Vitanuova for 2002 October
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I've been pretty busy. What's more, I expect to take six plane trips (three round-trips) in the month of October, and at least four more (two round-trips) before the end of the year.

I'll be in Washington, D.C., from October 8 (Dave Barry's son's birthday, as readers of Dave Barry Slept Here will all recall) until the evening of October 11. If you want to wait in line at the Supreme Court with a group of us starting on the evening of October 8, let me know. (Of course, we will be making a valiant attempt to get in to the Eldred argument.)

Later in the week, EFF has several meetings with staff at the FCC to talk about the broadcast flag NPRM. I also hope to visit the CCIA, Public Knowledge, the Library of Congress, and the National Cryptologic Museum.

I finished A Void, by Georges Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair), the eighth book on my reading list.

What leads to the error 

Package foo has no available version, but exists in the database.
This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency and
never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the contents
of sources.list
E: Package foo has no installation candidate

Is this necessarily indicative of a bug?

(I get this when I try to satisfy a dependency of a package which was itself not actually available in the release of Debian I'm using. Maybe that explains it; maybe changing sources.list would make the error go away.)

I visited relatives in San Ramon and got some driving lessons. (Many readers will be aware that I've never learned to drive a car and don't have a driver license.) I also got to ride a mountain bike and a motor scooter. Motor scooters are remarkably fun, and are supposedly legally equivalent to bicycles in many jurisdictions (although they pollute the air a lot more).

I had a BBC meeting in Berkeley with Nick, and I fixed the way packages whose best upstream source is Debian are handled. This turns out to be pretty straightforward, because gar is powerful enough to handle a gzipped patch downloaded from the Debian pool. So pax is a pretty canonical example of how this is done. bsd-finger and procps are other examples. I am glossing over the still-unexplained fact that pax and procps require WORKSRC to be changed by means of the addition of ".orig", where bsd-finger works fine with the default value of WORKSRC.

Conceivably, we could have a script called use-gnu-upstream which would produce a basic Makefile for a GNU package called foo, and a similar script called use-debian-upstream which would do the same thing for a Debian package called foo. So if you wanted to add GNU hello to the BBC, you could then start with 

mkdir utils/hello
cvs add utils/hello
cd utils/hello
use-gnu-upstream hello

and then customize the resulting Makefile. use-gnu-upstream and use-debian-upstream would have to check (using standardized rules) for the most current upstream package versions available at ftp.gnu.org and ftp.debian.org, respectively.

In a cafe:

First person: I'm trying to learn to copy an entire DVD onto my hard drive [points at laptop] -- that would be really convenient.

Second person: You can do that?

First person: You can, but I haven't quite figured it out yet.

Second person: Is that legal?

First person: I think it's legal -- I know you're copying it, but I think you're allowed to make one copy of something for your own use.

I resisted the temptation to give them a five-hour lecture on DeCSS, DVD Video, Universal v. Reimerdes and its appellate history, the WIPO Internet treaties, DVD CCA v. McLaughlin and its much more interesting (and encouraging) appellate history, the CPTWG, the Gallery of CSS Descramblers, Bernstein, 1201, and two upcoming bills to reform the DMCA's anticircumvention rules which are due to be introduced in the very near future.

"a DVD litigation fan, the way many people are science fiction fans..."

What's the historical record on trying to make the general public into informats? It seems that the U.S. has been there and done that during the first Red Scare.

I think I was talking to Cory or someone about case sensitivity (for filenames and directories) in filesystems. It seems obvious to me that the case sensitivity of the Unix filesystem is the right thing and a feature, but why is that? Is it possible that filesystems should merely preserve case?

I can think of a few reasons, but they seem inadequate to many users. Can anybody help me out?

My father got me a subscription to The Sun, an interesting magazine which reminds me in some ways of Harpers or The New Yorker. The writing inside seems serious, interesting, and careful, and reminds me of Wendell Berry and other writers who might be mentioned in the same breath.

At this point, I'm used to reading mainly advocacy, headline news, editorial, academic papers, and, of course, techne. So it's surprising (a nice surprise) to be reminded that there is such a thing as an essay.

Plus, the current issue of The Sun contains a photograph (uncaptioned) which I recognize as the bike path bridge across the Connecticut River between Northampton and Amherst, so it makes me nostalgic. (The magazine isn't even published in New England, yet still it has pictures of my home town!)

A film series in Berkeley sponsored by MSRI looks like great fun. I should be able to make it to a few of the films.

I was writing about trusted computing and the claim that trusted computing systems give you new features without taking away features you had before. This seems to be true of Palladium and TCPA (although we'll find out a lot more about TCPA later on this month when the TCPA Promoter Companies come by EFF to give us a briefing).

In particular, the suggestion is that you can run any software which you could run before. E.g. in the Palladium FAQ

"Palladium" brings additional capabilities to the PC but does not interfere with the operation of any program that runs on current PCs. "Palladium" never imposes itself on processes that do not request its services; "Palladium" features must be requested by a program. So the MP3 player you have today will still work on a "Palladium"-enabled PC tomorrow.

[...] "Palladium's" security chip (the SSC) and other features are not involved in the boot process of the OS or in the OS's decision to load an application that doesn't use a "Palladium" feature and execute it. Because "Palladium" is not involved in the boot process, it cannot block an OS, or drivers or any non-"Palladium" PC application from running. Only the user decides what "Palladium" applications get to run. Anyone can write an application to take advantage of "Palladium" APIs without notifying Microsoft (or anyone else) or getting its (or anyone else's) approval.

So there seems to be a clear technical sense in which you can do what you did before and you are only gaining capabilities and not losing them.

Still, people who believe this may still believe that Palladium is not a good thing overall for many users, or will still introduce disadvantages. How can that be?

To argue that point by analogy, you'd want to find examples of where gaining something, or possessing something you didn't possess before, is a disadvantage to you in the end. Specifically, if possible, you'd want to try to find cases where gaining an ability, or having an ability is a bad thing, or cases in which you might want to have fewer capabilities.

Here are a few such examples, offhand:

I wrote about this before in April of 2000, and I mentioned the Sirens, the time-lock safe, an essay by Robin Hanson, and holding copyrights when you're being sued by someone who wants to censor you. The latter was the occasion for my mentioning the problem in the first place. If you hold a copyright or a trademark, someone can sue you, be awarded the copyright or trademark in a judgment or a settlement, and then use it to try to censor you and third parties. This is especially likely to happen in reverse-engineering cases where someone publishes software produced by means of reverse-engineering and is then sued.

One possible conclusion in this case is that it's better for an organization like the FSF to hold copyrights than for you, as a software author, to hold them yourself, if litigation is likely. The incentives for you as a litigation defendant will not necessarily favor the outcome which you would ideally prefer in the abstract. Faced with risks like losing your home or livelihood, you might agree to something which is not beneficial to the public or to your cause.

This is also true for personal property in litigation. If you own personal property, it can be taken from you, so owning property can be a serious disadvantage in case of litigation.

The concrete argument which I'm hinting at by analogy is that having the new "ability" to decrypt certain things only subject to conditions of someone else's devising may not be a net benefit for you, even though it's a new ability you didn't have before. And the market effects of having everyone gain this ability may particularly not be a net benefit for you.

