May 29th, 2007 by mattl
Something I’ve been thinking about lately - what role should Free Software play in Free Culture?
Who am I? I’m Matt Lee - a comedian, comic book artist and author. I’m also a free software hacker.
Is Free Culture the combination of Free Art and Free Software and some other things? FreeCulture.org and the students of the United States have a golden opportunity to set an example here, by switching to using only Free Software.
A potentially controversial statement, and it should be clear that my views might not represent those of FreeCulture.org.
Some notes came out of the National Conference about Free Software and it was great to see the Free Software Foundation and Defective By Design represented.
Anyway, I thank Nelson and the FreeCulture.org gang for giving me the opportunity to post this. Give me your feedback by email - mattl at gnu dot org or find me on IRC - mattl.
Comments (7)
April 2nd, 2007 by Asheesh Laroia
I read via a Public Knowledge blog post that Apple is going to sell music from a major label in a non-DRM’d format. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, software that restricts what your computer will let you do with music you typically have paid for. For example, the DRM on the iTunes Music Store prevents synchronizing full-quality files to portable music players other than the iPod.
As a consumer, you can now pay $0.99 for a DRM’d song or $0.30 more ($1.29) for a DRMless version with higher audio quality (bitrate). You can also up-convert your music for $0.30.
During these approx. four years of iPod + iTunes Music Store dominance, I always thought that Apple had built its empire on the lock-in between the music store and the portable player. So this move surprised me (I checked the date - April 2, not April Fool’s). This is a very different approach to the music industry than we saw with Microsoft and the Zune, and I’d say this looks very hopeful. The Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player, seemed to be a a pushover for the DRM folks; Microsoft gives about a dollar per Zune sold to Universal, a major label. That’s money handed to Universal for doing absolutely nothing. And the Zune has the famous “squirting” feature which provides very restricted music sharing, adding restrictions to any song you share.
This isn’t the first time EMI has played with selling music online without digital restrictions. Late 2006, they distributed a Nora Jones song in the standard MP3 format on both the Yahoo! music store and eMusic (a company I personally buy music from).
The way I see it, Steve Jobs is performing a market experiment. What do consumers think their freedom is worth?
Comments (5)
October 13th, 2006 by Elizabeth Stark
Freeculture.org is pleased to announce the contest winners for our Down With DRM video contest. We had a lot of great entries, and want to thank *all* of the participants for their submissions. They’ve all contributed greatly to raising awareness in the fight against DRM.
And the winners are (in no particular order):
The winners will all receive a Neuros OSD digital video recorder. Thanks again to Neuros for providing our wonderful prize and to Defective By Design for the support!
So check out the videos, rate them, and send them to your friends to help put an end to DRM.
Comments (40)
September 15th, 2006 by Elizabeth Stark
Enter the Down with DRM video contest for a chance to win a Neuros OSD - a portable digital VCR! (Thanks jborn.)
Joining in Oct 3rd - Day Against DRM, Free Culture will select the 5 best anti-DRM video entries and award a Neuros OSD to each creator. DefectiveByDesign.org is also looking to air selected anti-DRM videos on their website during the week of October 3rd, and we want to give them a hand.
Here are the official rules to enter Free Culture’s Down with DRM Video Contest:
- Deadline for submissions: Sunday, October 1 at 11:59pm EDT
- Criteria for video:
- Anti-DRM themed
- Short
- Video, animation, or remix
- Make it catchy — we want these videos to be viral
- Please submit your video to the online video sharing network(s) that you prefer. Here are some examples:
- Please tag your video with “downwithdrm” and “dbdoct3″so that people can search for it.
- Preference will be given to submissions under free content licenses such as Creative Commons BY-SA, BY, PD, or the Free Art license.
- E-mail downwithdrm@freeculture.org with a link to your video by October 1 at 11:59pm EDT.
- Free Culture will select the top 5 entries and award the winners with a Neuros OSD (one per video).
UPDATE: We have announced the winners of the contest!
Comments (24)
March 2nd, 2006 by Bill Herman
In yesterday’s Philadelphia Weekly, on page 18, there’s a picture of me holding a flyer that says “Are you buying a dangerous CD?”
The story, Copy Cats, is another great media clipping covering the antics of FreeCulture.org.
Saturday, we were protesting outside Tower Records on South St.
We believe that the major music labels are using deceptive business practices and stealing legal rights from consumers. They cripple more and more new CDs with digital rights management technologies. In the most egregious case, Sony infected millions of computers by installing malicious, hidden software (a “rootkit“) onto Windows computers of users who merely inserted a Sony music CD.
I have to publicly admit that, even though I am the one pictured, I deserve little credit for the protest. FreeCulture Swarthmore students organized it; I just showed up.
I guess I was the most menacing presence. As noted in the article, I “embarrassed” the other students and pissed off the Tower Records management.
This is just further proof that, for a group dedicated to information policy wonkdom , FCo sure is good at landing earned media.
Update: this story is now also on BoingBoing; here’s the link. Thanks, Cory.
This is cross-posted from ShoutingLoudly.
Comments (0)
February 2nd, 2006 by Gavin Baker
If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign our pledge to boycott DRM. The deadline is 6 February, just a few days away.
In under 1 month, nearly 3,500 people have pledged to never buy a CD with DRM. We far surpassed our initial goal of 500, but the more signatures, the stronger the message to the music industry. Please join us and pledge to boycott DRM—and ask your friends to do the same.
Comments (0)
January 6th, 2006 by Nelson Pavlosky
Join us in our new Pledgebank pledge to boycott DRM:
DRM severely restricts our rights as users, creators, and members of the global community. We will not stand by and let fair use grow extinct as a consequence of poorly thought out technology and the laws that support it.
It’s really absurd that the content industry wants to penalize people who are buying legitimate CDs by restricting what they can do with the products they can buy, and we should not support this behavior.
Comments (1)
