Sarah Davies

Benjamin Mako Hill made a great post on the Free Software Foundation blog today about what he calls Anti-Features, those incredibly annoying technological limits that companies spend time and money to put on their products and make you pay to take off, like the ability to download raw data from a camera rather than a compressed jpeg.

I noticed a similar trend this summer while Prius shopping. Every Prius in the world is basically built the same way, so that it can be outfitted with all the bells and whistles of the top model. Given the low cost of electronics, I’m sure it would be cheaper for them to make every car the same, but they’ve done enough market research to know that people like options, and are willing to pay $2k more for $10 worth of wires that make their phone talk to their car. Many people base their self-identity on their car, and wouldn’t buy a car unless they were sure their model was more expensive than someone else’s (other people value thrift, and thus require that their model is less expensive). Despite the fact that it would be cheaper and more efficient to give everyone all the bells and whistles, the market responds better to fabricated class stratification.

Don’t even get me started on how much less it would have cost Microsoft to build a DRM-free Zune, and how much better it would be selling currently!

I got a letter in the mail this week from Creative Commons. I get lots of fundraising letters from organizations I’ve donated to in the past, and I generally find it annoying. Doctors without Borders is the worst. I donated to them some time in 2004, and every week I get pictures of dying children and pleas for moremoneymoremoneymoremoney. I think they’ve frittered away my entire donation on postage and printing costs to send me all this crap years later!

EFF is better. When I joined EFF, rather than sending me a letter that said thanks for your money, now give us more money, they sent me a letter saying thanks for your money, you’re a good person, here’s a bumper sticker to show that you’re a proud member. (Said bumper sticker is still on the wall of my cube at ACLU)

But Creative Commons was truly remarkable. This is what they sent me:

They asked me to take action four times before they asked me for money. This came with a simple card showing what sorts of stickers and t-shirts I would get for donating different amounts, and that’s it. No full color 16-page expose on starving artists, just a letter and a card. Bravo!

The Jackson Free Press is reporting today that Brian Cox, Field Coordinator for ACLU of Mississippi was arrested for observing police and asking for their badge numbers.

After the interdiction, Cox approached the officers again, asking for identification. The ACLU worker said both officers refused to give their identification numbers, counter to municipal policy. The female officer even covered her badge.

Another officer pulled up, and eventually one of the officers told Cox that he was being arrested for “interfering with a police investigation.”

Cox, who has been trained in police scene observation, said police did not read him his Miranda rights at any point during the arrest, emptying his pockets or while guiding him to the patrol car.

Cox sat in the county jail in Raymond for 14 hours before getting his phone call and arranging his $2,500 bond.

All honors to you for fighting the good fight, Brian. Sometimes we forget, working here in Seattle where everyone loves us, that people in other parts of the country are still targeted and abused for defending civil liberties.

Just read the new Open Source Primer from Nonprofit Open Source Initiative written by Michelle Murrain. The primer does an incredibly thorough and fair job of weighing the economic, temporal, and philosophical benefits of proprietary and open source software. It also documents case studies from front runners in open source software development and small nonprofits who are just starting to use Linux. My favorite passage:

Community ownership of software is also in itself consonant with the missions of many nonprofit organizations, whose role is in strengthening community. By using tools that are owned by everyone, you know that you aren’t building your work in a way that depends on or benefits any one corporation or institution, but building your work in a way that benefits everyone.

This is a well written and well researched opus that will benefit the nonprofit community hugely in the years to come. Bravo!

Cross-posted to Freedom for IP

Stop The ACLU made an interesting post yesterday (their database is down currently, or I would link to it) including Part I of a History of ACLU video. It goes into the Communist connections in the 1940s and Roger Baldwin’s statements in support of anarchy.I find it particularly interesting because I was shown a remarkably similar video (ragtime background music and all!) the first day I started working for ACLU. Unfortunately, the copy our office has is on VHS, not even DVD, let alone YouTube. It had most of the same content, except that the “draft dodgers” were called “contentious objectors” and it focused more on how anti-communist we got in the fifties (kicking out members and board members!). This is only the first half of the video, and it appears to be telling the story chronologically, so perhaps that’s in the second half.

Judging by people’s reaction to the video around the office, I think today’s ACLU is more ashamed of excluding communists in the 1950′s than associating with communists in the 1940s. We don’t talk about communism in the office much, it’s not seen as the almighty goal. We’re pretty much about sticking to the mission, although there are a few stances we’ve taken that puzzle me (eg ACLU Michigan and the Muslim footbaths). Civil liberties aren’t generally seen as a stepping stone to some greater goal; they are a great goal in and of themselves.