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EFF Chairman Interviewed
mpawlo writes "I have just published an interview with Mr Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the EFF, over at Greplaw. Mr Templeton presents, among other things, his view on spam and freedom of speech among. If that's not enough, there is also a rather unique tongue-in-cheek interview with Professor Lessig."
I donated about a $100 per year to EFF foundation before, but I will stop the practice this year. I am not sure what the goal of the foundation and how it helps the simple folk anymore.
A friend of mine lived in Germany and was harassed by the local hand of IFPI, which I guess would correspond to RIAA over here. All I wanted from EFF was a simple consultation on what should be done. Specifically since the German IFPI wanted a $300 fine not to take the matter to the court.
Two e-mails to EFF from their contact page and dead silence, as if you're e-mailing a black hole. If I had not donated $300 to EFF in years before but just gave the money to my friend to pay the fine, I'd be better off.
even though USENET has stagnated and not added much new since the 80s, it's still the best way to read an online conversation. None of the web message boards come even close to the speed and ease of use.
USENET has not stagnated. Not much has been added since the 80s because nothing more was needed. Even with all this p2p nonsense, USENET continues in its near-perfect simplicity and utility. If you're one of these puckered-rectum FAQ Nazis, USENET is chaos. If you're willing to do due diligence of your own filtering and scanning, USENET consistently delivers great text info and binaries.
>>Registration requirement.
Anyone else think these two are unreasonable? They deal no harm to huge corporations of the kind that now own our culture, but they would be a major obstacle to people who just want to make stuff. If I had to go fill out forms and spend money every time I wrote an article or composed a song, I would do much less of those things.
It depends alot on how difficult it is to register your work. If it was a simple and free web form/ftp to the library of congress, probably not big deal (to us - there would need to be methods for the non-computer literate as well).
If you needed to spend $10, you probably wouldn't bother with some things.
If you needed to spend $1000, well, that would really suck and would stifle creativity.
As a major side benefit, all the works would automatically be freely available from a set of libraries as soon as the copyrights expired.