We Believe in the Freedom to Read
By Jill Christine Carpenter
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Rated "G" by the Author

 REVIEWS

"It’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table." -- David Pogue

I think it would be advisable to allow readers the opportunity to educate themselves to what DRM is really all about first, before asking them to sign a petition.

There are too many emails out there that want people to sign petitions based only on the authors explanation of the petition. Which most times is not the complete story. This in my opinion is not good.

There are to many hate mongering bigots out there in plain sight today swaying people in the wrong direction.

I know people will sign anything based on their individual opinions, but maybe we can change the opinions of some by giving them all the information so they are better able to make an educated decision on their own...and not just sign something based on what they have been taught by family, education or religion.

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management and read what DRM is before signing the petition. This will give you a greater insight to what the petition is all about.

And I do agree with you most of the time, you have written some good articles.— Chris the Abducted Alien

A Kindle, or a Swindle? Coalition launches petition demanding that Amazon drop DRM from the Kindle

by Jill Christine Carpenter

These excerpts were taken from recent articles by: DefectiveByDesign.org and the Free Software Foundation

Coalition launches petition demanding that Amazon drop DRM from the Kindle

We believe in the freedom to read

We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.

That is why we readers, authors, publishers, and librarians demand that Amazon remove all DRM, including any ability to control or access the user's library, from the Kindle.

Signatories to the petition include prominent academic and industry names like Creative Commons and Change Congress co-founder Lawrence Lessig; author, poet and MacArthur Fellow Lewis Hyde; Harvard Law Professor and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources John Palfrey; and Christopher Hayes, Washington, DC editor for The Nation.

Read more, and sign the petition, here.

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It's a Very Fine Line...
By Jill Christine Carpenter
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Rated "G" by the Author.

US Copyright Law, King Lear, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset

I've dropped my paid membership to AuthorsDen and had no intention to write more pages here.  But copyright is a subject that should be of critical interest to anyone who creates content for sale, so I thought AD would be a good place to post this.

This topic should be especially interesting to those writers, musicians and artists who actually believe the current copyright system is a perfect environment for protecting their works.

So, I would like to direct you all to this article by Pamela Jones of Groklaw.  It outlines the reasons why Shakespeare would never have been able to write King Lear if the copyright regime that we have today had been active in his day.  It's a worthy tale that should give all of us food for thought.

US Copyright Law, King Lear, and Jammie Thomas-Rasset

Now, I'd like to address the rest of this message to the jurors in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial:

Dear Jurors,  I hope you never look too closely at your own computers, because I will guarantee that you have copyrighted content on it that you didn't ask permission to have.  Content that, by todays restrictive standards, could brand you as a thief. 

You need to understand just how thin the line is between you and Jammie Thomas-Rasset.  The thugs from the RIAA and MPAA could be suing you next, or your kids, or your neighbors and friends. Their lives will be ruined and YOU will have to carry a large portion of the blame. I hope you can live with that...well, actually, I hope you never get another night's sleep over it.

Over 30,000 citizens, in the USA, have been sued by the RIAA/MPAA mafia over the last few years, including elderly people, small children, seriously ill people, dead people, teenagers, college kids, along with people that never even owned a computer, but none of it matters to the Mob.

That number is now growing worldwide. It's time to pull the plug on the mobsters and their extortion racket.

RIAA VS The Economy

New Curriculum Gives Students the Facts About Their Digital Rights and Responsibilities