ping, and on Saturday, dinner with Danny, Quinn, and Fred. Saturday was also the day of the EFF Share-in concert in Golden Gate Park, which I think was very successful.

I'm still trying to remember a particular joke Danny told me.

For those of you who are following software-defined radio, FCC rules, communications security, or the tinkering issue, take a look at this SDR Forum report on software-defined radio and security. It's wide-ranging, but a lot of it has to do with mitigating security threats involving end-user modifications to radios. The FCC, in its Report and Order on SDR, made some allusions to the importance of preventing SDR transmitters from transmitting on the wrong frequencies or with greater-than-licensed power, and I think there were suggestions in there that this meant that the transmitters should be built in such a way that the software driving them couldn't be modified by end-users.

The SDR Forum has picked up on that suggestion and expanded upon it with a long discussion of the importance of, well, preventing end-users from modifying the software in radios, mainly with a view to avoiding interference and spoofing, but also apparently in order to prevent certain other behaviors.

There seems to be very little discussion in this report (just as there was practically no discussion in the FCC's Report and Order) of whether it is important to prevent users from modifying the software in software-based receivers. I've talked in the past about the idea that it may be appropriate to specify only "wire protocols" (even for wireless systems) instead of specifying the design of a device which implements those protocols. That is the approach taken by virtually all Internet RFCs, and by most communications standards, but not always by FCC regulations.

It seems that the SDR Forum is responding directly to the FCC's suggestion that industry should consider security issues related to SDR. And they've considered precisely those security issues which the FCC asked them to consider. That means that it's still totally unclear whether the FCC or the industry has thought from the point of view of security about SDRs which are only receivers and not transmitters. (See, I know of one of those. They've considered the possibility of implementing transmitter functions in the future, but none of them have been implemented to date. The commercial members of the SDR Forum all seem to be working exclusively with systems which are capable of transmitting.)

Now I'm wondering to what extent it's been required by law in the U.S. that systems which are designed to radiate RF energy must not only comply with certain frequency and power limitations but must also be designed to resist modification by a user. Anybody?

There used to be a War Department, which is now more euphemistically called the Defense Department; what if there were a Peace Department?

I've been writing some pretty wild sed rules; I hope to be able to share them with you soon.

http://www.ed.gov/pubs/RegPrivSchl/nebraska.html:

Private, denominational, and parochial schools, K-5, must devote at least one hour per week for stories of American history and American heroes, singing patriotic songs and memorization of the Star Spangled Banner and America and the development of reverence for the flag and proper conduct in its presentation. In 2 grades from grades 5-8, private, denominational, and parochial schools must devote at least 3 periods per week for American history from approved textbooks, taught to make the course interesting and attractive, and to develop a love of country. In at least 2 grades of every high school, 3 periods per week must be devoted to civics, including the constitutions of the United States and Nebraska, the benefits and advantages of our form of government, the dangers and fallacies of Nazism, communism, and similar ideologies, and the duties of citizenship. Appropriate patriotic exercises must be held for Lincoln's birthday, Washington's birthday, Flag Day, Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day. Nebraska requires that all of these history courses stress contributions of all ethnic groups in the growth of America, art music, education, medicine, literature, science, politics, government and war service. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 79-724

[...]

Private, parochial and denominational school teachers must give special emphasis in their instruction to common honesty, morality, courtesy, obedience to law, respect for the national flag, the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of Nebraska, respect for parents and the home, the dignity and necessity of honest labor, and other lessons which promote an upright and desirable citizenry. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 79-725.

(Although you might not have realized it, many states impose requirements much like these on public schools. Fairly few apply them to private schools as well.)

Confusingly, if you hear a radio engineer talking about DRM, it might be Digital Radio Mondiale, a standard for digital AM radio.

Schneier's Crypto-Gram is getting flagged as spam by Razor. The reason is that some spam-detecting software will try to automatically detect spam and then automatically report it. So somebody's SpamAssassin mistakenly concludes that a copy of Crypto-Gram is spam and reports it to Razor, and this happens a few times over; now everyone who uses Razor will automatically be advised that Razor considers Crypto-Gram to be spam!

This is also happening to the EFFector. I'm really concerned that opt-in announcement mailing lists are not surviving the widespread and somewhat careless use of spam filtering tools. As soon as just a few people mistakenly think that a legitimate announcement is spam, thousands of other people are going to have their software's behavior reflect that incorrect judgment.

Anyway, after cryptographers eat their Heavenly Hash ice cream, they get those Bit Commitment Blues.

Graydon and some other people are having a discussion on Advogato about formal methods.

Graydon writes:

a proof, on the other hand, is another formal object in a much larger "space" (a linguistic space in which machine state spaces, and some parts of your preferred maths or logics are basic terms). the sort of proof you are interested in is one which relates your program's text residing in memory at one point, to a (good or bad) region of machine state space which is implied by the program, via a logic whose rules you like.

any test can be translated into a proof in a silly logic easily: the proof is simply the trace of your processor executing your program's code on your test's input, and the logic is one in which each machine transition that happened is an axiom. but that proof is boring.

an interesting proof is one which is much smaller, when written down, than the sum of all the tests which you would need to write to fill the machine state space bounded by the proof. in this sense, I really believe Chaitin is onto something when he talks about proofs as nothing more than a form of "higher order data compression", and the value of a given formal system as the amount of compression it commonly admits over interesting data.

so, getting back to mbp's comment, certainly you can produce a very large set of (formal) bugs which nobody's compressed inside a proof yet, for any program you care to mention. but I do not think this means that all, or even a sizeable majority of those bugs will admit "no further compression" if the author puts their mind to it.

raph's suggestion that we design programs "the way we'd want to prove things about them" is, seen in this light, a suggestion that we design programs "in a way which admits a lot of compression".

Recently, I linked to a document about software-defined radio and security. John Gilmore's criticism of the same made it to the IP list.

Having a whole generation of young people grow up full of knowledge about engineering, computers, and networking is a wonderful advance in the state of humanity. The authors of the paper apparently see it as a drawback, since they depend on their customers being ignorant.

Marc Perkel has some nice Share-in pictures (see also the second and the third set of these). I show up in some of them, and they seem to capture the atmosphere pretty nicely.

Lots of people have written self-reproducing programs -- programs which print themselves out when run -- in various languages. (These programs are often called quines.) I wrote a quine in Python before I knew how to program in Python, and I also wrote a quine in Scheme which works in LISP and turns out to be identical to a pretty well-known LISP quine.

Most quines are based on the approach which is used in Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust. That is, they define a blueprint which contains a blank space and then print out the blueprint, substituting the blueprint itself for the blank space.

The C version looks kind of like this:

int main(){char *Q="int main(){char *Q=%c%s%c;printf(Q,34,Q,34);}";printf(Q,34,Q,34);}

(That might not be Thompson's version exactly; I wrote it by porting a Python quine based on Thompson's original C quine back into C. Here the "blank space" is the printf escape sequence "%c%s%c" and the "blueprint" is the string Q.)

The approach of the Scheme quine is slightly different, but seems closely analogous: it's kind of

print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes "print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes"

although the "print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes" is actually written out explicitly as (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))).

One English equivalent might be

Say twice "Say twice".

Hofstadter discusses some English parallels (a variety of self-reproducing and "self-documenting" sentences) in Metamagical Themas.

My challenge is this: Can you write a quine in the computer language of your choice which does not use the approaches described above?

As promised, this is a sed script to try to collapse Unix paths by eliminating "." and ".." and "//". (For example, we can turn "/foo/../bar" into "/foo/bar".) See if you can improve it at all. I hadn't known about the sed command "t" (or, indeed, pretty much any sed command other than "s"), and it certainly helped save me from a few traps. 

:start;

# /../ --> /
s:^/\.\./:/:; t start;

# /.. -> /
s:^/\.\.$:/:;

# roughly foo/bar/../baz --> foo/baz  plus other cases
s:[^/]\+/\.\./\?::; t start;

# roughly foo/bar/./baz --> foo/bar/baz  plus other cases
s:/\.$:/:; s:/\./:/:; t start;

# // --> /
s://\+:/:g; t start

If this stands up to careful testing, we might put it into gar to prevent problems where some programs compiled under gar expect to be installed in "//bin" and the like. (If you have a nightly build of LNX-BBC, you can see this problem by doing "strings /bin/* /usr/bin/* | grep //".)

A great restaurant in the Mission is Minako Organic Japanese at 2154 Mission. They have a lot of vegetarian Japanese food, and it's really, really good. Praveen had a birthday party there which turned out to be an immense feast (not to be confused with an immense Fthà).

Why does the private sector consider "cyber-" kind of quaint and overused and retro but the government still continue to use it all over the place? They are referring to the Internet as "cyberspace", and they are using coinages like "cybercrime" which used to be the stuff of mainly somewhat sensationalistic journalism. Has anybody else noticed this?

There are lots and lots of them, but happy birthday at least to Biella, Praveen, and Wolfgang.

At the Share-in, I talked with Fred for a while and tried to understand the intricacies of U.S. copyright law in its application to musical works.

Below is my current understanding, but any errors in it are mine and not Fred's! I'm pretty sure I've made some mistakes in this.

The complexity begins with the fact that there are two separate copyrights associated with much recorded music -- a copyright in the composition and a copyright in the recording.

For any given copyright, there are several different rights which copyright law grants to the holder of that particular copyright. (Frequently, the holder of the copyright in a composition will not be the same as the holder of the copyright in a recording of that composition.) The rights reserved by law to copyright holders include a right of reproduction (copying) and a right of public performance (playing or performing in public), among others.

So, to start off:

I have some news to share, but I'll leave it for Sunday because I'm off for the weekend to the EFF Retreat in Mendocino!

"O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!"
Aeneas ait et fastigia suspicit urbis.

Aeneid I, 437-8

Gary Shapiro is still coming on strong in support of the public's rights.

