I happened to see the 2010-02-18 Rachel Maddow show and the 2010-02-25 Democracy Now!. Both discussed Andrew Joseph Stack III, the man who flew his plane into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas which killed Stack and IRS manager Vernon Hunter. Stack left a suicide note (local copy) published [...]
“Sita Sings the Blues” is an independently produced movie that is widely legally copied on the Internet. Writer/director/producer Nina Paley released “Sita” under a license that allows sharing (and far more, actually, but the details of how much more are beside the point of this article). Sita is also for sale on her [...]
How good can a president be when he continues the hated acts of his predecessor? How valuable can that president’s support be when they challenge the predecessor’s wrongdoing but remain virtually silent about continuing the same bad policies?
Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyer’s Journal in a web exclusive (video, transcript) had this to say about [...]
Obama recently announced his intention to appoint David Kappos, IBM VP and general counsel, to head the US Patent and Trademark Office. While some press highlights his changes to US patent policy, even a quick glance at the changes reveals them to be no serious challenge to US patent policy or IBM’s power to [...]
President Obama is the latest beneficiary of corporate stenographers to power known as the American mainstream press. The range of allowable debate makes room for NBC’s recent puff pieces on Obama’s White House while excluding issues of substance such as questioning the war in Afghanistan, examining the implications of fighting wars with mercenaries instead [...]
Senator Obama flip-flopped on civil liberties and privacy during his presidential campaign landing on supporting telco immunity. Now President Obama continues the assault on our civil liberties by siding with former President Bush and going beyond: Obama extends immunity to protect government officials, something not surprising but exactly what Democrats said was the saving [...]
James Boyle, law professor and author of “The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind“, recently wrote about his mixed feelings concerning the release of his book for the Amazon Kindle, a portable proprietary electronic device for reading texts.
His points concerning DRM (which I prefer to call “digital restrictions management” because that acronym expansion [...]
Around this time of year or around Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, people cite King’s speeches. Most don’t cite “Beyond Vietnam” which sharply and rightly criticizes American foreign policy including calling the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon point out, this speech [...]
Today is Buy Nothing Day, a day when many around the world encourage you to understand how restrictive it is to be a consumer. A consumer-driven economy weakens people by reducing us to purchasing machines that earn money in order to spend it mostly on things we don’t need. We become defined by [...]
Recently the FDA issued an import alert which allows detainment without inspection of “all milk products, milk derived ingredients and finished food products containing milk from China due to the presence of melamine and/or melamine analogs”. The FDA notes that this is a a recurring problem: “In 2007, bulk vegetable protein products imported from [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley