Slashdot Mirror
DRM and Democracy
jar writes to tell us Bruce Perens has a short editorial on why DRM could have an impact on much more than just our record collections. From the article: "Within the last century, electronic communications have increasingly become the vehicle of democratic discourse. Because radio and television broadcasting are expensive with limited frequencies available, the wealthy have dominated broadcasting. The Internet and World Wide Web place into the common man's hands the capability of global electronic broadcasting. [...] In order to protect democratic discourse in the future, the Internet must remain a fair and level playing field for the distribution of political speech. The full capability of the Internet must remain available to all, without restriction by religious, business, or political interests."
"the Internet must remain a fair and level playing field for the distribution of political speech."
Like: 'bush is teh gh3y.' "no, gore pWnz u." 'bush/cheney ftw.' "you stole my election!"
[ANALOGY TIME] Finding political speech on the internet is like finding poop in the toilet: it's easy to find, but you don't want to see it.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
"Real Americans don't use backups, they just email a disk image to their grandmothers and let NSA handle the archiving!"
- with apologies to Linus