Cory Doctorow on Copyright by Webmaster Josh
Balance in Media- Josh
Start Your Own Damn Site
Constructive Anarchists encourage every American to start a blog and/or website. Corporations own Congress,the White House and most news outlets, but free speech on the internet is driving them crazy.
Neoconmen have no sense of humor, so satire really drives them over the edge. Join in the fun. Express yourself and lets link up.
The back cover of the Sex Pistols first album inspired the title of this category. Johnny Rotten drew a crude drawing of three basic guitar chords, and wrote: “This is all you wankers need. Go start your own damn band.” Young Brits then were fed up, but they found a voice and fought back. In the Sixties, Americans used radio to get the word out. With a license ($1,000) and basic equipment (less than $1,000) your garage became an FM station.
It’s time to speak out again. Let’s take back America and reinstate democracy and the Constitution. Start your own damn site. Comments? Questions? Ask Josh (our amazing webmaster).
Cory Doctorow on copyright
Cory Doctorow, an author at the forefront of online publishing and co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, gave a talk at UC San Diego last month: a video of this talk has been posted to the internet archive, and is definitely worth a quick look. The movie is large (347 MB, scroll to the bottom of the linked page), but it will start streaming within a couple minutes.
If you have an hour or so to kill, his sci-fi short story 0wnz0red is very highly reccommended.
Balance in Media
I’ve found some very interesting sites in my research of the technical details involved in setting up a site like Constructive Anarchy (and just in my own reading). I’d like to share a couple:
Blow Your Rights is an article discussing a myriad of modern issues from balance in media to software piracy, and how the consumer is the only true loser in these battles. Many of the comments resonated with me—a couple hours’ research on the web and I knew how to rip a DVD to get rid of annoying advertisements, trailers, and extraneous menus. Yet such activity is viewed in a very dim light by the money-grubbers at the RIAA and MPAA. As the article mentions, they are actively lobbying for legislation that will do more to restrict consumer rights (their true goal) than restrict piracy. Update: DVD Piracy = Terrorism.
Now that the Induce Act has failed to progress through its initial stages in judiciary committee, I have a new-found hope and respect (however small) for our representatives in US government. They may be making and allowing terrible decisions in the world at large, but at least they seem to understand this small piece of our future.
Err… off the soapbox I guess…
I ran across another cool link while looking for information about the Creative Commons license, which Greg is using for his books. CC is popular among grassroots journalists because it offers an outlet for ideas that both protects the author’s rights and avoids the stifling nature of current copyright law.
The link is one of their featured articles, concerning an interesting guy who has followed a similar path to where we want to go with Greg’s books. He has found a backer in O’Reilly of all places (known for their excellence as a technology-oriented publisher), who host downloadable PDF chapters of his entire book and offer a hardback version for $25. Maybe this is a big step towards the media revolution that Gillmor is advocating in his book?
Well that turned out to be more than a couple links… but at least there’s a common thread in there (somewhere—hopefully).
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Published by Greg at 11:59 AM on January 21, 2005