Digital Citizen

Cindy Sheehan announced she is stepping down from her peace movement work and in so doing the US is losing a leading anti-war voice. We will be worse off for her departure. Sheehan spoke with Amy Goodman on today’s Democracy Now! (low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwdith audio, video, transcript). I am sympathetic to her reasons for leaving, but I was not aware that the political left helped lead her to her decision. I think it is another sad point on an unbroken line of bad advocacy. Despite sharing (what I thought were) points of agreement with the political left, I don’t agree that supporting corporatists is the way out.

[W]hen I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used.

In 2004 Sen. John Kerry (D-NH) offered to manage the war better than President George W. Bush. The political left rallied around Kerry, forgoing all anti-war alternatives. Today, the political left dutifully follows the corporate media which leads them to champion Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) despite both candidates’ late-to-the-table approach on major issues of the day (for example their lacking health care ideas which began as a cynical virtual non-showing at a recent union event and has now grown into a means to keep private HMOs intact). We’re not supposed to discuss Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) H.R. 676, the only single-payer health care plan offered in this election. Like Congresswoman Pelosi’s stance on impeachment, universal health care is off the table.

On Iraq and Iran, Obama has made many speeches with little substance but some things are clear: he doesn’t want the US (military or corporations) to leave Iraq now and he stands by what he told the Chicago Tribune—he’s okay with sending rockets into Iran. Clinton won’t clearly identify her support for the invasion of Iraq as a mistake. She stands with AIPAC against Iran. What leads people to think highly of these two “frontrunners”? A dearth of media coverage of Democratic party alternatives combined with people’s unwillingness to do the research and find out where candidates get their campaign money, what their voting record reveals, and what they say about themselves; behavior that would compel them to seriously question their party loyalty.
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I was working on my own response to the recent Mark Helprin op-ed in the New York Times when I learned that Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and blogger, maintains a wiki where a response is being edited. There are some uniquely American aspects to this discussion (such as the unconstitutionality of an infinite term of copyright) but the access to culture and the promise to be able to build on culture are not uniquely American. Ironically, while Helprin gives no value to the public domain, another supporter of his argument draws great value from the public domain: the Disney corporation, a chief supporter of increase copyright term, makes a great deal of money by making movies out of stories in the public domain. This doesn’t draw too sharp a line between Disney and their proponents because Disney can afford to pay for any license that company wants.

If you’re looking for more discussion on why the term of copyright should not be extended I direct your attention to the Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s talk and the subsequent discussion. Like many such discussions, this one came about in part because corporate copyright holders (this time record labels and popular wealthy artists) are pressuring government (this time British) for more copyright power. In time, these same people and organizations will pressure American government for “harmony” in the term of copyright (a scam that is brought out to increase copyright power). They play countries off each other because it has a history of working, despite growing opposition including an increasingly media-aware public that knows they’re getting a raw deal.

Making copyright last forever can be thought of as a huge increase in the term of copyright, so the discussions about increasing the term of copyright are apropos. Copyright already lasts too long and one can argue it’s already infinite in term through repeated exploitation of the “limited Times” language in the US Constitution. Helprin celebrates exploiting renewable retrospective copyright extension and Justice Breyer’s dissent in Eldred v. Ashcroft points out that “The present extension will produce a copyright period of protection that, even under conservative assumptions, is worth more than 99.8% of protection in perpetuity (more than 99.99% for a songwriter like Irving Berlin and a song like Alexander’s Ragtime Band).”). Giving copyright holders more exclusion power is neither necessary nor a good idea.

John Stauber lays out the argument against the Democrat’s support for the bipartisan war in Iraq and Stauber doesn’t leave out their water carriers (such as MoveOn.org).

Very few Democrats are talking about impeachment and war crimes trials. Yesterday, Rep. Kucinich (D-OH) spoke on Democracy Now! on this topic (video, audio, transcript). One can only hope that memories of the war will last beyond the end of Pres. George W. Bush’s second term so that he can be brought to justice. As I’ve noted on this blog before, Americans seem to have trouble finding the time to hold high officials accountable for their crimes after they leave office, as though the resulting deaths somehow become irrelevant.