This reminds me that some people still think the Industrial Revolution was a bad deal for the public. I find that hard to believe, but it did bring about things like industrial pollution and repetitive strain injuries, from which I'm suffering even as I type this sentence.

Speaking of winners and losers in the course of progress: In May of last year I quoted a DRM business model pitch -- since altered -- which compared the progress wrought by DRM to a genocide:

The author's second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley 1996) bought this observation into focus by pointing out that historical frontiers were typically tamed by displacing property-averse, communitarian, indigenous tribes (such as the American Indians and the Open Source movement) by property-conscious, capitalistic newcomers. Although the displacement of primitive economic systems is devastating to those displaced, the advanced economic order that follows is ultimately far more productive and capable than the primitive economic system that preceded it.

I continue to find this analogy really shocking, and perhaps its author did, too, because he subsequently took that paragraph off of his web site. (I should get a copy of Superdistribution and see whether it actually says this.)

Rep. Lofgren and Rep. Boucher have now both introduced significant DMCA reforms. These bills are useful because they directly attack the harshest consequences of 1201 -- the fact that 1201 makes many circumvention acts and technologies illegal even when they are not aimed at an infringing purpose.

Problem: the entertainment industries don't want to have to prosecute actual infringers, if they can instead roll back the Betamax standard and control the actions of the much smaller number of providers of technologies. A reformed DMCA would put the focus back on the infringers and shift it away from technology providers, and so Jack Valenti has immediately insisted that it would be useless.

"You could still learn [French] by sitting in a café and watching, noticing that when someone says 'Un café, s'il vous plais', they get this thing that looks like coffee. You could guess that those words meant 'A coffee please'."

(Tridge)

She smiled at him again. "Is this your first trip to an art gallery?"

"Yes'm."

"Great," she said. "My life has been worthwhile after all."

(Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia, p. 99)

Via RRE, I found a link to a list of some U.N. Security Council resolutions which are being violated today; there are more than you might think and by more countries than you might think.

(It's also not as though all bad things result in U.N. Security Council resolutions. For one thing, they focus mainly on cases where there is or has been a territorial dispute in which at least one party is an internationally recognized nation-state; for another, they're subject to a tremendous amount of politics.)

More politics: claims about oil pipelines and Realpolitik (which is German for "nihilism"). (Thanks to Aaron for the link.)

I got a couple of nice replies to my question. Everyone agreed that filesystems preserving case made sense, but people seemed to be skeptical that case sensitivity was a good thing. The strongest statement in support of case sensitivity so far is that it provides the flexibility to implement both case-sensitive and case-insensitive systems and software on top, in another layer, whereas case-insensitive filesystems don't provide the flexibility to implement case-sensitivity (in that software will never be able to create a file called "polish" and another file called "Polish").

The deeper controversy, briefly addressed by one correspondent, is probably whether it makes sense for software to expose filesystem case-sensitivity to a user. I may have been making an unstated and possibly unwarranted assumption that the view of a filesystem in an API (for example, in the Unix open(2) system call) is the same view which will appear in a UI. This has traditionally been true in almost all Unix software, but not, for example, on a system like MacOS. It is possible to have a filesystem which is case-sensitive but a UI which conceals that case-sensitivity -- or even does more, e.g. translating UTF-8 in a filename into Unicode glyphs, and vice versa.

I have an attempt at a Martin Gardner bibliography on my web page, and I got a helpful note from Dana Richards, who is compiling a much more authoritative bibliography (and published part of it in Martin Gardner Presents, and correctly concluded that I'd had access to that book in the course of compiling my own bibliography).

I went to Berkeley over the weekend, attended a birthday party, visited the RSF (the student gym) for the first time in many years, and actually worked out there (which was the first time I had gotten a workout in months). I also got a haircut and got to have brunch at Intermezzo (the first time in a year) with Michelle, and to see Sumana.

Speaking of birthdays, happy birthday to Dave Barry's son (October 8).

On Friday I wrote:

I think consumer expectations are subject to a great deal of manipulation and are not clearly related to either fair use or innovation. (Libraries are particularly sensitive to this; what consumers expect to be able to do at home has very little connection to what other groups, like librarians and scholars, want to be able to do in the course of their own work.) However, "consumer expectations" seems to be a very politically powerful concept [...]

There ought to be more on this subject. Consumer expectations is just a tiny piece of the puzzle, but it's starting to get top billing.

Weather permitting, I'll spend much of tomorrow night in line to hear the Eldred argument, and I'll be out in Washington, D.C., for the rest of the week. I've only been to Washington once before, when I was very young. Now I'm going back as an adult man to do real work.

Every now and then I hear about a Hindu religious concept which is used translated "Thou art that". Now, I now extraordinarily little about Hindu theology (and really just a little bit about Jewish theology and Christian theology -- enough, someone might say, to be dangerous). Strangely, the former resident of the attic room in my mother's house in Northampton, whom I don't believe to have been a Hindu, had put a big THOU ART THAT sticker up on the wall of the attic staircase. That room was my room, so almost every day when I lived with my mother I would walk up to my room at night and see THOU ART THAT, which I knew was a Hindu religious concept and of which I didn't (and don't) have much understanding otherwise.

When I was in Berkeley toward the end of September, I happened to walk by a protest and, as I often like to do, I asked for some protest literature. The protestors handed me a single-page flyer. As I was walking away, I started to read it, and I was absolutely horrified by the contents -- verging momentarily on "outraged", but mainly just horrified.

I folded up the flyer and put it in my pocket, and walked another block or two before I thought any more deeply about it. And what I suddenly realized was that, actually, I was that: it would have been very easy for me to have been one those protestors, to believe what they believed and to act as they were acting. Even more, it seemed to me that I had acted exactly as they were acting, and advocated (mutatis mutandis) what they were advocating. I saw a parallel between myself and those horrifying protestors which was so close that there was no reason not to call it an identity.

That's the clearest experience I've ever had of "Thou art that".

I arrived in D.C. with Cindy on Tuesday evening and went to a party in honor of the petitioners, organized by EPIC's Marc Rotenberg, whom I'd never met before and unfortunately met only briefly at the party.

At that event, I met Eric Eldred for the first time, and talked to him about bookdealers, the publishing industry, electronic texts, DRM, and the prospects for being proactive in supporting the public domain and the public's rights in copyright. I wanted to get Eldred to autograph a copy of The Scarlet Letter, but I didn't manage to buy one in time. (I don't think Brewster Kahle's Bookmobile, which was there at the party, had a properly typeset edition of that work available for printing, although I'm fairly sure we could have printed a plain ASCII e-text of it.)

As I said, Brewster Kahle was there with his Bookmobile, looking none the worse for wear after driving all the way across the United States. Brewster and his friends printed up books, mainly classics of children's literature, for the partygoers, and the Bookmobile drove off to the Supreme Court later in the evening.

I also met for the first time two people I know on-line, and with whom it so happened that I'd been in an e-mail exchange (about CSS encryption) the night before: Ernest Miller of LawMeme, and Aaron Swartz of Creative Commons. Aaron was in town for the Eldred argument as a special guest of Larry Lessig, who recently called him "a favorite boy genius". Ernie drove down from Yale, where he's invited me to appear as a panelist at a one-day Yale Law School conference on blogging next month.

I also got to meet some of the EPIC staff, and James Boyle, who'd just received $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor for research on the public domain in copyright.