With this pronouncement, along with similar euphemisms by the media, it is clear that the copyright community has reshaped the debate. [...] They've changed the simple language that describes the acts at issue. [...] They call it stealing and always use analogies to shoplifting products out of a store. The Justice Department has adopted this approach. Stealing is stealing is stealing, said Malcolm in Aspen. [...] Chernin echoed these themes and used the words piracy, shoplifting and stealing repeatedly to describe downloading. He even declared that those who disagree with his views on copyright are either amoral or self-interested. [...] [S]ome legislators have become confused and convinced by Hollywood that there is a connection between broadband and copyright.

(I disagree with Shapiro about some of the contents of his speech, but the overall tone is impressive.)

Don Marti is interviewed on GrepLaw.

Free software won't so much change society as it will bring the computer business more in line with the rest of the economy. If you went shopping for any non-computer product, and got offered an End User License Agreement like those offered in the computer business, you'd laugh and walk out. Free software gives the customer the same rights of inspection and control that he or she has when buying non-computer products such as furniture (you can cut a hole for your cables in your desk) or cars (you can change your own oil.)

Lessig is in Wired, in a profile prepared in anticipation of the Eldred case.

"I am a great admirer of Larry Lessig," says Jack Valenti, Hollywood's master lobbyist.

I seem to have landed in Wired News myself, in Spanish, even:

Según Seth Schoen, un experto en tecnología de la Electronic Frontier Foundation (Fundación Fronteras Electrónicas), si los dispositivos analógicos dejaran de existir como resultado de la sanción del proyecto, la misma ley permitiría al gobierno controlar la próxima generación de artículos electrónicos.

"Este proyecto de ley es un poco menos amplio que el de Hollings, pero sigue los mismos lineamientos", señaló Schoen. [...] El proyecto de ley de Tauzin "dice no sólo que hay que seguir las reglas que establecieron otros cuando se utiliza una tecnología impuesta por el gobierno, sino que además no se puede utilizar un estándar abierto porque si uno lo utiliza, los propietarios de contenidos se ponen nerviosos", dijo Schoen.

The bit about "una tecnología impuesta por el gobierno" is a bit confused (as it was in the original English). I was trying to explain no mandate. It's not actually that a technology is impuesta por el gobierno which leads to the legal obligation to seguir las reglas, but rather the fact that it's proprietary. The new element in the Hollings and Tauzin bills is that you will also be subject to such rules when you use open standards, which for the most part is not currently the case. Today, by using open standards, you can avoid the need to follow other people's compliance rules. But unfortunately los propietarios de contenidos se ponen nerviosos.

You can also read the article in English.

Another Eldred-related profile of Lessig turns up in the L.A. Times.

Patricia Lessig was pregnant with her third child in late 1960 when she went to see "Village of the Damned," a horror flick about a rural town whose womenfolk are mysteriously impregnated by aliens. The women give birth to a race of superhumans capable of reading minds and imposing their will on others. Four decades later, when Patricia contemplates her super-achieving son, the movie offers the only reasonable explanation. "I think he came from outer space."

[...]

"He was rather like Ralph Nader, but brighter," says [Richard] Posner.

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song;
I'm twenty-two now, but I won't be for long.

(Simon and Garfunkel, "Leaves That Are Green")

I had a dream that I went to D.C. to hear the Eldred argument and also dropped by a party to celebrate it. This dream is strangely realistic -- except that the Supreme Court in my dream was incredibly informal (they invited people from the gallery to come up and talk to them about the case, for example, and to call them by their first names) and the party was held in a warehouse which looked kind of like the apartment building in Brooklyn where my friend Micah lives.

My dream Supreme Court was definitely going to reverse the court below, if only because the Solicitor General in my dream had hardly found anything good to say about the CTEA. Adsit omen!

The Katzdot service at Crummy today asked:

Can Online Flamers Stop The Digital Music Industry?

Well, can they?

I went over to a party put on by Sumana and Nandini at which people could meet their parents. I brought along my copy of Set, but we didn't play Set there. I did play Set by myself on the way over, to practice. (I think I could devise a strategy which "leverages", as business people say, the fact that my visual perception sees certain similarities more readily than others. If I organize my search for sets so that I look first at combinations of cards which are particularly likely to yield sets and particularly easy for me to group visually in relevant ways, I can probably speed things up a bit.)

On the way back from the party, I got to chat with Leonard a bit.

I've having a great deal of trouble with my arm injuries again.

Something interesting and (temporarily) secret happened at work.

My plush python is on its way.

I should have checked the depo[sition] schedule before inviting you [to my birthday party].

Happy birthday to Google, to Critical Mass, to the GNU Project, and to me.

Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday greetings or came by to celebrate with me. Leonard wrote me a remarkable and funny program called ksethdavidschoen, which uses this picture of me to decorate your X11 windows.

And Leonard has some pictures from my birthday party. These include many of my friends, many of my books, and many of my gnus.

A few pictures feature a bottle of Jack Daniels liquor. That bottle is used by Leonard for comic effect, but it was not actually consumed (or even opened) at my party.

In many of the pictures, you can identify objects and read text. Can you find a set in the pictures of my Set set?

Vitanuova for 2002 September
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