Licensing

I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun. Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

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Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons has been coming up on my radar alot over the past few weeks. Now, Creative Commons happens to be one of the clients I manage, so I guess that's not too surprising, but I'm talking about outside of work. For example, this blog post at World Changing is an interview with LL about CC's Developing Nations License. As usual, innovative and thought-provoking ideas from CC. The idea is this: keep your copyright in the "developed" world while distributing it freely (with attribution) in the developing world.

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DefectiveByDesign.org a joint project of teh Free Software Foundation and CivicActions got some digital ink this morning in the Chicago Tribune. Columnist Eric Zorn wrote about Amazon's Unboxed license agreement which FSF ED Peter Brown described as: [A] road map for what all content providers want to have down the line: Their goal is to have so many locks and gatekeepers that every interaction you have with copyrighted material becomes a transaction. Cory Doctorow published a point-by-point analysis of the Unboxed license which represents some of the most restrictive and anti user DRM we have ever seen.

This is why we have declared October 3rd the "Day Against DRM". DBD members around the world will be taking part in both virtual and meat-space actions to raise awareness of the dangers of DRM. Check out the site, join an action, or start your own. The only way DRM will fail is if people know about it (and don't take my word for it, that line is borrowed from a Disney Exec!).

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Just like it says. Check out this amazing tool: http://www.scrutinizethis.com/ Submitted by Brooks Cole

Today The Free Software Foundation and CivicActions launched the Campaign in Seattle at the Microsoft WinHEC conference. We had a great time with about 20 local Free Software and privacy advocates. We all dressed up in hazmat suits and handed out leaflets warning of the dangers of DRM to attendees of theWinHEC2006 conference.

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