Still alive after four days of too much info to process and too little sleep. So I'll just dump a list of talks here that might interest you:

- Richard Stallman: Freedom in your computer and in the net
- Jake Appelbaum/Laura Poitras: Assassination lists, planetary surveillance
- Tobias Engel/Karsten Nohl: SS7, the backbone of mobile networks, is fucked beyond repair (two talks, same topic: one, two)
- Laura Poitras and others: cryptography for high-profile journalists
- Bill Scannel: Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg (NSA spy post - wierd talk)
- internet of toilets
- What Ever Happened to Nuclear Weapons?

So if an individual or a company spends hundreds of hours or millions of dollars creating something that only exists in the digital realm, everyone has the right to copy it or even resell it? Is that seriously your position?

Copyright is not only not out of date, it is more relevant than ever.

The problem is that corporations are abusing it. Copyright was meant to give a creator a reasonable period of time to earn a living from their work and then it went back to the public domain. This has now been perverted by the likes of Disney to mean "we own this shit forever" (the irony being they made their fortune from public domain stories).

But copyright as a concept is still totally valid. I write software for a living. Some stuff, I give away. But that's my decision. I'm sure as hell not giving up my livelihood because you read some Stallman.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Some people just don't get my unique comedy stylings.>> ^marinara:

>> ^dag:
Maybe it was gnutella.
[rim shot]

standing upside down w/ those Australians must warp your humor. I follow u on twitter 4 this?

>> ^dag:

Maybe it was gnutella.
[rim shot]


standing upside down w/ those Australians must warp your humor. I follow u on twitter 4 this?

I'd love to see this guy and Richard Stallman in a room.
It seems this guy is just supporting fox views and companies like AT&T and how they stand on net neutrality. His last main point which draws on creditable journalism is completely unfounded, there exists sites with objective news such as the BBC.

From the Google Video comment:

Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. It features several interviews with prominent hackers and entrepreneurs (and hackers-cum-entrepreneurs), including Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf.

The film begins in medias res with an IPO, and then sets the historical stage by showing the beginnings of software development back in the day when software was shared on paper tape for the price of the paper itself. It then segues to Bill Gates's Open Letter to Hobbyists in which he asks Computer Hobbyists to not share, but to buy software. (This letter was written by Gates when Microsoft was still based in Arizona and spelled "Micro-Soft".) Richard Stallman then explains how and why he left the MIT Lab for Artificial Intelligence in order to devote his life to the development of free software, as well as how he started with the GNU project.

Linus Torvalds is interviewed on his development of the Linux kernel as well as on the GNU/Linux naming controversy and Linux's further evolution, including its commercialization.

Richard Stallman remarks on some of the ideological aspects of open source vis-á-vis Communism and capitalism and well as on several aspects of the development of GNU/Linux.

Michael Tiemann (interviewed in a desert) tells how he met Stallman and got an early version of Stallman's GCC and founded Cygnus Solutions.

Larry Augustin tells how he combined the resulting GNU software and a normal PC to create a UNIX-like Workstation which cost one third the price of a workstation by Sun Microsystems even though it was three times as powerful. His narrative includes his early dealings with venture capitalists, the eventual capitalization and commodification of Linux for his own company, VA Linux, and ends with its IPO.

Frank Hecker of Netscape tells how Netscape executives released the source code for Netscape's browser, one of the signal events which made Open Source a force to be reckoned with by business executives, the mainstream media, and the public at large.

Kinda reminds me of the free software song, as sung by Richard Stallman. Pretty scary...