BBC is selling your freedoms out to Microsoft

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You remember when the BBC proposed their Windows-only media player? Now they’re doing it. On Friday, 27 July 2007 Defective By Design reported:

Today the BBC made it official — they have been corrupted by Microsoft. With today’s launch of the iPlayer, the BBC Trust has failed in its most basic of duties and handed over to Microsoft sole control of the on-line distribution of BBC programming. From today, you will need to own a Microsoft operating system to view BBC programming on the web. This is akin to saying you must own a Sony TV set to watch BBC TV. And you must accept the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) that the iPlayer imposes. You simply cannot be allowed to be in control of your computer according to the BBC.

Defective By Design follows this up with analysis of how this decision violates the BBC charter.

So Britons pay for the BBC’s works and are saddled with digital restrictions management that officially only plays in one proprietary player on a proprietary operating system. Since the iPlayer is proprietary software it can dictate when you can play BBC media and if you tell it (even indirectly) where you are, the iPlayer could be programmed to use that information to restrict where you can play media. You wouldn’t tolerate these restrictions for DVDs, audio CDs, audio cassettes, LPs, or books. Why tolerate it for the BBC?

For now, FairUse4WM will effectively strip the DRM and leave you with a copy you can play in free software players or transcode into some other format. But FairUse4WM doesn’t address the the underlying issue here.

Shutting out the competition: Compatible goals or conspiracy?

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Sen. Mike Gravel and Rep. Dennis Kucinich rightly identify Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards conspiring to narrow the Democratic Party contenders at the NAACP Democrat forum in Detroit on 2007 July 12. When the senators thought they were off-mic they had a brief but frank discussion about eliminating their competition:

Edwards: We should try to have a more serious, and a smaller, group.

Clinton: There was an attempt by our campaigns to do that, it got, somehow, detoured. We’ve gotta get back to it. Our guys should talk.

Sen. Clinton is practiced in whittling down competition by not debating them. Not long ago she used anti-democratic techniques to retain her Senate seat against anti-war candidates in New York.

But they couldn’t get away with this without the complicit mainstream media. Showing more of their shameful attitude, the New York Times is there to join the conspirators. Which side the Times is on is all too clear when one skims

their sidebar on “The 2008 Race”. Not that I expected better from the paper that runs sourceless headline articles about WMD in Iraq and then lets those reporters leave of their own accord.

I guess we just can’t afford to have people’s candidacies weighed on the value of their ideas. What is it the Progressive Left argues every other election cycle? This election cycle must be “too important” for that…again.

Principled reasons to not buy Harry Potter books

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In April 2003 parodies of Harry Potter were suppressed. Rowling challenged a book about “Tanya Grotter” and won. In July 2005, a Canadian bookstore sold the then new Harry Potter book “by mistake”. JK Rowling, Harry Potter’s author, allowed her publisher’s lawyers to challenge people’s right to read something they had purchased.

Richard Stallman addresses the issue quite well (including further explanation of the Canadian “mistaken” book selling) and he explains further the need for this campaign against buying Harry Potter books.

This isn’t to say one should not read the books, that’s a matter of personal taste and of course one must be free to read. The issue here is about opposing reduction in our freedom to read and opposing reduction in expressive freedom. If you think Harry Potter is worth reading, you can borrow a copy or buy a used copy (no money goes to the publisher when you buy used media).

UK citizens: Sign this petition

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There’s a petition to tell the government to favor free software for all publicly-funded software projects and it’s hosted on petitions.pm.gov.uk. So here’s hoping that more UK citizens will sign it before 22 July and people with power will realize this is worth implementing.

A talking point some politicians understand right away: Free software means jobs—You can hire people to do work for you, pay them a living wage, and get software you control. If you don’t like the work they do, hire someone else. There’s no need to hand over any slice of your soverignty to a foreign proprietor. There’s no need to deny yourself the freedom to inspect, share, or modify your software. Hire local developers, artists, and writers to work with you and license the work under a free software license.

Thanks to BadVista.fsf.org for the tip.

Be careful about placing style above substance.

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While I too happen to agree with Moore’s points, I have to disagree with weighing someone’s “personality” (and I’m not sure what, exactly, that means) rather than the substance of what they say. It suggests a lack of priorities I find dangerous on important issues of the day—we’re dealing with life and death issues when we talk about war and health care. We really don’t have time, nor is it in our best interest, to give people any excuse to dismiss an argument for being vaguely unpalatable. I thought Moore’s stridency was perfectly appropriate and I look forward to more of the same. The war machine and HMOs are quite strident when pushing their points, it’s time the rest of us framed issues plainly, directly, and without reservation.

To the extent anyone in the US supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq is due to the misinformation the corporate media fed them. Now the US public knows better and they aren’t fans of that war at all. The media were busy kissing administration ass instead of holding the government’s feet to the fire. The media have a duty to ask the tough questions and they reliably still don’t (note the lack of examination of proponents of war with Iran such as Senators Clinton and Obama; when Sen. Gravel points out the code talking in a debate, he is dismissed as a kook). We need more people to get the courage to call the corporate media on their lies and lack of apology. We know they can do it, look at how the New York Times (a leading proponent of war with Iraq during the run-up to the war) ran an exposé on Jayson Blair for some relatively unimportant lies. If the Times had any real pressure on them, they’d have to expose how Judith Miller lied about far more important issues on the Times’ front page.

Another problem: time in interviews. As Chomsky points out in “Manufacturing Consent”, restricting people’s time to short interviews and soundbites is another way to get people to reiterate the same old (invariably business-friendly) points you hear on corporate “news” all day every day—you don’t have time to say anything new or different. If a ten-minute segment is ever thought to be a gift, something is very wrong.

