Lessig, Stallman in New Documentary

Alternative Freedom is a documentary on intellectual property rights featuring lots of interviews with folks like Stallman and Lessig, as well as people like DJ Danger Mouse (creator of the Grey Album). They have a trailer available, but if you're in NYC the movie is now showing. If anyone manages to go, I'd love to see some real reviews of it.

Quicktime?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

From TFL

Viewing the trailer requires Quicktime. If your browser does not support embedded files you can dowload the .mov directly here.

Whoa! RMS is going to crack it! [zmag.org]

It falls to me to tell them they are doing so, that they with their own actions are giving certain large companies more power. When you send someone a ".doc' file, a "Word' file, or an audio or video file in RealPlayer or Quicktime format, you are actually pressuring someone to give up their freedom. Perhaps because I constantly have to bring this up, people believe I don't have a sense of proportion.

Sometimes people take for granted that I will participate in those activities with them. Thus, when I webcast a speech, I have to ask which format it is going to be webcast in. I am not going to go along with a webcast of my speech about freedom that you have to give up your freedom in order to hear or watch. Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format. [emph mine]

Note - I am not making fun of RMS here - I greatly admire his principals even if I am too lazy to always follow them myself.

Oh - and anyone interested in hearing the grey album mentioned in the /. summary, a torrent. [mininova.org] It is an amazing album.

Re:Sheep Shears

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Stallman isn't behind the "OSS movement", but anyway, we don't need a cult of personality at this point. We need people who are thinking for themselves to realize that freedom is important. This is slowly happening (and the pace is picking up, even) but what people are afraid of is that the laws and technology will increasingly make it difficult to show people the tangible reasons why freedom is important.

Re:Hey editors...

[stinerman]

The overlooked problem is that the article doesn't look like it was submitted by anyone. It looks like Taco just wrote the summary himself. If that is the case, Taco is drunk or just pulled off one hell of a troll.

Re:DJ Dangermouse

[jb.hl.com]

I'd also mention that he did a lot/most of the production work on Gorillaz' last album, Demon Days. (EMI, apparently, shat themselves when they heard of Gorillaz' choice, as they were the ones who sued Danger Mouse over the Beatles sampling...)

Re:Quicktime?

[stinerman]

I always wondered what his position would be for using non-free/patented codecs and algorithms in countries that don't have software patents. For instance, if I live in the EU, is it morally permissible in RMS's eyes to use mp3s? As you say, lame is a good choice and is LGPL, so it should be permissible to use it under such a jurisdiction. Using mp3s doesn't hinder freedom in that respect, although a tangential argument would be that in some countries mp3s rely on patented technologies, so the program wouldn't be free the world over, which is a goal of the free software movement.

Re:Quicktime?

[Cal Paterson]

I agree. It's an interesting grey area. I, also, get the impression that RMS's view that mp3 is less than desirable because it is patented in some countries.

Personally, I agree in. However, mp3 has Free Software tools available for it, and so does MPEG4. Lame and ffmpeg are both good pieces of software. While the mp3 format is technically proprietary, I feel that in reality the format has now been forced open by lame. When it's worth doing, I use ogg (ie when I am doing the original encode of a file) for this reason. I don't however, transcode mp3s into ogg (unless space is an issue). However, the current issue is that ogg isn't brilliantly supported. I also like FLAC (the audiophile is shining through ;))

I can see the Ogg formats taking over eventually. They're nice, and they're small, and imo, they're a hell of a lot better than aac in most instances.