Monthly Archives: May 2007
50 Politicians Who Take Money from the RIAA
Thanks to Ilan, the founder of SCALE, I was notified of this list of 50 congresspeople who take money from the RIAA. Here’s the breakdown (from Consumerist.com): Congressperson Receiving Contributions From The RIAA Amount Dist 19-FL WEXLER, ROBERT DEM … Continue reading
Example of Open Formats at Work
For those who think the open format legislation battle is all about one competitor vs. another, you’re wrong. This write-up on the recent KOffice ODF Sprint is a good example of what can happen with a truly open format: collaboration, … Continue reading
OSBC – Matt Szulik on Open Standards
I read the early transcript of Szulik’s keynote from day 1 of OSBC 2007. I was heartened to hear this bit on open formats in general: Governments around the Globe are putting money into thinking about and implementing open standards, … Continue reading
All Your Rights Are Belong to Us
For those of us who thought copyright law in the United States couldn’t possibly get any stronger, we were shocked and dismayed by the unveiling today of a new lobbyist group comprised of “backers of stronger copyright laws.” This group … Continue reading
Beware of Lobbyists Bearing Gifts
In some of the video posted on this site from the April 17 JEDE committee hearing, one of the defenses Microsoft used to oppose AB 1668 is that everyone was already converging on standards so there was no need for … Continue reading
Microsoft Takes Aim at US Economy
Microsoft has entered a new stage of aggression against open source technology and open formats. On this web site and many others, I have reported on the various shenanigans Microsoft has employed to stop current open formats legislation. And now … Continue reading
Take the BytesFree.org Pledge
Do you create software? Do you know someone who does? Take the BytesFree.org pledge. Promise not to make software that violates our information access rights.
Open Formats in Other Lands: Norway Joins the Fray
Was happy to see Andy Updegrove’s Standards Blog with news that Norway is looking to adopt ODF and PDF as mandatory document formats. From his post: Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of … Continue reading
Protecting Our Basic Human Rights: Access to Information
Here’s a paper I wrote to define what I feel should be the ultimate goal of digital rights: constitutional protection of our rights to information. I put it on the bytesfree.org wiki under a Creative Commons license so that others … Continue reading
Dear Jeff Nolan: It’s Called Civil Disobedience
Jeff complains that Digg.com caved to pressure when it agreed to stop censoring posts about everyone’s favorite hexadecimal number. Um yeah, Jeff. You see, there’s this history of people rebelling when laws become too oppressive and do not represent the … Continue reading