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Lessig's Challenge: Are You Up To It?
Eloquence writes "At the 2002 Open Source Conference, law professor and cyberactivist Larry Lessig, last prominently featured here because of the Eldred case, asked some poignant questions: 'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? How many people have given more money to [the] EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?' Luke Francl has interpreted these questions as a challenge, and decided to chronicle both his donations to good causes and his less voluntary payments to 'the media oligarchy' on this page: Lessig's Challenge. This is a good idea if others imitate it: If these pages become interlinked with each other, not only can they motivate us and let us track our progress, they may also help us to keep each other up to date about 'good causes' -- there's more than the EFF, after all. With Harry Potter in theatres and Lord of the Rings before us, should 'nerds' also be thinking about supporting those who fight for our rights to, say, play DVDs on an open-source OS?"
The DMCA will be implemented in different variants world-wide. This is a real issue: To play DVDs on Linux, you need to break the law, in America and soon elsewhere as well. That's why it's important to change the law instead of just passively ignoring what's going on and hoping that the problems will go away. If you do that, what's currently the case with DVDs will soon be the case with all commercial media, thereby defeating the whole point of open source.
Note that the copyright cartels have already successfully gone after people who distributed the DVD decryption software, and even those who linked to the tool that allows doing so. They love the additional control over content use that the DMCA gives them, and they'll fight to keep it and to extend it even further (which brings us to Microsoft's Palladium).
What's better--working for an hour to remove works from the tyranny of copyright, or working in a "regular job" for an hour and donating the proceeds to EFF?
what exactly are you doing to remove works from the tyranny of copyright? if you are referring to transcribing, or prooring for project gutenberg then you are simply making those books more accessable. those books have already fallen out of the hands of the copyright holders.
the only ways i know of to legally get copyrighted works from the holders of the copyrighted material
is to
a) purchase the copyright,
b) wait for the copyright to expire,
c) work to change the law to make the copyright expire sooner
this isnt to say that working for projects like gutenberg is bad-i think it's great. just dont make it out to be something it's not, and it's not freeing works from the tyranny of copyright.
-- john
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A visit to the Action Center at the EFF would be useful as well. Do your part or watch your rights slip away! Direct others to help you in the fight.
You can use the Combined Federal Campaign to contribute. EFF is #2229.
I don't think the EFF is or would be able to register as a charity under either English or Scots law.
In the UK if you want to support Free Software there are a number of ways of doing so:
You could join the Association for Free Software (http://www.affs.org.uk/)
You can use the UK Free Software Network for your ISP - all profits from UKFSN are donated to fund Free Software projects and there is open accounting so you can verify this is true (another ISP called uklinux makes the same promise but the money never finds its way out of the pockets of the directors!).
You can support the UK Unix User Group, who do a lot to promote and support Open Source and Free Software in the UK.
You can support the Campaign for Digital Rights (http://ukcdr.org/) who are working hard to try and protect our rights to fair usage of our own property and the right to develop software under a Free Software license.
While you and I may feel that OSS and Free Software is beneficial to society at large I am not sure the Charities Commission would take the same view thus we're excluded from registering a Free Software charity in the UK.
It had never occured to me in the past that EFF might be on their big list but they are! So this year, my donation has gone to the EFF conveniently via payroll deduction and the CFC
For those of you wishing to do the same, the CFC code is 2229
mbbac
Are you really serious? You think the DMCA is easy to beat? EFF got Sklyarov out of jail, they just won the ICANN case. They are standing up for technology with their cases on P2P and PVR systems. They offered the first technical look at Pd. They are in all of the BPDG meetings standing up for you. All this and more on a tiny fraction of the budgets of the groups they are fighting, which is really what this challenge is all about.
Maybe you should take a look at what you are really getting for your money
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
Hi, I'm the guy who made the Lessig's Challenge website. I'd like to address some of the concerns which have been raised with the idea.
To my doubters: This isn't about a fundraising drive for the EFF (though I think you should join. Did you know the EFF only has 7,000 members? You can make your voice heard in the way the EFF operates if you join). It isn't about me buying cool stuff and writing it off as hurting the MPAA.
It's about supporting a different way to do things than the MPAA and RIAA. They want to lock up content and charge you every time you view it. They want to prevent you from viewing DVDs on Linux. And we help them do it. Every time you buy a CD, every time you go to a movie, you help them take away your freedom.
It's time to fight back. We can fight back not only by giving money to the EFF and the ACLU and the Free Software Foundation and Digital Consumer -- orgainizations which will fight against the media oligarchy -- but also by helping those artists and programmers who are outside the system. If they can make a living without turning to the RIAA or MPAA, the media oligarchy will not survive for long.
I'm not asking you to boycott these orgainizations entirely because it's not really plausable. Everyone likes to go see a movie now and then, everyone likes to listen to the radio or buy a few CDs. What I'm challenging you to do is to keep track of how much you're giving to the oligarchy (to take away your freedom) and counter that with a donation to people who will fight against that.
Here are a few suggestions:
The list goes on and on.
If you want to support EFF or other nonprofit organizations, you may be better off donating directly than going through the Combined Federal Campaign, which is administered by the local (D.C.) United Way.
The United Way in D.C. has been dogged by scandal because of improper financial management.
An article last week in the Washington Post reports "A new audit of the local United Way's handling of federal employee donations shows that the group held onto about $1.3 million it should have distributed to charities, took an unexplained $3 million short-term loan from the contributions and ran up more than $120,000 in questionable or unsupported expenses."
The article also notes "A federal grand jury began investigating the Washington area United Way this summer after revelations that the organization had withheld donations from charities, inflated its donation totals and allowed a former executive to take a retirement payment that was not authorized by the pension's rules."
Automated charitable payroll deductions through CFC may be convenient, but at what cost?
So as long as 1% of the money spent on a product goes to something you don't like, you shouldn't spend the other 99% on the product either, even though it goes to the things you *do* like and want to support? The frustration with using the free market power to vote with your wallet is that most purchase prices include a heck of a lot of "riders" you are also voting for, just like a bill before Congress. And, just like a congressman you are stuck where the only way to vote against those riders you don't like is to simultaneously vote against the rest of the bill that you would otherwise have supported. When you support the making of good high fantasy movies, like LOTR and want to see hollywood make more, the only way to "vote for" that is to also "vote for" the DMCA as a small rider tacked on to your ticket price.
Asking people to never support these riders EVER isn't a practical solution unless you plan to move up into the mountains and live as a hermit. The solution of making sure you give more money (votes) to the opposition than you do via incedental riders on your ticket prices, CD-R prices, and so on, is certainly sub-optimal. But it's the only practical way short of not being a participant in the modern marketplace at all.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.