GeekPAC

If you’ve been reading this site, you may be surprised to know that we haven’t ever officially “launched.” We just sort of came to be and started blogging on the AB 1668 process. As we look to extend the number of people involved in bytesfree.org, as well as the scope of what bytesfree.org hopes to accomplish, it became clear that bytesfree.org had to graduate to a real organization with some real infrastructure. And so it begins…

On Friday, February 8, 8pm at SCALE, there will be an Open Source Politics birds-of-a-feather session. If you intend to be at SCALE, and we hope you will be, please do drop by. We will discuss the upcoming June primaries in California (Feb. 5 is just the presidential primary) and the issues that matter to us: copyright reform, information rights, DRM, open formats, digital divide, open voting, etc.

One of the core values for bytesfree.org is that everyone deserves the right to access whatever information they legally possess. Another core value is that these rights, what we call “information rights”, rise to the level of basic human rights, on account of the prominence of the Internet and digital technologies. As we looked around at the organizations dedicated to these issues, 2 things stood out:

1. they did not communicate those messages effectively, if at all, in our opinion. Or…
2. they were incorporated as 501 (c)(3) nonprofits, which limited the amount of legislative and election lobbying they could perform

So on February 8, we will announce a few things. First will be an introduction to who is behind this web site, which will be Ilan Rabinovitch, a co-founder of SCALE, John Mark Walker, and 2 other names to be mentioned then. We will also give an update on our application for 501 (c)(4) status, which gives us more leeway in terms of political activities. After that, it will all be about how to get ready for June. We hope to see you there!