Christian Seberino will doing a presentation:
Intellectual Property Extremism:
We are in the middle of the Intellectual Property Wars. This is sort
of the Civil Rights Movement of the 21st century.
* Did you know that criminal charges were brought against a Linux
user just for trying to do the good deed of giving away software
to play DVDs?
* Did you know that if you design a Linux e-commerce application
that requires too few mouse clicks that you may be committing a
crime?
* Did you know that Linspire, a Linux company, is reconsidering a
decision to distribute software over peer-to-peer networks because
of the fear of legal retribution if they do?
* Did you know that Senator Berman of California recently proposed
a bill that in some cases would make it legal for others to hack
into your Linux PC without fear of liability?
You'd almost think the US government had declared war on Linux and
open source!
I framed these points to emphasize their impact on the Linux
community. Unfortunately, this war is wider than just some odd
discrimination against geeks.
* Did you know that the Girl Scouts were sued for singing songs
around camp fires because they wouldn't pay up?
I could go on and on with many more examples but you get the point.
This extremism is sometimes justified today with references to the
sanctity of "property". Those who disagree are labelled as:
"anti-property", "un-American" and "pirates". Such rhetoric is a
ridiculous distortion of our history, the Constitution and common
sense.
One severe handicap in fighting this war is that it is not quick and
easy to understand the counter-arguments we need to make against such
charges.
We'd all rather be talking about interesting Linux software and
hardware at KPLUG meetings. If you can spare a short amount of your
valuable time, I'll try my best to give you a worthwhile overview to
enable you to talk intelligently about such matters and to prevent
yourself and others from becoming casualties.
Most of this discussion will be "pirated" from Professor Lawrence
Lessig's book Free Culture .
--
Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net
http://www.paccomp.com
Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B 8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the
system of a regular government.
- Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-newbie
