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 avoid [...]
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 of [...]
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 grace [...]
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 [...]
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 wasn’t ignored [...]
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 what we [...]
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 China [...]
Apparently a lot of you have given the Democrats your votes, your time, and your money. What will you do if President-elect Obama continues President Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors thus making Obama as multiply impeachable as Bush already is? Ralph Nader succinctly lays out the problem for Obama continuing the crimes of Bush’s presidency: [...]
After reading “Begging the Software Gods“, I read a response that seemed genuine. This post is a follow-up to that response. Nothing is “special about software” and nobody said that you deserve certain freedoms for software but not freedoms for your food, clothing, and other things. There are other groups of people working on other [...]
Congratulations to Randall Cotton for his well-deserved article about his anti-war and local tax policy activism. I voted for the local property tax increase (aimed to help the poor) due to his activism. I don’t mind spending more money in taxes when the money will go to help those in need. Governments are in a [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley