Monthly Archives::
February 2006

London Copyfighters: Speak at Speaker’s Corner on Mar 19!

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If you’re in London on Sunday March 19, there’s a public event at my office that I’d like you to come to: we eat brunch, go to Speakers’ Corner, and give impromptu speeches about copyright in between the Marxists, god-botherers and loonies.

Since January 2005, I’ve hosted a series of EFF-sponsored monthly-ish brunches at my office in London’s Stanhope Centre. These “London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop” events have been semi-open: anyone who showed up was welcome, but I didn’t advertise it much because I couldn’t afford to feed an army.

But Stanhope Centre’s lost its lease, I’m retired from EFF, and spring is upon us, so for the very last of these events hosted at Stanhope, I’m throwing it open to the wide world. If you’re interested in issues of copyright, patent, trademark, free information, access — that kinda thing — you’re invited to come to Stanhope on March 19th for an 11AM-1PM brunch and then to come and give a speech at Hyde Park’s legendary Speaker’s Corner, just over the road.

Giving a speech at Speakers’ Corner is wild — it’s the ultimate soap-boxing experience, and everyone who’s done it swears by it. You can check out pictures of previous declaimings, too.

Come April and through the spring and summer, the Open Rights Group will continue to run Copyfighters’ Brunches as picnics in Hyde Park, and it’s hunting for a nearby indoor home for the autumn and winter of 2006.

March’s event is co-sponsored by EFF, Open Rights Group, the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure and the Open Knowledge Forum Network.

When: Sunday, March 19. Food from 11AM to 1PM; Speakers’ Corner excursion 1PM-~2PM.

Where: Stanhope Centre (Stanhope Centre, Stanhope House, Stanhope Place, London W2 2HH)

Directions: The nearest underground station is Marble Arch. If you are at the Marble Arch tube station, walk West on the North side of the street. The Street is Oxford Street as you exit the tube but it immediately becomes Bayswater. Keeping walking due West for 2 blocks (using the pedestrian underpass to cross under Edgeware Road). Hyde Park will be on your left or to the South as you walk. Then, take the first right after you exit the pedestrian underpass is Stanhope Place. (It is about 75 yards from where you exit the pedestrian underpass. Walk north on Stanhope Place approximately 50 feet to the first set of steps on the block. You will see a sign for Stanhope Centre. Walk up the stairs and ring the bottom bell, which is marked Stanhope Centre.

Interview on Bit-Tech

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Wil Harris from Bit-Tech conducted an interview with me last week; it’s online there now:

I think that joining FreeCulture, joining EFF is a really important step, because understanding that there’s a political dimension to this is also crucial.

This whole thing isn’t just about wanting stuff for free, it’s about understanding that information is built either in architectures of control or architectures of liberty and that the job of the EFF etc. is to make sure that architectures of liberty dominate. The EFF wins big, substantial battles on these subjects every year.

If you’re in the UK, hold the BBC to account. Why is it shipping the IMP, a DRM crippled player? Is there a point in the future where the BBC imagines that bits are going to get harder to copy? And that the IMP will solve its problem? Really, what the BBC is saying is that there’s two ways you can get its content after it airs on the TV; one is that you can get it through the IMP and have a crippled experience, the other is that you can be a criminal. If you want to get BBC content in a way that you want to use it, in a way that the law says you can use it, you have to be a criminal first. As a UK license payer, you’ve already paid for this content.

Finally, use Creative Commons licenses in your work. Last year, there was a proposal to build a harmonised DRM specification for the European Union, and one of the things they said is that we should embark on this in a way that would eliminate unencrypted works – period. They said that all works should be encrypted in some form.

Return to Pleasure Island, Part 01

/ / News, Podcast

Here’s part one of a four-part podcast of another story, “Return to Pleasure Island,” a dark and mean fantasy story that was originally published in Realms of Fantasy in 2000, and reprinted in my 2003 short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

George twiddled his thumbs in his booth and watched how the brown, clayey knuckles danced overtop of one another. Not as supple as they had once been, his thumbs — no longer the texture of wet clay on a potter’s wheel; more like clay after it had been worked to exhausted crackling and brittleness. He reached into the swirling vortex of the cotton-candy machine with his strong right hand and caught the stainless-steel sweep-arm. The engines whined and he felt them strain against his strong right arm, like a live thing struggling to escape a trap. Still strong, he thought, still strong, and he released the sweep-arm to go back to spinning sugar into floss.

A pack of boys sauntered down the midway, laughing and calling, bouncing high on sugar and g-stresses. One of them peeled off from the group and ran to his booth, still laughing at some cruelty. He put his palms on George’s counter and pushed against it, using them to lever his little body in a high-speed pogo. “Hey, mister,” he said, “how about some three-color swirl, with sprinkles?”

George smiled and knocked the rack of paper cones with his strong right elbow, jostled it so one cone spun high in the air, and he caught it in his quick left hand. “Coming _riiiiiight_ up,” he sang, and flipped the cone into the floss-machine. He spun a beehive of pink, then layered it with stripes of blue and green. He reached for the nipple that dispensed the sprinkles, but before he turned its spigot, he said, “Are you sure you don’t want a dip, too? Fudge? Butterscotch? Strawberry?”

The boy bounced even higher, so that he was nearly vaulting the counter. “All three! All three!” he said.

George expertly spiraled the floss through the dips, then applied a thick crust of sprinkles. “Open your mouth, kid!” he shouted, with realistic glee.

The boy opened his mouth wide, so that the twinkling lights of the midway reflected off his back molars and the pool of saliva on his tongue. George’s quick, clever left hand dipped a long-handled spoon into the hot fudge, then flipped the sticky gob on a high arc that terminated perfectly in the boy’s open mouth. The boy swallowed and laughed gooely. George handed over the dripping confection in his strong right hand, and the boy plunged his face into it. When he whirled and ran to rejoin his friends, George saw that his ears were already getting longer, and his delighted laugh had sounded a little like a bray. A job well done, he thought, and watched the rain spatter the spongy rubber cobbles of the midway.

Part One MP3