Sherry Wolf on why the Left can’t support Ron Paul is an engaging read, particularly advised for those who support Ron Paul’s policies. I think everyone who wants to run should be allowed to run, and I support Ron Paul’s attempt to overcome needlessly difficult ballot access requirements. But I’m not willing to trade away [...]
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert break union solidarity and return to their TV shows—that’s not the headline any of the pro-corporate news outlets puts on this story but they should. The Huffington Post’s comments summarize the reactions I’ve seen to this: apparently it’s okay to chastise late-night talk show host Carson Daly for having new [...]
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon cover the worst of journalism this year in the sixteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes including Jeff Greenfield’s health care coverage post-SiCKO: Reflecting what became mainstream media’s conventional wisdom in the wake of Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” documentary, CBS correspondent Greenfield explained that the U.S. lacks a universal healthcare system not because of [...]
The Globe and Mail tells us: Earlier today, Industry Canada, a ministry of the federal government, released a surprising study of peer-to-peer file-sharing on the music industry. The study is called The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada, and was written by Birgitte Andersen [...]
Hello Digital Citizen readers from the XO, an impressive new free software laptop for children all over the world. I’ve recently received my XO, installed the battery, powered it up, and I’m on my way to doing all sorts of things with it. This machine comes with a free software operating system so it teaches [...]
Marco Tabini describes why he finds the GPL to be “morally repugnant” in the context of discussing the copyright infringement lawsuit facing Verizon right now. Verizon is accused of distributing the GNU General Public Licensed software “BusyBox” without distributing the complete corresponding source code as that license requires. Verizon is clearly in the wrong here, [...]
The Motion Picture Association, a corporate movie lobby group, was distributing software which allows the installer (and, of course, the MPA) to get more information on bandwidth usage. The MPA hopes that this will more clearly indicate who is using the Internet to share copies of movies whose copyrights are held by the MPA’s clients. [...]
Illuminata Analyst Gordon Haff is quoted as saying If people get the impression that even inadvertent license violations will get them involved with lawyers, you could well see some making the call that it’s safer to stay away from open source The GNU GPL is not an “open source” license except that the Open Source [...]
Buy Nothing Day encourages you to buy nothing today—”Participate by not participating”. When AdBusters tried to advertise Buy Nothing Day on television, MTV rejected their ad. MTV, the channel that markets itself to hip youth, has decreed that our Buy Nothing Day public service spot “goes further than we are willing to accept on our [...]
According to CNN, Sen. Barack Obama didn’t want him on the ballot. The Democrats are being shown up by Colbert’s short-lived presidential candidacy. A recent Colbert Report episode features recent corporate news coverage of his campaign and one of the clips shows Colbert polling ahead of a few Democrats. I doubt the Democrats like exposing [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley Richard Stallman