Matthew Garrett on Nostr: Back when I was at Google we wanted to use this to put machine Identity keys in the ...
Back when I was at Google we wanted to use this to put machine Identity keys in the TPM so they couldn't be copied to untrusted machines, which meant we needed to put the trusted certs in a repo to deploy them. But we hit a problem: there was no copyright licence for any of the certificates, so we had to get an exception from legal. I argued that certificates were clearly at best a collection of facts and random numbers and embodied no creativity so weren't copyrightable. Legal disagreed.
Published at
2025-03-14 16:32:53Event JSON
{
"id": "4f9bb2447888b0cd2a28413972b3a4bc06df6fd14436109949e061907384649c",
"pubkey": "ef5e80e6c74387ef14f5c6b89079f22b6847dc14365001c0ed662a20bd891677",
"created_at": 1741969973,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"b193dc04fac73553972bb335e9008670c1667c933464df3606d2f650b6e1ebb5",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub",
"reply"
],
[
"proxy",
"https://nondeterministic.computer/users/mjg59/statuses/114161744188410219",
"activitypub"
]
],
"content": "Back when I was at Google we wanted to use this to put machine Identity keys in the TPM so they couldn't be copied to untrusted machines, which meant we needed to put the trusted certs in a repo to deploy them. But we hit a problem: there was no copyright licence for any of the certificates, so we had to get an exception from legal. I argued that certificates were clearly at best a collection of facts and random numbers and embodied no creativity so weren't copyrightable. Legal disagreed.",
"sig": "11817c151708b2c13771d91e6077240f4d5903d9d0e15096650833b38d31e4010cd320fb2cdcd072136c22559f099251360b808bb71768567ac9a9a71a8318f2"
}