Lisa Rein and a big group of us had planned to meet at the Supreme Court and camp out on the steps of the Court overnight in order to be certain of hearing the Eldred argument. (Amy Harmon recently called Lessig a "rock star" -- I guess it's really true.) We had a list of cell phone numbers and a specific plan and schedule to try to make sure that our group of about ten very dedicated people would definitely manage to hear the oral argument in the morning. We'd already heard that lines would form early and grow quickly.

Lisa, who really seems good at organizing things, had managed to go to an Army surplus store earlier in the day and buy a huge number of cheap, warm blankets, as well as making some tea. By the time Aaron Swartz and I got to the Court, shortly before midnight, Lisa had already been there for hours.

Indeed, by the time we got there, the group had already ordered pizza, and was having a late-night dinner. (The Supreme Court Police Department night shift told them where to call to get pizza delivered until 1:00a -- I guess it ought to come as no surprise that the SCPD would know that sort of thing.) It was strange to see a little camp with blankets, sleeping bags, clothing, backpacks, and pizza assembled with the Court (or the Capitol, if you looked from the other direction) as a backdrop. I briefly hung my suit from a tree.

I hadn't eaten anything since morning, so I advocated a second pizza order, and so we had the unusual experience of calling up a pizza parlor and ordering four large pizzas and asking for delivery to the United States Supreme Court. (And we meant it, and they did deliver the pizzas there, and we ate them.)

Ernest Miller had come by and gotten in line with us (or "became the line with us"), with a LawMeme t-shirt and a big LawMeme banner, with the motto "Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur" ("Human laws are born, live, and die"). I suspect the focus on this particular occasion may have been on "moriuntur".

The reverse of the banner, and the reverse of the t-shirt, quoted the Copyright Clause, which I think you would definitely have been considered lame if you hadn't already memorized.

At about midnight, a group of about eight law students from Virginia showed up. People trickled into line gradually after that. After looking around the Court, we sat down to play a round or two of Set. Next, after dropping my suitcase and suit off in Lisa's hotel room a few blocks away, Aaron and I went off for a while to use some wireless net access he'd discovered on a corner. We must have been a funny sight, standing together on a residential street corner after 1:00 in the morning, intently working on a couple of laptops. (Aaron's laptop backlight was also dead, so, when his laptop's display became too hard to read, he started up a VNC server on the laptop, I started a VNC client, and we used the wireless network to allow him to use my laptop as an interface into his laptop so he could run software there. However, in order to make the wireless reception work right, I had to walk about thirty feet away and hold his laptop up in the air!)

We returned to the camp site to find the line incrementally longer, but we were able to reclaim our positions in front with Lisa's group. A few of us who were unaccountably not tired then went off for a late-night walk around the Capitol, which gave me a better understanding of the geography of the whole thing (especially how the House and Senate office buildings are located with respect to the Capitol building itself). When we finally got back, I fell asleep listening to the other campers recounting practically the entire procedural history of a number of recent copyright-related court cases.

I only got about two hours' sleep. It wasn't quite light out when I woke up, a bit after 5:00, but the line already contained at least 50 people, which was the largest number we'd been told were likely to gain admission. We started to pack up our stuff and form a more formal line, and suddenly a large number of police cars converged on an intersection about a block down the street. The SCPD came out and told us all to move the entire line around the corner, which we did, and then about ten minutes later we were told to move back to the original position. The police wouldn't explain why we'd been asked to move. (There was a rumor about a bomb threat or something, but it was never officially confirmed.)

Some time after 7:00, the SCPD came around to hand out cards with numbers indicating our relative positions within the line. I was number 6; I had been in line for over eight hours at that point, with only minor interruptions. (Lisa and I did have to run back from the hotel room she was renting a few blocks away; we'd stepped out of line for a few minutes to go back to her room and change out of our line-standing clothes and into our court clothes.)

As I remember it, the first six cards were assigned in this order:

  1. Jace
  2. Lodrina
  3. Macki
  4. Lisa
  5. Kevin Burton
  6. Seth

All these people were members of our group.

Number 6 is a very, very good line position to have. As it turned out, about 200 members of the general public turned out to try to hear Eldred. How many do you suppose were admitted?

The public was given lowest priority, behind all journalists, all members of the Bar of the Supreme Court, all candidates and sponsors for motions of admission to the Bar of the Supreme Court, and all guests of parties, counsel, or Justices and officers of the Court. (That was a lot of people. The Supreme Court can hold hundreds of spectators in its gallery, and it was almost completely packed by the time the public began to be admitted at all.)

At 9:00, the great golden doors of the Court slid open (not "swung open"; they're sliding doors), and the line curved around the corner. That was the last I saw of it, but I maintain that there must have been about 200 people who came by hoping to hear the argument.

The first fifty people in line were permitted to enter the Court's antechamber, where we were subject to two searches, but we kept watching as more and more people streamed into the courtroom ahead of us -- from the higher-priority groups I mentioned above.

Something like twenty-five members of the public were eventually admitted to the argument. Since the original line positions were scrupulously observed, I was the sixth.

Just as you've heard, they actually do say "Oyez, oyez!"; they actually do say "God save the United States of America and this honorable Court"; they actually do say "Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court" at the start of the argument. It was a real thrill to hear Lessig begin with "Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court".

Maybe some year it will be "Madam Chief Justice, and may it please the Court".

I have no notes from the argument, because note-taking is banned completely for everyone but credentialled journalists (who sit in a special walled-off section, perhaps so their note-taking won't give anyone else any ideas) and members of the Supreme Court Bar (who have to swear a loyalty oath, as I observed some new admittees doing immediately before the oral argument). Since I have no notes, I'm just going to discuss a few points based on my personal recollection. You can probably get a better story if you read the accounts by journalists who were taking notes on paper. For the most part, I don't even remember which Justice asked which question.

So this is going to be rough and perhaps somewhat scattered. If anybody has specific questions which might help me clarify or make better sense out of what I experienced, please ask, and I'll try to answer them here.

The argument felt extremely short for all of us who'd been following the case. Cindy and I read over 160 pages of briefs while we were on the plane, so we were thoroughly familiar with the basic lines of argument which were before the Court. You can get those briefs from the Eldred v. Ashcroft site.

The Justices gave both sides a hard time. This seems like a key point to me. At the outset, when Lessig was being asked tough questions, it seemed natural to say that they disfavored his argument. But Olson received his share of tough questions, too. (And I remember attending an oral argument in DVD CCA v. Bunner before a California appeals court which asked really difficult questions of Bunner's attorney and then ended up ruling in favor of Bunner. So it's never wise to say that one side is definitely going to win just because the other side was thrown a series of challenging questions.)

Lessig was very composed, and I say that you'd never have believed that it was the second time in his life he'd appeared before a court, unless you already knew that. Even so, I kept thinking that he seemed right at home (which could make sense, since he was formerly a clerk to Justice Scalia). The Solicitor General did seem more experienced at Supreme Court argument, but by no means astonishingly or overwhelmingly so. Lessig's answers to the Court's questions were generally more direct and more confident; the Solicitor General's answers were typically more evasive and uncertain, which managed to irritate one Justice so much that he said something like "I didn't ask you 'probably', I asked you 'yes' or 'no', counselor!".

