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LawrenceLessig posts

Filed under: News, Open Source

Lessig for Congress - wishful thinking?

Lawrence Lessig

With Congressman Tom Lantos' recent death, some attention has been given to the idea of Lawrence Lessig, running for the vacant Silicon Valley seat in a special election in June. The idea is purely speculative at this point, however, there are some signs that a bid could be in the works.

For one thing, Facebook has a new group, "Draft Lessig for Congress," with 425 682 members at the time of this writing. Another interesting development is Lessig's purchase of domain name change-congress.com. He is also on record endorsing Barack Obama, the presidential candidate whose message of change has undeniable momentum. Additionally, in his blog he is posting oblique references to the meaning of "real" change.

Clearly, the idea of change is one Mr. Lessig ideally suited for and whether the tea leaves we're sifting through here indicate he's going to run for Congress is wishful thinking or quite possibly the real thing, only time will tell.

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Filed under: Text, Video, Freeware, Open Source

Free Me! free culture primer available as a DVD ISO

Free MeSay you want to introduce people to the benefits of free (as in speech and sometimes as in beer) culture. What better way than to take a whole bunch of freely distributed files, pack them together onto a DVD and give it away?

The Free Me! DVD packs an awful lot onto a single disc. You get:
  • An Ubuntu Linux LiveCD
  • A bunch of movies that will play in a DVD player
  • A whole slew of public domain ebooks that are no longer bound by copyright
  • Several eBooks that are distributed with a Creative Commons license, including works by Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig.
Hard copies of the DVD will eventually be available for limited distribution, but a downloadable ISO is already available.

[via Boing Boing]

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Apple, Microsoft, Open Source

Interview with DefectiveByDesign on TDMW

DefectiveByDesign protests at the Apple Store in Boston, MAThe Haz-Mat suited activists of DefectiveByDesign gained quite a bit of exposure when they waltzed into Apple stores across the country carrying signs and informing customers about the rights they give up when buying DRM controlled music from the iTunes Music Store.

Our sister site, The Digital Music Weblog (she prefers to be called TDMW for short) caught up with the crafty folks at DefectiveByDesign for an interview about Digital Rights Management. DefectiveByDesign is an offshoot of the Free Software Foundation, the non-profit organization that maintains and defends the GNU General Public License, better known for providing the legal framework under which the myriad Linux distributions exist.

If you have any concerns about your rights in a digitally encoded future, you should read this interview. The folks at DefectiveByDesign aren't alone when they predict a bleak digital landscape ahead, where the content providers and device manufacturers are able to lock you in, and keep you from buying competing products by holding your media hostage.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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