SOPA and PIPA, the poorly-conceived draft legislation currently being considered in the USA, sparked a worldwide protest yesterday. I think they would also be bad for open source, and I explain why over on ComputerWorldUK.
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I was pleased to be able to send OSI’s sign-on to the civil society letter protesting the bad laws being considered by the US legislature at present. You can read more about it on my OSI blog.
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I’ve posted an overview of FOSDEM, the huge open source developer conference coming up soon in Brussels, on ComputerWorldUK today.
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Use the force of Parody: except in the UK, originally uploaded by Open Rights Group.
Parody is a powerful weapon for the campaigner. Turning the words of a target of criticism against themselves is a time-honoured way of criticising, and done well (as Greenpeace did in their parody of Volkswagen last year) it’s very effective. It also allows campaigners to use a strong cultural idea to ensure its audience understands a point without lengthy explanations, like the Newport State Of Mind parody. And in some cases it’s just pure, harmless fun, like the ongoing meme of redubbing Downfall.
While they would have been “fair use” in the US, all these examples were subject to censorship in the UK using copyright law as the excuse. The Open Rights Group has launched a new campaign to establish the right to parody into UK law, as recommended by a recent government review of copyright law. I think it’s well worth supporting, and if I had any artistic talent at all I’d be contributing to their activities. Maybe you can help?
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I’m pleased to say I’ll be delivering a short keynote at FOSDEM on February 4th at noon, explaining the new governance plans for the Open Source Initiative and announcing news of progress on the first steps of implementing them. Many thanks to the Programme Committee for their flexibility in arranging this.
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Mozilla released a new version of the Mozilla Public License this week. I think it’s a very positive development for open source globally – read why over on ComputerWorldUK.
[Updated: French translation available]
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I know from the statistics that many of the people who read this are in the USA. Apologies to everyone else, but I’d like to ask all my US readers to take a look at the minimalist petition on the White House e-petitions site asking the President to veto SOPA and PIPA when their future merged offspring finally reaches him. 46,000 people have already signed it so it has already passed the site threshold, but if you agree with it, please sign it and tell all your friends about it too. You may also want to take a look at the E-PARASITE petition – together these two petitions are head-and-shoulders above all the rest in the system.
I believe it is very important to disprove the assertion being made by the forces of 20th century monopoly that the only opponents of this bill are Google and its peers. Anyone who understands the Internet can see that the provisions in SOPA/PIPA are far too broad and over-reaching and place powerful new tools for market abuse into the hands of organisations that have already proved they can’t be trusted with such tools. Just as the DMCA has been used to prevent competition in the ink cartridge market for printers (and much, much worse), so SOPA will be used to stifle competition and consumer opposition even more.
There may be an appropriate law to help Hollywood and Nashville avoid the inevitable gravity of the meshed society (I personally doubt it), but if there is, this law is not it. Make sure your President knows that, even if Congress doesn’t understand the Internet, plenty of Americans do.
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The UK’s Minister of Agriculture thinks that the law against hunting foxes is impossible to enforce and should therefore be repealed. I wonder how he and his government colleagues feel about impossible-to-enforce laws against sharing copyrighted materials? For more, see my article in ComputerWorldUK…
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a short 2011 annual statistics report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
In 2011, there were 287 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 618 posts.
Click here to see the complete report.
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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers and clients. See my full disclosure of interests.
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