A clear conclusion: Many of the Justices believed that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was a bad idea. Several of them had strong and open criticism for it -- I emember something like "obviously diametrically opposed to the policy goals the Framers had in mind" or "obviously diametrically opposed to the Framers' vision of what copyright would accomplish" or something like that. Also something like "terrible policy" and (relying upon the economists' brief) something like "this Act costs the public billions of dollars, and the benefits are zero, to three decimal places". All the Justices who expressed any opinion at all were of the opinion that the CTEA was a bad law and that Congress had chosen poorly in enacting it. However, as many people (including the Justices in question themselves) pointed out, "a bad law" doesn't mean "an unconstitutional law", and the Court is reluctant to overturn a law merely because it believes Congress erred in enacting it.

There as skepticism about Lessig's claim that the 1998 act can be distinguished from the 1976 act and (less relevantly) from earlier "retrospective" copyright extensions. The Justices were not eager to believe that the 1976 act was unconstitutional, and Lessig argued that they didn't have to hold both unconstitutional in order to hold the CTEA unconstitutional. But they seemed to have a hard time distinguishing the two.

The film preservation issue was not discussed in detail. At one point, Lessig got confused because one of the Justices (Scalia?) started to ask a question about the effect of copyright extension on film preservation, and Lessig thought the Justice was saying that copyright extension harms preservation, where the Justice was actually asking about how copyright extension aids preservation. Amici urging affirmance and amici urging reversal each made independent arguments about preservation, coming to vastly different conclusions. Eldred's supporters, for their part, argued that allowing copyrights to expire would facilitate preservation, especially by non-profit organizations.

The MPAA argued in an amicus brief that extending copyrights would create a new financial incentive for preservation which wouldn't exist otherwise. (I already had a Valenti quotation on my wall: "I'm not saying the public domain is bad. But how does it benefit the consumer? If a film is in the public domain, who takes care of it? Who refurbishes it if the print goes bad? What incentive does anyone have to keep the movie alive and vibrant?")

I think both sides are right about this. If you extend copyrights, you favor preserving works with known commercial value (and a known copyright holder), by giving copyright holders a new incentive to engage in preservation work. If you allow copyrights to expire, you favor preserving works without known commercial value, or without a known copyright holder, by removing from non-copyright holders a significant disincentive to engage in preservation work.

Lessig has elsewhere suggested bringing back copyright renewal requirements. (That proposal was not at issue in the argument and it wasn't mentioned at all in his brief or before the Court. I should emphasize that this discussion was not at all part of the oral argument or even part of the Eldred case at all.) I think that such a requirement would narrow the gap on the issue of preservation. Commercially valuable works would be preserved because they could remain under copyright for long terms and continue to be exploited commercially by some copyright holder. Other works would be preserved because their copyrights would lapse, clearing the way for non-profit and other preservationists to do their work. As elsewhere argued, only around 2% of works have an ongoing commercial significance after the term prescribed by the 1976 act, so that 98% of works would presumably enter the public domain by the end of that period if there were a renewal requirement. This seems economically efficient, and, more important, especially beneficial to cultural continuity.

Requirements like deposit and renewal -- scuttled under Berne -- seem to me to have been in the public interest, and, equally importantly, to have made clear that the public interest was an essential, not incidental, part of copyright. They helped guarantee that works would enter the public domain quickly if copyright holders were no longer making money from them, and they helped guarantee that a good copy of a work would be available to the public whenever a copyright expired. Both of these are important; neither is the law today. I see those changes as an erosion of the belief that copyright law is exclusively or essentially about protecting authors' interests (since deposit and renewal were certainly inconvenient for authors and publishers). So I think they ought to be reversed.

Amy, infra, believes that frequent renewal requirements (and, I think, deposit requirements) would help the public domain but hurt copyleft, partly because free software changes so quickly (some projects have multiple releases every week!). If there were once again aggressive deposit and renewal requirements, it might be burdensome for free software developers to keep up; in that case, it would be difficult for them to hold onto current copyrights, which would make it difficult for copyleft licenses to be enforced. I think Amy has a point, and I don't know how to deal with it.

Renewal requirements might also help get orphaned software projects into the public domain quickly, while they're still useful. It continues to be incredibly wasteful that so much proprietary software is constantly being discontinued; I've written about that in the past. Useful code can simply disappear and never be seen again.

Back to the oral argument: it seemed that Lessig made a strategic decision not to challenge the holding of Schnapper v. Foley, which the majority below interpreted as precluding an application of "to promote the progress" as a substantive restriction on the power of Congress. It seems to me that reading "to promote the progress" as a restriction would be helpful to Eldred, and I don't understand the decision not to argue that point -- though I'm sure it was taken for a good reason.

Part of the petitioners' claim is that "99% of works" (elsewhere "98% of works") "have no commercial value". That didn't seem to be disputed at argument. I think this tends to substantiate the idea that there's a lot of collateral damage being done by copyright extension. There are 1% or 2% of works which are being sold and whose copyright holders get a benefit, and 98% or 99% of works for which the extension just creates trouble.

Famous people who were in the courtroom included (aside from the Justices, Lessig, and Solicitor General Olson) Alan Greenspan, Kenneth Starr, Jack Valenti (MPAA president), James Rogan (director of the Patent and Trademark Office), Eben Moglen (FSF General Counsel, legal scholar, and author), Rep. Mary Bono (sponsor of the CTEA), Rep. Zoe Lofgren, and very likely several other Members of Congress. (Sen. Orrin Hatch was amicus curiae and might have attended, but I don't know anyone who saw him.)

Mary Bono shook hands with Eric Eldred after the end of the argument.

There were also a lot of reporters I'd heard of sitting over in the press section.

Public Knowledge threw a party afterward. (Declan has a couple of pictures from that party; see the links below to Declan's work.) It was attended by many IP law professors (including those from Harvard's Berkman Center who'd worked on the case), many amici curiae who'd urged reversal, many different non-profit groups, many industry associations (an unusual, and, I thought, very productive connection), and many journalists.

I met Danny Weitzner, now of W3C, and Prof. Nesson, and several other people. I was really surprised that so many people kept asking me how the argument had gone. I didn't understand why they wanted my opinion; then I realized that almost none of them had actually made it into the Court.

It seemed odd to me that many of these people hadn't gotten into the oral argument, but it might have had something to do with the fact that they weren't all willing to sleep on the sidewalk under a blanket.

The whole experience was a rare thrill for which I'm grateful to many people, not least Lessig and the petitioners and amici. I hope Lessig manages to relax. When we saw him the following day, he was already back in front of a law school class, lecturing on copyrights; he told us that he'd re-argued the entire case (in his mind) several times that morning.

Several of us worried about the lawyer equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Here's a little bit of coverage from after the fact: Lessig himself, Aaron Swartz, Ernest Miller (and his part II), Lisa Rein (and her part II), and Copyfight (passim).

However, what you should really look at is a series of collections of Declan's photographs from the event. Jace Cooke, of our group, is prominently featured. You can also see Lodrina and Macki from our group there, and other people you might recognize, or scenes you might find interesting. (See Declan's Lessig collection, Eldred collection, and Bookmobile collection.)

There's tons of other coverage out there.