DefectiveByDesign.org is mounting a day of action against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and digital restrictions management (”DRM” framed from the point of the user) when Disney releases their new movie:

On Monday, Gonzales called on Congress to enact a sweeping new bill entitled the “Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007″ (IPPA) that would amongst other things:

• Increase penalties for circumventing a DRM scheme
• Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright
• Permit more wiretaps for investigating copyright violations
• Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes

This proposed legislation is a result of Hollywood’s lobbying, serving their special interests at the expense of the public good. As we have seen, thanks to the recent events like the Digg revolt, the public have turned against DRM. The illegal hex code that can be used to remove the DRM from HD-DVD can now be found on over a million web pages.

This is Hollywood’s attempt to scare us all into accepting DRM. Now is the time to take action!

On Friday May 25th, around the world, Disney will release “Pirates of the Caribbean - At World’s End”, a movie about a diverse community coming together to fight the far reaching and oppressive East India Trading Company to preserve their freedom loving lifestyle (sound kind of familiar?)

If you’d like to get a yellow hazard suit to protest at your local theater, Defective by Design can help.

The Free Software Foundation has started a new campaign to convince people to support Ogg Vorbis with PlayOgg.org. Other formats (such as MP3, AAC, and many others) are patent-encumbered or only available with proprietary software. You shouldn’t have to lose your freedom to control your computer just to play audio and video.

Long-time readers of Digital Citizen know that I host and steer people to multimedia encoded in free formats (Ogg Vorbis for general-purpose audio, FLAC for archival-quality audio, Speex for compressed versions of human speech, and Theora for video). I also work with others (such as News from Neptune) to help them host their media in free formats.

There are a number of programs for various operating systems to play all of these kinds of files. The audio files can be played with portable digital audio players too. So you don’t have to give up portability to keep your freedom when you’re on the road. The FSF has some instructions on acquiring and installing VideoLAN Client, a popular all-purpose media player and media sharing program.

More places you can go to get audio in Ogg Vorbis format (and licensed to share):

• Jamendo—considerable variety, lots of French music
• Magnatune—a wide variety of genres of music
• Kahvi—easygoing electronic music
• Pandora—Classical music

Seventy MPs have now signed an Early Day Motion calling for retrospective extension to the term of copyright. Despite much evidence to the contrary and a study which concludes that “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.” and the ruckus raised the last time the term of copyright was at issue (remember the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the US and the related US Supreme Court case Eldred v Ashcroft?), it looks like copyright term extension is going again.

Longer terms of copyright around the world are used as excuses for American copyright extensions—harmonization is the word used for this scam. It’s a scam in two respects: it’s never “harmonized” to exactly the same length and copyright term is always “harmonized” upwardly. So Americans have even more reason to help keep their friends and family from a worse copyright regime.

The Open Rights Group has more details including the 70 MPs that signed on to support copyright term extension and a pointer to a great talk and panel discussion on the topic (local copies of the Jonathan Zittrain talk and the debate that followed). I particularly enjoyed the analysis in the discussion period. I’ll see about converting the video to Ogg Vorbis+Theora.

AMD owns ATI, a computer videocard manufacturer. Recent ATI videocards have no free software drivers. The proprietary ATI driver which works with a typical GNU/Linux system is poor quality and as a result many users have problems with it. At the Red Hat summit going on right now, an AMD representative discussed the situation and Tom Calloway blogged about it:

An executive VP from AMD gave a keynote this morning, and he talked up open source and committed to making the ATI driver “better”.

We don’t need the driver to be “better”, Mr. AMD, we need the driver to be “free”. You make it free. Free your specs. Free up a little of your manpower to answer technical queries from developers. Free Dave Airlie from his NDA restrictions. Free your existing code.

You make it free. We’ll make it better. Everyone will benefit.

Calloway has the right message; software freedom will lead to improved code quality. If ATI supported our freedom we could change our position from recommending against ATI hardware to telling people which ATI videocards to buy, just like we tell people which Intel hardware to look for in their next machines as a direct result of Intel’s stance supporting free software. On a related note, consider what ATI spokesperson Henri Richard is reported to have said and the skeptical reaction recorded on Christopher Blizzard’s blog.

The situation Calloway describes here bears an eerie similarity to something we’ve heard before.
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One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is progressing and the folks at OLPC have put together another video with interviews of the people behind the project.

If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can search for “OLPC” on this blog and find their other video.

As before, the new video is licensed to to share under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 license (local copy).