On December 28, 2006, one week before Nancy Pelosi duties began as Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Ralph Nader addressed an audience at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District on what’s wrong with the country, focusing chiefly on civic apathy and corporate power. He points out the position of power Pelosi [...]
Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” has written an essay on Ralph Nader, subject of the new documentary “An Unreasonable Man”. He addresses the 2000 election for which some still blame Nader for somehow “spoiling” and causing Bush to become president: There is a fascinating rage—and rage [...]
Two FSF sysadmins, Justin Baugh and Ward Vandewege, have written a straightforward list of points on “How hardware vendors can help the free software community” (text file, PDF, LaTeX). It’s short and very easy to read; each entry in the list has three sections: A description of the issue, how hardware vendors can help, and [...]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Kyle Machulis who is being sued by Richard Silver. The EFF explains: EFF’s client, Kyle Machulis, shot [a] video at a concert last month. In one ten-second segment, a group of fans in the audience attempts to dance part of the Electric Slide. Machulis later uploaded the video to [...]
Carl Malamud wrote an interesting letter to C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb about use of C-SPAN congressional footage (local copy). Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi posted a snippet of C-SPAN footage to her blog and C-SPAN cried copyright infringement. Sadly, Speaker Pelosi didn’t challenge this claim (even on fair use grounds, where she had a good [...]
The BBC news website carries Michael Geist’s critique of American publisher’s copyright demands on the majority of the rest of the world. There is a fair bit of propaganda language involved there: “protection“ “intellectual property“ “digital rights management“ which should prompt you to ask the timeless question “Who benefits?”. Hint: it’s not you. As the [...]
Cindy Sheehan, board member of the Progressive Democrats of America, a group which tries to bring progressives into the Democratic party fold, recently challenged Democrats to impeach the President (3m5s of audio; a transcript follows). Thanks to Fred Nguyen and WBAI for the audio. Today’s Democracy Now! mentioned Sheehan’s statement, but did not play the [...]
Richard Stallman discussed Free Software and the future of Free Software in Zagreb on March 9, 2006. Free Software is software that respects a user’s freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software for any purpose at any time. Non-free software, by contrast, denies users these freedoms. Even if you’re not a programmer (as [...]
The RIAA wants to avoid court and get the accused to agree to settlements. To that end, the RIAA has sent a letter to ISPs asking for information and offering a possible discount (“opportunity for an early decreased settlement amount”) to would-be defendants (“targeted users”). In a letter (which has the recipient information blacked out) [...]
Congratulations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation which just won an important judgement against drug giant Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly tried to stop a number of websites from publishing leaked documents about Zyprexa, Eli Lilly’s top-selling drug. The judgement is available and the zyprexa.pbwiki.com wiki which challenges Eli Lilly is still online. From EFF’s press release [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley Richard Stallman