We had meetings on Thursday and Friday with advisors in the staff of Commissioners Martin, Copps, and Powell. On Friday, we also had a meeting with staff members from the Media Bureau and some of their colleagues in other Bureaus.

We tried to make the case to them that the broadcast flag mandate was unwarranted and a counterproductive idea. I think the staff members had varying degrees of receptiveness to this general message, but it was useful to have met them, and it was a valuable experience for us at least as much as for them. (While sitting in the FCC's cafeteria, I thought "You feel more experienced. Welcome to experience level 5.")

I believe we're going to be doing a couple of ex parte notices for these meetings, so you may soon be able to search public records on-line for a list of our meetings and a copy of an outline of our arguments. The FCC has rules designed to let everyone interested in an issue know (in many cases) what kinds of non-public contacts have taken place concerning that issue between advocates of a particular position and FCC staff, and roughly what kinds of arguments were presented.

I couldn't overstate how grateful I was to have Cindy with me for all of our presentations.

Aaron and I paid a brief visit to the Library of Congress, the world's largest library. On display were incredibly rare things such as Edison's lab notebook (with its original handwritten account of the "Mr. Watson, come here" incident), and the items Abraham Lincoln was carrying in his pockets when he was assassinated (including two pairs of Lincoln's eyeglasses). We went up to the gallery and looked out on the main reading room. I felt that it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I was briefly practically overcome with emotion.

Part of that emotion and that sense of beauty came from the reading room's form and majesty, and part of it from the reading room's function. I remembered a dispute in The Name of the Rose about what a library's function is; because of the setting of that book, the dispute was case in abstract theological terms (whether, if I remember the issue correctly, libraries fight the Devil or aid the Devil).

When I looked out on the reading room, I thought "Here they are fighting the Devil".

Elsewhere at the Library of Congress, I tracked down a particular corner or alcove of which Sumana gave me a picture from her own trip to D.C. (its inscription says "Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words", which made me think of Bernstein and the other code-is-speech cases).

The biggest disappointment for me on that visit was that the Library's stacks are entirely closed to the public. (The reading rooms are closed to the public, too, but you can get in by becoming a registered researcher. But registering as a researcher can't get you access to the stacks; only getting a job with the Library of Congress can do that.)

I stayed in Washington with a woman I'll call Amy who works for a non-profit organization there. Visiting her was a tremendous amount of fun, and I'm very grateful for her hospitality.

Amy and I found that we had a lot of things to talk about, and so we started to make a list of topics, lest we should forget any. We never made it through the list. I still have it, and it seems to contain more than fifty outstanding conversation topics. I hope we have a chance to catch up on them.

Amy is studying Perl; I wanted to suggest that she learn Python, but she has some sensible practical reasons to learn Perl. Since she's already a C programmer, I don't think Perl ought to hold any great terrors for her (so long as it's possible to conceive of Perl failing to hold great terrors).

I think we did great honor to Eric Eldred and to the advancement of learning -- or, if you like, the promotion of science and useful arts. And I had an enjoyable and memorable visit.

I also spent some time with Mike Godwin. Some people I know may be vaguely surprised at the thought that Godwin is an actual person -- they may remember him best for "Godwin's Law" -- but indeed he is a real live lawyer, and one who's making useful contributions to our efforts. (Maybe I should say: "Godwin is not just a law but a lawyer".)

I was in Washington as the recent sniper attacks were going on, and it felt as though practically nothing else received news coverage during the week. I believe there were two or three new sniper attacks while I was there, all in the suburbs of Washington; many public events, especially those involving children, were being cancelled. All the parents I spoke to were extremely concerned about their kids, and typically weren't letting them go outside alone or walk anywhere alone.

I went down to Claremont to see Don Marti and Tabinda Khan get married. The wedding was very elegant, with a nice delegation of Bay Area Linux activists, and many other communities represented. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Muslim wedding ceremony, and also the first time I heard a recitation of part of the Koran.

Both Tabinda and Don looked very good and very well. I also briefly had a chance to meet their families and to enjoy some excellent food.

Riana came back to town with some friends from Walla Walla, and we went to the pirate store and then to hear the performance of Koyaanisqatsi at the Symphony Hall. (Philip Glass and his colleagues performed the music live as the film was shown on a screen without sound.) We also had some very nice meals. We saw Danny and Quinn briefly after the concert; Riana was wearing her NTK "iMachavellian" shirt, so she was very easily recognizable as an NTK fan.

Thanks to sethf: the Library of Congress (they of the incredibly beautiful reading room, but sometimes lamentable statutory duties) is holding another DMCA anticircumvention exemptions rulemaking. Where did those three years go?

Dan Bricklin argues that the right to create derivative works is important, in connection with the Eldred case; I was thinking exactly the same thing as I watched the oral argument. Sometimes people, including Justices of the Supreme Court, forget that copyright has expanded to include derivative work rights and public performance rights and digital public performance of sound recording rights and now even anticircumvention paracopyright rights. It's not just about literal copying.

As we reported, the time for public comment on the FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was extended to December 6 (apparently in response to a request by Public Knowledge, CDT, and Consumers Union).

Via Felten, politicians are saying:

the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.

Maybe we will all get pushdown automata in the future instead of Turing machines. "Eat low on the food chain, code low on the Chomsky hierarchy."

At the Indian ice cream place on Valencia between 16th and 17th Streets, there's a picture drawn in the concrete of the sidewalk outside. The picture contains two transistors and three resistors; it appears to be a schematic for some kind of TTL logic gate.

Update: I'm now guessing that it's an RTL NOR gate, but I have to go back and take a look at to make sure. My reference is Mano, Digital Design, p. 410.

("Resolution and Independence", "Existence and Uniqueness" -- someone should write a poem called "Deposit and Renewal".)

Aaron sent me some comments about Amy's concerns about how renewal and deposit requirements would affect free software, especially free software under a copyleft license. Aaron argued that the deposit is easy if an electronic deposit by e-mail is permitted (much, I suppose, the way BXA, now known as BIS, permits electronic notification by e-mail of crypto exports -- a scheme Bernstein continues to challenge). I think that's correct. In fact, it's a shame that there is not even a voluntary electronic deposit mechanism, since so many works which will some day be lost are being written today in digital form; I guess simply publishing on the web is a good first approximation.

But Amy's main concern was about renewal, not deposit. Rewewal requires an action at regular intervals in the future with respect to every copyrighted work, and, to be really effective at dissuading people from renewing copyrights with no commercial value (or with de minimis commercial value), has to require a nominal fee.

That could be a problem when there are many released versions. Proprietary software typically has only a few releases, but free software sometimes has a new snapshot release every day -- or, with anonymous CVS, published copyrightable subject matter in the form of patches many times every hour.

Can anybody tell me what a "certificate of division in opinion" is?

Via Crackmonkey, Oftaj demandoj pri denaskaj Esperant-lingvanoj (Frequent questions about native Esperanto speakers). There is a common myth that only continuously live (sc. "having communities of native speakers") languages have any native speakers at all today. This is totally untrue. Hebrew is probably the most obvious counterexample, since it was deliberately revived as a native spoken language from almost exactly the current condition of Latin, and is now spoken natively by millions of people.

