fsf

The Free Software Foundation and DefectiveByDesign have been working with attorney Ray Beckerman to help fight for victims of the RIAA's baseless intimidation campaign. The RIAA recently took notice, calling our position -- and by extension the position of many other anti-DRM activists -- "virulent" and "baseless."

We've responded to these accusations in an article published at TorrentFreak. Fighting these lawsuits is an important part of defusing Digital Restrictions Management -- the more of these suits that the RIAA wins, the more ammunition they will claim to have in their repeated efforts to shoot holes in our digital rights and control our technology.

Executives like Rolf Schmidt-Holtz of Sony Music Entertainment should get the message and back off. Although they claimed in December that they would stop filing lawsuits against individuals, the RIAA filed 62 more in the month of April alone. Citizens are tired of watching their governments squander their freedom to enrich this handful of corporations, and they are tired of being intimidated. The FSF and DefectiveByDesign will continue our work to support this opposition to the War on Sharing, on all fronts.

• Read the full article at TorrentFreak.
• Give it a digg and vote for it on reddit.

Today the FSF announces the release of the GPLv3. The announcement coincidentally is on the same day as Apple's much awaited iPhone release.

As the GPLv3 press release states:

“Tivoization” is a term coined by the FSF to describe devices that are built with free software, but that use technical measures to prevent the user from making modifications to the software—a fundamental freedom for free software users—and an attack on free software that the GPLv3 will put a stop to.