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A day of activities and information-spreading about the evils of Digital Rights Management. Fight!

From Boing Boing:

Remember, DRM doesn’t stop “piracy” — the only people who get DRM infections are people who don’t pirate their media. You get DRM by buying your movies, music, games and books through authorized channels — the stuff you download from P2P or buy off of a blanket at a flea-market has already had the DRM cracked off of it. They say that DRM “keeps honest people honest” — but all it does is keep honest people in chains.

The House is preparing to vote on whether or not to preserve the currently operative principle of “network neutrality” – meaning that a big ISP cannot decide to selectively slow down access to sites that don’t pay them premium protection money. If this vote goes the wrong way, the Verizons et al. can charge, say, Amazon a huge fee to not throttle-down traffic to their site, while political blogs and everyone else who cannot afford the ‘protection’ fees will suddenly have slow, slow-loading sites. Bah. They must be stopped.

Trenchant as always, Greg Palast loudly fails to applaud the generals who are currently slapping Rumsfeld like a punk. Not because he doesn’t approve of the slapping, but because whacking this Punch won’t bother the puppeteers hardly at all. Read his essay on why Rumsfeld should not resign.

To very loosely paraphrase Greg Palast’s missive to most of the political press: “Ring, ring. It’s the Clue Phone and it’s for you.” Palast opens up a can of reality check. Read his piece…

Television dramas have their heroes. The prefascist hero was a policeman. The fascist hero is a torturer.

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When I read the email I receive from some of my favorite not-for-profit organizations, and see links to further information like this: http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=Fa_ZPSW_W-e_kiG002aSKxB (don’t try to go there – long alphanumeric strings have been changed to protect the innocent), I become cranky. Why? Read on.

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