But there are also native Esperanto speakers, even though Esperanto is an artificial language which had no speakers at all before the 19th century. And there are not only Latin speakers, but even native Latin speakers, and I believe that there have been native Latin speakers continually for thousands of years. (Michel de Montaigne is a famous example; although he was born in a French-speaking community, he learned Latin as his first language and French as his second language, from adults who spoke Latin as a non-native language. There is no suggestion that his Latin was awkward or inadequate or that he had any trouble communicating with other Latin speakers.)

The only reason some people say that Latin is a "dead language" is that there are no communities of native speakers who regularly teach the language to their children to produce more native speakers. (You could also claim that Latin is not the language of any community, but I think this claim is misleading.)

There are a lot of regional languages in danger of "death" in the sense that they are not being learned as native languages. I bought a book on language death (Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages, by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine), which phrases the question of what a language is in an interesting way:

After all, languages are not living things which can be born and die, like butterflies and dinosaurs. They are not victims of old age and disease. They have no tangible existence like trees or people. In so far as language can be said to exist at all, its locus must be in the minds of the people who use it. In another sense, however, language might be regarded as an activity, a system of communication between human beings. A language is not a self-sustaining entity.

(p. 5)

So you can see a language as a kind of cultural practice or activity or pattern which happens between and among people -- the kind of conventional view of language and speech, the kind of unmagical view, which fairly shocked me when I ran into it for the first time in Lee Tien's account:

The relationship of speech acts to language, however, is not that speech acts must be in a language, but rather that language constitutes a system of conventions that permits speakers to perform otherwise purely physical acts like uttering sounds that hearers understand in virtue of their knowing those conventions. But because language is not the only system of conventions that makes intersubjective utterance meaning possible, nonlinguistic acts can also be speech acts.

(Lee Tien, "Publishing Software as a Speech Act", 15 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 629, 642 (2000))

("Conventional" here means "consisting of conventions" rather than "ordinary" or "widely accepted".)

Back to language death: most endangered languages have not been used to create a famous literature or other recorded cultural artifacts, so they're not likely to enjoy the fate of Latin or Hebrew or Sanskrit. People are still studying Sanskrit and Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) largely so that they can read the literatures which were produced in those languages. But many of the languages dying today haven't even had a written form for most of their lifetimes.

Lisa Rein says she was actually #2 in line (which makes sense, since she got there well before Lodrina and Macki did). Yesterday I mistakenly reported that she was #4.

Reading Ernest Miller's coverage of the Eldred argument reminded me of one part I neglected to discuss yesterday. It's the re-copyrighting question.

Justice Breyer raised an analogy he would repeat with the Solicitor General. He asked whether under Eldred's argument it would be permissible to recopyright the bible, Ben Johnson, or Shakespeare.

(For "Eldred", I think, read "Ashcroft".)

The Solicitor General argued that copyright term extension was useful because it could promote "distribution" (if you have an exclusive right to publish something, you may have a financial incentive to publish it, regardless of how long ago it was written). So Breyer speculated that it might be helpful for public access to works written a long time ago, like the Bible, if some contemporary publisher were given a monopoly on them. Would that be legitimate?

Olson struggled with this and didn't seem to give a straight answer. He seemed to suggest that it might be legitimate to re-copyright public domain works in order to obtain the distribution benefits.

Eldred coverage from Kevin Burton, who camped out in line with us, is now available. 

schoen@gar:~$ uptime
Unknown HZ value! (17) Assume 100.
 15:50:09 up 301 days, 10:44,  4 users,  load average: 1.10, 1.11, 1.11

This machine has been used as a development server for, well, about 301 days. It has development work done on it almost every day, has been used as a relatively high-volume web server, and builds an entire operating system distribution automatically twice every day. It's also a remotely-accessible CVS server and maintains a bug database. It runs Linux 2.2.20 on a dual-processor Pentium II machine.

Art Tyde invited me to speak at BALUG on Tuesday evening about EFF's work, so I did. That was a nice time. Thanks, Art!

I think this diary is inadequate, in the sense that I can write very little about the most important things and a lot about the least important things. For example, on October 10, a series of completely unprecedented things happened in my life. But you wouldn't know it at all by reading my diary.

In our TCPA meeting yesterday, I had an idea. It's clear that trusted computing systems could be used in ways which unambiguously provide security benefits to end-users and act in the end-users' interests. Is it possible that these systems could be designed only to do this and specfically not to be useful for any other purpose?

Design constraints like this are always interesting; sometimes they're accomplished in very practical ways. I think of the denaturation of alcohol -- in order to guarantee that some alcohol will be used only for non-intoxicating purposes, it can be mixed with a low concentration of a much more dangerous poison, or something which tastes downright awful. That kind of poisoning or contamination will protect essentially all non-food uses of the alcohol, but prevent uses in foods and beverages.

How could you "denature" a trusted computing system so that it would be useful for purposes which benefit the computer's owner but not, in general, for any other purposes? If this could be done, how would that possibility change the way we think about trusted computing systems?

So here is a thought experiment: add to the requirements for a trusted computing system a rule that there should be a physical button or keypad attached to the device, as well as an interface for removable recordable media of some sort. When the physical button is activated or a particular passphrase is entered on the keypad, the device must sequentially write the entire contents of its memory, without regard for trusted computing domain separation or access control rules, rules, into a file on the removable media. (You need to define "the entire contents of its memory" carefully to guarantee that memory physical located, e.g., within a CPU will be included if it's directly addressable by software.) The media can then be removed and read inside another computer.

I'm going to call this feature an Owner Override function, because it allows the owner of the computer to override certain policies the owner might consider disadvantageous (such as not allowing the owner to read some data which was saved using sealed storage). In the alternative, you can implement this in a technically different way and call it something like "owner-directed migration", a direct attack on Pd "migration disposition" in which a creator of a file or an application might have defined certain rules about migration.

We know that the basic technology for assuring that a function like this is never triggered from software is already implemented; it's a design requirement of TCPA and Palladium, ordinarily referred to as "physical presence indication". The system is required to be engineered in such a way that it can reliably determine whether you are there in front of it or not. (In particular, it needs to be able to reliably determine that a particular instruction was generated from hardware by a physical action, and not from software. This is meant to guarantee that malicious code can't impersonate an end-user in order to trick the system into undermining certain kinds of privacy or security protections.)

On reflection, I don't see anything in the physical presence indication concept which prevents it from being extended to include a broad mechanism for overriding policies. Already, there are things you can do with physical presence in these trusted computing system which you simply can't do otherwise; why is "override security" not one of them? (It is, de facto, in all existing PC hardware! What's more, I don't believe that any parts of ordinary PC hardware before 1995 were specifically designed to prevent users from altering any part of user-visible functionality. Maybe someone can find an interesting counterexample, because it seems very possible that there is one. Incidentally, the feature I'm proposing as an Owner Override is not really very different technically from existing suspend-to-disk functionality provided in many laptops.)

The point of this exercise is not to suggest that TCPA actually ought to require this (although I am sure that would be a straightforward way of dealing with many consumer advocates' concerns!). The point is to try to show that, as a technological matter, the functionality which unambiguously protects an end-user can be separated from the functionality which ambiguously protects the end-user or has some potential to undermine or compromise the end-user's interests.

And the fact that physical presence indication is already designed in means that perhaps the biggest part of the required infrastructure is already in place. The machine already has a way to distinguish requests made by its user from requests made by software. That distinction could enables features, like Owner Override, which work outside of the default trusted computing security models in which policies are defined by software authors.

