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?"

Comments

Re:Other side?

[Eloquence]

Open source developers would love to do just that. But if you're trying to play a DVD under Linux, you'll run into problems: To play the DVD, you need to decrypt it. This is impossible to do legally with an open source application, as it violates the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits circumvention of copy prevention mechanisms. (Even creating a legal, closed-source player requires payment of licensing fees for the keys, which is impossible for a Linux distribution that can be downloaded and distributed freely.) There may eventually be a commercial closed source player, but that is obviously incompatible with the whole open source idea.

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).

Re:What about actual work?

[gimpboy]

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.

Show your support - quit arguing.

[QuietRiot]

You can show your support for one of the best electronic freedoms lobbying groups here. Accepted methods of payment include

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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.

EFF and the Combined Federal Campaign

[superid]

In a startling coincidence, I read this article as I was filling out my yearly Combined Federal Campaign donation.

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