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.