The next step with regard to this idea is to ask what would happen if it were implemented. I argue:

We already know a practical reason why this wouldn't be done: because the first customers trusted computing vendors anticipate are corporate IT departments, who explicitly want to limit end-users' control over computers, and are always saying so and spending millions of dollars on products which purport to let them do so. Although there is much debate about the ethics of workplace control, many people consider the IT departments' exercise of control justified by default because the end-users are not the owners of the computers.

However, when the end-users are the owners of the computers, there is a high likelihood that their view of what the technology should or shouldn't do is not identical to the view of corporate IT departments. End-users would not necessarily see a system capable of being used to restrict end-users' control as in their interest, even though it is entirely true that the system need not necessarily be used that way and that there is a bargaining problem whose outcome would determine whether or to what extent it is used that way. (I wrote earlier about many precedents which suggest that there are certain capabilities you don't want to be given, because they can ultimately turn out to be a curse rather than a blessing. I think my favorite of these was "knowing how to build St. Basil's Cathedral").

I think the point bears repeating: the functions corporate IT managers want (including controlling end-users) are not necessarily the functions end-users would choose for themselves. That may mean that a technology developed for one part of the computing world will be an odd match for a different part. End-users are obviously much more likely to choose machines with an Owner Override, where corporate IT managers are obviously much more likely to choose machines without it.

Let's assume that there were a choice -- that there were fairly robust competition among several different trusted computing proposals, perhaps, and some of them included an Owner Override and others didn't. How can end-users think about whether having an Owner Override (a well-documented Owner Override, built into the published specifications for the trusted computing technologies themselves) would be a good thing for them, relative to not having it?

The difficult problem seems to be that, because of externalities and network effects, no individual's decision will in itself decide the overall outcome for that user. If you decide to boycott trusted computing systems and millions of other people decide to use them, you still suffer many of the disadvantages; if you decide to use trusted computing systems, and millions of other people decide to boycott them, you won't gain some of the advantages.

Cary Sherman thinks that Gary Shapiro is totally wrong. Everyone reading here probably already knows what I think about each of the arguments in that rebuttal.

Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc! But sethf thinks this is a distraction from more significant issues.

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.)

We had a second meeting with Microsoft, as a follow-up to our famous first meeting. Thanks to everybody who showed up from Microsoft, and to Bunnie, who came along to help us understand Palladium better.

I'm going to write some notes for publication about our Palladium meetings and our earlier TCPA and LaGrande meetings, but I haven't written them yet.

I've come out to Oregon and Washington State to visit Riana this weekend. We spent Saturday and Sunday in Portland, and we're spending today and tomorrow in Walla Walla, where Riana is a college student (sort of).

Praveen and I flew up together on Friday (I got a ride to the airport with the Microsoft crew, and I didn't overhear any evil plots having to do with computing). Riana and Praveen and I had dinner on Friday, after which Praveen went to Eugene (and he's flying back separately).

Portland is beautiful! Our hosts, Deb and Perry, provided us with a copy of the Portland Greenmap, which they helped edit, and which gave an interesting perspective on the city. The driving in Portland (which Riana did and I didn't) is very confusing, because many of the streets -- particularly in the northeast quadrant -- dead-end, twist sharply, or are interrupted by parks. There's a sensible grid, but it frequently doesn't let you take the path of your choice.

Riana and I visited Powell's City of Books -- the largest new and used bookstore in the world! This was a thrill; I've been planning since 1999 to make a trip there, and I finally got the chance. (We spent hours wandering around and only saw a portion of the store. Now that's a large bookstore.)

We also visited Powell's Technical Bookstore, just down the street. They ought to connect the two with a tunnel. (Riana: "What would they put in the tunnel?" Seth: "Books!")

Browsing at Powell's Technical reminded me that there are lots of things I'd like to buy which I can't afford. Many of them were meant as college textbooks and sold at between $60 and $100 -- even used! But there was a tremendous amount of techne on sale. I was especially curious to see two textbooks on software-defined radio, apparently now a subject of college courses of its own. Neither one mentioned GNU Radio. One had a section on regulatory issues which reiterated the apparent conventional wisdom within industry that end-users should not be permitted to modify the software which drives transmitters.

I did find Gardner's Why's and Wherefores used in Powell's Technical, and several interesting things at decent prices in the regular Powell's store. I guess we spent at least four hours between the two stores. Riana spent a while in the Blue room.

We stumbled across two weddings which were taking place in churches right across the street from one another. We rode streetcars (which are all, within any given generation, painted the same way, unlike San Francisco's F Market line). We looked around downtown, ate some pizza, and watched Fritz Lang's Metropolis in an old-fashioned movie theater. (I'd never seen Metropolis before; I see why people found it so impressive, although the ending seemed corny or heavy-handed to me. The version we saw was a new restoration using many more sources than some earlier editions.)

While in Portland, we also got to see the Chinese Garden, and we saw some other places from outside without going in (a Federal court, the Art Museum, etc.).

We had two very pleasant meals at the Vita Cafe, which reminded me of Herbivore with slightly lower prices and a slightly larger menu (and, unfortunately, a couple of meat items). We also had some chai in a cafe and discovered that we were missing a concert by Dar Williams and the String Cheese Incident in Portland that very evening. (That's OK -- I'm going to hear that same concert with Sumana next weekend in Berkeley.)

We played a good game of Scrabble with our hosts and found their home extremely comfortable. I see why my father said that we'd enjoy staying with them! And all their advice and directions went a long way toward enhancing our enjoyment of Portland.

There are several bridges over the Willamette River in Portland. I think we crossed two of them by car and one on a train. You could probably spend a whole day just trying to cross all the bridges. (Leonhard Euler would be proud!) I guess it's that way in most major cities which are bisected by bridges. We also got the hand of the four-quadrant system and the numbered avenues after a while.

I enjoyed seeing the fall foliage in Portland, but when we left for Walla Walla on Sunday evening, I was even more surprised. The scene freeway along the Columbia River looked just like Massachusetts at this time of year. We got to see Multnomah Falls while it was still light out (and I think that's a larger waterfall than any in Massachusetts), and all along the way until the sun set it kept on looking like New England autumn scenery to me.

Walla Walla's climate turned out to be even more similar to Northampton's than I'd expected. There are chestnut trees, and maple, and oak, in about the same mixture as Northampton, and real and rich fall colors. So I say again to anyone who misses East Coast autumn scenery -- come to the Pacific Northwest!

Whitman's student manual reminds students that there are four distinct seasons up here. That's right, four!

Whitman's campus is architecturally and otherwise aesthetically like NMH's or Smith's. Walla Walla itself has about as many people as Northampton. The rumor is that there's not all that much to do in town, but I'm going to have to investigate that first-hand.

Fritz's Hit List has made it into the New York Times!

As I was saying before, the Pacific Northwest is really nice!

Looking back over the Powell's map, I see that Riana and I spent a lot of time in the rose room, no time in the orange room, a lot of time in the blue room, a fair amount of time in the purple room, a little time in the gold room, a little time in the red room, and very little time in the coffee room, the pearl room, and rare book room. Do you get the sense that Powell's is pretty large?

