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A particularly good rejoinder from RMS in the Lynx flamewar is here:

That the Lynx developers use the GPL for Lynx has no effect on *your* creative efforts. It does, however, specify conditions for whether you can use *their* creative efforts. You seem prepared to put conditions on the use of your work, and your conditions are much less cooperative that the GNU GPL.

It sounds rather DMCA-like. I wonder if Parliament passed something DMCA-like with almost no fanfare.

No. Heritage Canada and Industry Canada have been collaborating in a very significant consultation process accross Canada. I attended their Ottawa consultation meeting, which had surprisingly strong "citizen" representation. The big american content producers were given their say, but not given a lot of credibility. Michael Geist, a U of Ottawa lawyer , was particularly good with not letting things by.

Canada DMCA opponents mailing list.
Digital-Copyright.ca
Thorough background brought to you by Matthew Skala, the chap that broke (IIRC) the Cyber-Patrol encryption and, again IIRC, was pursued by Mattel for DMCA violations, despite being a Canadian.

In Canada it is also (...for now... but stay tuned to properly oppose any pending legislation(!)) perfectly legal for a person to make copies of their own media. It is also absolutely LEGAL to copy ANOTHER PERSONS AUDIO CD.

What does this mean? (first see this faq) You can take your friend's CD and burn yourself a copy - and its legal. This is because Canadians pay a levy on CDRs which 'compensate' producers (et al). I dont agree that this is the best tactic, but it is a powerful one. If people were informed of this fact, and groups actively promoted this, you could eliminate the present distribution scheme in Canada (retailers/distributors/labels). The Library would be all that Canadians needed to have copies of all the music they wanted.

Now, why is this going OT? I would like to know, does anyone have links or Info to make a Linux based, CDR 'copy machine'? I would like to organize a 'Copy Your Friends CDs Party" at a library or some such (near the Uni in town would be good), but would like to be able to copy many-many volumes of CDs.

I also have thought about make such a device available on loan to local Libraries in order to 'promote' and 'encourage' the practice.

Can anyone provide a info to do such a thing? What would be really nice is if the device could be operated without a monitor - just insert discs and close the trays...

Most likely not, politicians all over the world have been busy selling out the little guys rights to big corporations for the last few decades. See stuff like MAI and fast track

Canada is getting very close to having its own version of the DMCA. It may not "seem much better" for long.

It already has. My involvement with Free software has already led me to protest about the actions of RiceTec Inc. who have patented Basmati rice!

IMHO, Basmati rice is used by humanity under the terms of a GPL-like license (if it wasn't, why does it produce seeds (aka source code) that can be grown (compiled) to produce new rice?)

Luckily, it looks as though, for once, the system came through and ruled that 75% of their claims were invalid

Info: Global Democracy Ottawa

those who feel, like me, that a non-violent response makes sense, might be interested in this petition for a non-violent response.

and please, if you've found any others, please post them here!

note, i'm certainly not saying that the perpetrators of this attack should be allowed to go free. any terrorist group must be removed from circulation. but bombing afghanistan will only increase the cycle of violence; if not today, then tomorrow when we can even less afford it. and do we really want to see even more innocent people suffer? whether on this continent or another, it's all the same thing...

"Violence breeds violence... Pure goals can never justify impure or violent action... They say the means are after all just means. I would say means are after all everything. As the means, so the end." - Gandhi

Absolute bullshit...If you know the URL of this "Union Busting" webpage, let me know, I would like to see it.
Wrong fact #1. It's been all over the news. I'm surprised you haven't heard about it. I read about it in either the New York Times or the LA Times. Here's an online news article about it. If you search in Google on "amazon.com union," you'll turn up a huge number of stories about it.

I searched the interal webpage for this and found nothing.
Well, there you have the advantage of me, since I don't have the ability to search Amazon's internal web site. The NYT and LAT have pretty high journalistic standards, so I kind of doubt either one would run the story without verifying that the page exists.

I even bet Andover.net will sell your Slashdot.org account information to the highest bidder if they go under.
Wrong fact #2: Their privacy policy says "At no time, unless such disclosure is required by law or a user specifically authorizes such disclosure, will OSDN disclose individual user personal information that is not publicly available to unrelated third parties."

Of course we own it because we want to control the content. We are not going to post anti-Amazon.com infomation on our own site, ...
Wow, that's interesting. I didn't realize it was that tightly censored. Thanks for letting me know. I guess that's another very strong reason not to use Amazon's reviewing system.

Amazon.com is not going out of business
That's a pretty confident statement about a company that has never made a profit. How do you know?

By the way, are you a manager at Amazon or an hourly employee? Do you own stock in Amazon?

Oh no, I don't have any firewalls! I am an agent of the International Free Computing Task Force, and firewalls are by definition an obstacle to Free Computing that must be brought down. When I ordered my dedicated ARPA Internet connection, I instructed my ISP very clearly to make my connection wide open without any firewalls whatsoever.

'Nuff Said.

In general, I like to recommend that people do a little research before they take what Michael says too literally. Unfortunately, Google seems to have got bored with Michael's magnum opus (the page in which he describes his love for the GNU project is particularly fun), but it still lists many of the other mailing lists Michael has tortured over the years.

When i first discovered B.S., i became an immediate fan because the style of humor struck a chord with me. Then i became more of a fan when i saw the quality Perl work, and then the quality Photoshop work. Now i think i'm ready to propose marriage.

It's nice to see you're not a hypocrite regarding your Metallica feature. And i completely understand the last part of your post - i've put out a lot of humor in various mediums (1 2 3) and it's often taken quite a bit of my time and effort to do so. But even though i can't name any benefit i get from it, i just feel i have to. I mean, once an idea comes to me, it's like an obligation to develop and release it.

It's the exact same reason people work on Open Source - while the Cathedral and the Bazaar suggested reasons like peer admiration and utility, i think my feeling of duty is the real reason. That "labor of love" feeling produces the purest kind of art, be it humor or code or music.

One last point of irony - when i go to Brunching on a weekday and see no new feature, i feel robbed, as in, "Hey! I downloaded a banner ad and i didn't get any content in return!"

Uh, on that note, everyone should click the link in my sig, sign up, and make me some money. :)
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Posted by posterkid:

Actually, it's not my patch, but there is one in progress. Check the lynx-dev archives at flora.org and skim the subjects, it should stick out. You'll need the most recent dev version to apply it. If you find bugs, do report them! (It's pretty recent, so will be under January 1999 posts)