One such different point on health care, for instance, is one Moore explains in proper interviews with real journalists who aren’t embedded with corporations or government (such as his recent interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman). Moore explains that “universal” health care isn’t good enough. We can have “universal” health care the way some US states have universal car insurance: simply legally require everyone to buy a plan with an insurance agency. What the US needs is single-payer universal health care, and HR676 (the Conyers/Kucinich health care plan) is a great step in that direction. The HMOs had their turn and they kill people. They need to go. American readers should require their Congresspeople to co-sponsor HR676 now.

Corporate power criticism needs to be more common

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Today’s Democracy Now! has a very recommendable hour with Ralph Nader on corporate criticism and how paid off our elected officials are. Free software activism, potable water, clean air, launching wars of aggression (and the lack of punishment); every issue you can think of suffers as a result of corporate dominance in our culture and our collective lack of focus which would keep corporations subservient to the will of real people. Very much a part of this discussion is a movie I can’t recommend enough—The Corporation which you can also find online gratis distributed via BitTorrent at leading peer-to-peer websites (including OneBigTorrent formerly ChomskyTorrents.org and The Pirate Bay).

Nader was also at the aforementioned Taming the Giant Corporation conference where he was interviewed by Amy Goodman (video, audio, high-quality audio, transcript).

The deceptive value of freedom to choose.

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I happened across a blog post discussing a dilemma between “my capitalist “do-what-you-want-with-your-money” ideals with my free software ideal “omg-you-don’t-know-what-you-are-doing-with-your-money.””. The poster concluded that he “ultimately, [believes] in choice.”. It’s a good thing that this blog entry says there are better free software arguments. I’ve heard better arguments too, so I’ll try to lay out one such argument I’ve found quite compelling.

One of the problems of focusing on “freedom of choice” (as it is often framed) is how easily restricted one’s choices become when one ignores important freedoms such as the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify computer software at any time for any reason (collectively known as “software freedom”). For example, consider web browsers: Not that long ago there were 3 web browsers people generally paid attention to—Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. Choice was satisfied: there were at least two options. But software freedom was nowhere to be found. Software freedom was not among the choices.

The freedom-of-choice argument frames proprietary and free software as points on a spectrum of equally valid alternatives. Any ethical examination of how the software treats the user is tossed aside in favor of technocratic examination (which program is more powerful or reliable, for instance). The free software movement’s philosophy removes a proprietor’s metaphorical seat at the table by showing how proprietary software is unethical; a choice of dependency or enslavement to another’s control over your computer (and, as we become more dependent on computers, control over your life) is no choice at all. Thus a freedom-of-choice argument reverses the effect of the free software movement’s philosophy. Anyone who argues for freedom-of-choice is arguing to replace that seat at the table and invite proprietors to fill that seat, offering us less software freedom.

Even if free software programs aren’t as powerful or reliable as their proprietary alternatives, free software is better because it respects the user’s freedom. It is wiser to choose free software because free software can be improved to become powerful and reliable but it is rare when a proprietary program can be made free. In other words, we can collectively fix what’s broken when we have the freedom to fix it but when we’re stuck with broken proprietary software we’re at the proprietor’s mercy. We are always better off improving the programs we have which respect our software freedom rather than entering into dependency with a proprietor.

There are technical reasons to exclusively choose free software as well, but none are quite as compelling as the ethical reasons: all programs have bugs but free software lets technical users help you fix those bugs. If you’re not a developer, you can help developers by sending in detailed bug reports and installing improved versions of software. The more free software you run, the more developers can help you diagnose and debug what went wrong. Proprietors sometimes offer to let you send in bug reports, but they might not choose to fix your bugs. If the proprietor is uncooperative you have nobody left to turn to for help; all proprietors are monopolists.

“Well, fuck you then, Obama.”

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According to the International Herald-Tribune, junior Illinois Democratic Party Senator Barack Obama said:

“I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president’s authority,” [and,] “I believe if we began impeachment proceedings we will be engulfed in more of the politics that has made Washington dysfunction,” he added. “We would once again, rather than attending to the people’s business, be engaged in a tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, nonstop circus.”

One notable reaction (reminiscent of the reaction Vice President Cheney received in New Orleans shortly after hurricane Katrina hit) is found on digg.com:

“Well, fuck you then, Obama.”

GNU GPLv3 is released today

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Today the GNU General Public License version 3, the preeminent free software license, and the GNU LGPL were released today at noon Eastern Daylight Time. Read the press release about the announcement events or go directly to the Free Software Foundation’s website for live streaming coverage of the events.

Here are the official recordings, most likely licensed to share under a simple verbatim copying and distribution license:

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire recording is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Read the press release about today’s GPLv3 launch and the new GPL (HTML, TeX, Text) and Lesser GNU GPL (HTML or Text).

Congratulations to the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen (or his Wikipedia entry which has many pointers to his talks), the Software Freedom Law Center, and the community who participated in GPLv3 revisions and critique. Our hard work will definitely benefit us all and continue to serve as a constitution of the free software movement.

“Mainstreaming” reasonably licensed music requires playing it.

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The Creative Commons organization has a blog entry on “mainstreaming open music” quoting a means for taking over with music people can share. I think this is right-headed and entirely more productive than trying to negotiate a less painful arrangement with corporate labels and their representatives.

This kind of discussion reframes the debate toward something technocrats do well: how shall we use what we’ve got to better allow people to easily hear this music? The free software music player Rhythmbox makes it easier to audition Jamendo and Magnatune tracks. It’s my hope that this kind of collaboration will spread. If you’re interested in listening to a lot of music, I’m sure there are people who would like to hear your recommendations!