TorrentFreak.com writes about Mark Diestler, a filmmaker who doesn’t mind illicit sharing of his latest movie, “The Inner Room”: I would much rather have 500,000 downloads than 5,000, although our distributor may feel differently. The worst thing that can happen to a small film, any film for that matter, is to fall into obscurity. 500,000 [...]
Some years ago I attended a talk at “Ebertfest”, movie reviewer Roger Ebert’s annual movie festival held in Urbana, Illinois. The talk was held in the Illini Union’s Pine Lounge by the now late MPAA chief Jack Valenti. Valenti used a series of half-true emotional arguments to justify increased copyright power, maximal copyright length, and [...]
Freedom is participation in power.Marcus Tullius Cicero Wikipedia’s summary of Carrier IQ rootkit events to date: In November 2011, researcher Trevor Eckhart claimed that Carrier IQ was logging information such as location without notifying users or allowing them to opt out, and that the information tracked included detailed keystroke logs, potentially violating US Federal law. [...]
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon.com is starting a digital book lending service; readers will be able to download a copy of a book and keep it on their reading device for as long as they want before “returning” it (which really means making it unavailable to the reading device, and thus the reader) [...]
In or around October 26, 2011, Apple released source code to their software (called “ALAC”) for compressing and decompressing audio without any loss of audio quality. Apple chose the Apache License version 2.0 for this code which includes a patent license. This was a good thing to do because it helps users with ALAC files [...]
J. K. Rowling—author of Harry Potter, her suppression of free speech in many countries goes underdiscussed while she makes billions. Justin Bieber—pop singer, suppresses free speech while claiming bogus violations of “intellectual property” and publicity rights, makes millions. Steve Jobs—entrepreneur, restricts user’s software freedom (including necessitating “jailbreaking” a computer), treats workers poorly, makes billions. I’m [...]
TorrentFreak.com asks “Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?” for good reasons: people who share files are being tracked down and sued for high sums of money, far in excess of the commercial value of a copy of the work they’re accused of illicitly sharing. To avoid being found, some users use a VPN or [...]
Background On October 6, 2011, one day after Steve Jobs died, Richard Stallman (rms) posted his reaction to Jobs’ death: Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not [...]
Juan Rodriguez posted his dissatisfaction with the Free Software Foundation’s tactics in recent free software campaigns. This is a response to that post, but I thought it a good opportunity to raise awareness of various FSF posts and positions for a wider audience at the same time. The FSF asks people to use more free [...]
Today is Software Freedom Day, a day to celebrate the freedoms we get with free software—we can run, share, and modify free software without any serious restrictions that get in our way. There are celebrations around the world, so join one or make your own celebration!
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley Richard Stallman