The EFF Gets a Blog
It didn't take long for Cory Doctorow to make his latest career move--literally. As of Thursday, April 4, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's new Outreach Director began presiding over Consensus at Lawyerpoint, a weblog with the tagline "Being a true account of the undertakings of the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group". Cory explains:
This is a radical departure from the way it's usually done. Usually, bright nerds invent something cool and the entertainment industry has a nervous breakdown and runs around telling everyone that the sky is falling. (Marconi got sued over the radio; Sony got sued over the VCR...)
This time around, the entertainment industry wants to take away all that sloppy, inefficient fooling around where technology companies try out lots of different approaches, where garage inventors go from obscurity to posterity under a hail of customers, where you and I get to invent amazing new uses for our stuff that a bunch of engineers in a board-room never would've thought of in a million years. This time around, everything not forbidden is mandatory.
As with everything else the EFF does, Consensus at Lawyerpoint helps us save the Internet's commons from the self-righteous paranoids whose unseen hands operate congressional sock puppets like South Carolina's Fritz Hollings, (prime author of the CBDTPA, which the lawyerly end of EFF officially follows here). In his own blog, Cory calls Hollings' bill the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.
email: doc@ssc.com
