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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.

Last week the Free Software Foundation announced that version 3 of the GNU GPL (GPLv3), will be released on June 29th.

On this date many thousands of free software projects will start to switch to this license. And GPLv3 is squarely aimed at defeating DRM.

Many corporations use GPL covered works to build their products. The successful adoption of GPLv3 will help limit DRM to those products built with proprietary software. Those products will be less attractive to consumers, more expensive, and less useful.