Riana described the gold room in a funny way -- something like "Stuff That Isn't Respectable Yet". (It houses "science fiction and fantasy", "horror", "mysteries", "nautical fiction", "erotica", "thrillers", "romance", "westerns", and "graphic novels". The way Riana put it was really funny.)

I think Riana and I told well over 100 pirate jokes during that trip. These are not really jokes; they are riddles in which the answer is provided by substituting a purported pirate utterance ("ar", "avast", "ahoy", "matie") for a similar-sounding part of some non-pirate-related phrase. (A typical example would be "Where does a pirate get a map?" "From a carrrrtographer." Or, of course, "Who's a pirate's favorite folksinger?" "Darrrr Williams." But my favorite was probably "What's a pirate's favorite article of clothing you're wearing right now?" "Avest!")

It seems that such jokes could almost be generated by a shell script, but we had a good time with them. It's an obscure genre.

So I got to hang out briefly in Walla Walla with Riana and some of her friends at Whitman, and see KWCW (hearing about the FCC from a totally different angle), and attend a class about free speech (hearing about the first amendment from a totally different angle). I came back on Tuesday and had my first ever really good airport food. I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant; it's in the Portland Airport and it's a deli restaurant and the food is actually food I would voluntarily go and eat. Maybe next time. (Speaking of delis, there is a deli in Walla Walla with a really great tiramisu or tiramisu-like thing.)

The Portland Airport (as I told Praveen) reminds me of Chicago O'Hare, except on a friendlier scale. It even has a Powell's outlet (with only new books and no used -- imagine selling used books in an airport, and wouldn't that be a wonderful thing?).

I don't know what it is about that image which I find so compelling. Airports are somehow a place where nothing second-hand is sold because nothing second-hand or non-corporate is sold. If used books (serendipitous, unpredictable, exciting, romantic) could make it into the unbelievably controlled environment of an airport, then anything could happen!

The TSA Federalized airport security screeners took over from private security forces just a couple of weeks ago. (I was flying to Washington on their very first day on the job, which was interesting.) I think they are more polite, more efficient, more respectful, and otherwise just nicer than the private screeners. It's not fun to get searched, and it's not fun to get searched by the government, but the TSA screeners seem to be doing in some sense a better job.

To give one example: before TSA, I saw occasions on which passengers confronted private security with plausibly legitimate complaints and were then harassed, searched again, or prevented from flying. But on my way back from Portland, I saw a passenger try to pick a verbal fight with a TSA screener. The screener resisted being provoked, continued to do his job, allowed the passenger to pass, and didn't go on a power trip. I was surprised -- I completely expected the passenger to end up in handcuffs. Nope: the TSA screener continued to call him "sir", and he made his flight. No handcuffs, no rifles, no threats, no extra searches. Cool.

(Now, if only law enforcement officers always behaved that way when they weren't on videotape...)

My flight was pretty uneventful, and I caught AirBART back to the Coliseum station. But on my way back to San Francisco, our BART train developed a brake problem. I smelled a strong odor of burning plastic, and our train came to a complete halt inside the Transbay Tube and was stuck beneath the Bay for about half an hour. Some of the passengers in my car became extremely angry and started to swear. One of them called the train operator and threatened to start to deface or damage the train if she didn't do what he wanted. (The train operator's response was somewhat less polite than I imagine the TSA's would have been in the same situation.) The train operator kept trying to pull forward; the train would move a couple of feet and then come to a stop again. Finally, a technician was sent out on a rescue train and was able to come aboard our train and help the operator get the train running in reverse. We rode it all the way back to West Oakland and then transferred to a new San Francisco train.

Fortunately, I had a book with me while I was waiting.

I still haven't written up my notes from our TCPA meeting and our second Microsoft meeting.

Richard Stallman wrote an essay on trusted computing which makes a lot of good points. But I have trouble with a couple of suggestions:

In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.

and similarly

Treacherous computing puts the existence of free operating systems and free applications at risk, because you may not be able to run them at all. Some versions of treacherous computing would require the operating system to be specifically authorized by a particular company. Free operating systems could not be installed. Some versions of treacherous computing would require every program to be specifically authorized by the operating system developer. You could not run free applications on such a system. If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.

Neither of these concerns is applicable at all to Palladium (as Microsoft has described it to us) or to TCPA (as the TCPA has specified it and as it has been implemented). While Microsoft could be misleading us about Palladium, the TCPA specification is public and implementations of it have already been made.

It's possible that some other trusted computing system could have such a misfeature, but the design of TCPA and Palladium doesn't require these properties at all, as far as I can tell, and they seem to be more or less independent.

I do share the two concerns in this paragraph:

There are proposals already for U.S. laws that would require all computers to support treacherous computing, and to prohibit connecting old computers to the Internet. The CBDTPA (we call it the Consume But Don't Try Programming Act) is one of them. But even if they don't legally force you to switch to treacherous computing, the pressure to accept it may be enormous. Today people often use Word format for communication, although this causes several sorts of problems (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html). If only a treacherous computing machine can read the latest Word documents, many people will switch to it, if they view the situation only in terms of individual action (take it or leave it). [...]

I'm not convinced that something like Palladium is the infrastructure contemplated by the CBDTPA. I think Microsoft made a good argument that the current Palladium design is not as restrictive as the measure called for by the CBDTPA and desired by the Hollywood studios. (As Microsoft pointed out to us, there's nothing in the current Palladium design which prevents you from recording, playing, or distributing MP3 or Ogg files, or other media without DRM; there is no watermark detection, and there are even things which appear to create technical obstacles to adding watermark detection where the user doesn't want it.)

However, it's possible to imagine a legal mandate for some kind of trusted computing system, which would be a bad outcome, and I'd love to hear more about what trusted computing vendors are doing to oppose that. (Part of Microsoft's answer seems to be roughly "by not actually designing the things the studios would most like to see", which is not a terrible answer.) I ought to talk more about trusted computing technologies, self-protecting content, and 1201(c)(3), so remind me if I don't get back to that, OK?

The network effects point is also one I take very seriously, perhaps most seriously of all. I've been stressing the anticompetitive applications point when I talk to people -- as I did in an interview with Technology Review earlier today. I see the problem from a slightly different angle, but a closely related one. If you're a minority platform user, network effects can cause real trouble for you. Right now, the extent of that trouble is mitigated by the possibility of doing reverse engineering to create interoperability with majority platforms, even if they use file formats and protocols which someone hoped would remain proprietary. With trusted computing infrastructure, attaining full interoperability with minority platforms may never be possible. (And that's just the beginning of the sorts of troubles which might result from network effects.)

I'm thinking about other things after our meetings last week, and I should try to write them up soon. One of the really interesting things has to do with hardware attacks and trying to assess how easy they are (and what that means). I'm glad Bunnie was able to come to our second meeting with Microsoft.

Aaron Swartz answered my call for fresh quines by providing this one:

Author: Omar Antolin (omar@galois.fciencias.unam.mx)

a = ['print "a =", a', 'for s in a: print s']
print "a =", a
for s in a: print s

I don't think it's exactly along the lines of other quines I've seen before, although it has some family resemblances to them. The use of a Python list is very nice.

The funny thing about running in framebuffer mode is that you don't hear your multisync monitor click when you switch between a text console and an X11 console. I find this extremely disconcerting.

Vitanuova for 2002 October
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Contact: Seth David Schoen