Restrictions Management makes Davos agenda

The threat to freedom that is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is up on the agenda at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at Davos, Switzerland, sez DRMwatch. This being a meeting place of high-level politicians and managers, with the public and the media comfortably locked out, it looks like a perfect opportunity to promote far-reaching Read more »

Surprise: CD sales drop in 2005

The music industry majors have done their very best to scare away their customers in 2005. This included taking computer illiterates to court for filesharing and willfully exposing customer’s computers to attacks (no, I’m not linking to any Sony Rootkit stories now. You can hardly go outside these days without one flying in your face.) Read more »

EFF: Cory Doctorow retires for writing

It is with sadness that I read that Cory Doctorow” has retired from his job as the European Coordinator of the EFF. It is with joy that I learn that he has done so in order to write full-time. Until now, Cory has something like three novels and a decent supply of short-stories under his Read more »

France: Cultural flatrate? Could this be true?

Thorough information is still hard to find, but it seems that the French parliament has taken a step I have long hoped for. As Bjoern Schiessle and Markus Beckedahl of netzpolitik.org write in accordance with the Register, the assembly voted 30-28 in favour of setting up a collection model for the remuneration of artists and Read more »

Unauthorised copying and farm subsidies

The San Francisco Chronicle carries an interesting article linking rich-country farm subsidies and developing countries’ inaction towards (or resistance to) “anti-piracy” measures. The push to get rid of agricultural subsidies is linked, in the minds of poor countries, to any expansion in exports from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The leaders of poorer countries of the Read more »

IPRED2 universally unloved

The International Herald Tribune has a wonderful article on the stupidity that is the EU Commission’s proposed IPRED2 directive. Heavyweights like Nokia and Microsoft on one hand, and the grass-roots Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure on the other, are making common cause against wide-ranging legislation proposed by the European Commission that would criminalize all Read more »

Vienna Manipulations on my favourite web cartoon

The Vienna Manipulations story has reached one of the hubs of the Free Software universe: The comic strip site Everybody Loves Eric Raymond I heavily advise swallowing any liquids you might be consuming at the moment before clicking this link. Otherwise your keyboard and screen might suffer.

Head of Publishing Industry reports his brain missing

Maybe it’s just me today, but this outburst of ignorance reported on The Register really has me fuming. The latest in a series of idiocies in the publishing industry’s campaign against Google Books features Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council, ranting about “parasitic” search firms: The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Read more »

Open letter on Vienna Manipulations in Austrian “Standard”

The Austrian daily “Der Standard” has published an open letter to Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (in German) by FSF Europe Reinhard Müller. Müller refers to the secretly modified Vienna Conclusions, the statement of a high-level panel discussion which was changed without the consent (or even consultation) of the undersigned from a document pointing out the value Read more »