This is not the Kickstarter model. It's just accepting directed donations toward a project (and MediaGoblin is certainly a fine cause!).

The Kickstarter model is the "Threshold Pledge" system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system). It means you set a threshold, a minimum fundraising goal, and all the funders pledge amounts toward that goal. Until the goal is reached, the pledges are either not called in, or are held in escrow to be returned in the event the goal is not reached. That way, everyone who gives money knows that, if their money reaches the recipient, then the recipient got enough to actually accomplish what it is trying to do. If the recipient doesn't get enough pledged to reach the goal, then no one loses their money.

It is designed to solve the problem of "I'd love to donate to X, but only if I know that enough other people will donate for X to be sustainable / achievable / whatever." In economics, it's called an "assurance contract".

What the FSF is doing here is not the threshold pledge system. It's just accepting directed donations.

I should have done that research before posting -- thank you for clarifying the situation.

There is still a bug here, in that (according to the linked bug ticket) even if one *requests* a key using a longer ID, from a keyserver that can handle the request, GPG transforms it to the short ID and then returns you all the keys that match. That seems like non-optimal behavior, given that the user asked carefully, and the server could have answered, if only GPG would transmit the true request.

However, that's a slightly different problem from what I originally posted, so I'm glad you replied.

Presumably the Three Letter Agencies generate their own cert chains themselves, and employees manually confirm the fingerprints and tell their browsers to trust those custom certs? In other words, their internal sensitive data shouldn't be at risk of exposure due to the DigiNotar problems, because they'd be crazy to depend on a cert root that they didn't generate anyway. I can see how this whole fiasco might make a difference for some non-employee accessing a CIA (or whichever) web site, but other than that, it shouldn't be significant for the TLAs... right?

-Karl Fogel

I just sent this to a freeculture.org mailing list -- thought I'd spread the
idea here too (not having time at the moment to implement it):

---

A good protest method, if anyone has time & a means to contact some
students there:

Students there start deliberately using the software to share completely
legal things (e.g., freely licensed and public domain music and books),
and then when the police come knocking, explain to the police that
sharing culture and information is not inherently illegal. Force the
administration and the police to start making distinctions, instead of
always assuming that something is prohibited until proven permitted.

QuestionCopyright.org might try to organize something like that, if we
can find some spare cycles, but... it would be a *perfect* kind of
action for Free Culture / SFC! Please, please beat us to it! :-)

-Karl

The Maltron -- http://www.maltron.com/. It's been a lifesaver -- not only a better shape (curved, to match your hands) but a better layout of letters (to avoid "single-finger hurdles" and other problematic movements). See also http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/maltron.html.

Not a conspiracy theory, just history taken from primary and secondary sources. See http://questioncopyright.org/promise#history .

Counterfeiting money is unrelated to copyright: see http://questioncopyright.org/faq#counterfeiting .

Some editors have sentence-wise motion commands (for example, M-a and M-e in Emacs). These rely on the "two spaces after a sentence-ending period" rule in order to distinguish sentence ending from abbreviations. Documents that follow the two-spaces convention are more easily editable by people who use those commands.

Personally, I also find it much easier on the eyes -- I can find sentence boundaries with minimal mental effort, which saves those cycles for something else (like, say, understanding what the document is saying :-) ).

Yes, should have been Nevada, not Arizona -- and the fault was mine in the original submission, not Slashdot's. Sorry about that! I'm glad they updated the post.

-Karl Fogel

Considering how many great composers lived and wrote before copyright was even invented or could affect them (*cough* J.S. Bach *cough*), it would make more sense to call this "one composer's view of copyright". Especially given how much every composer -- Brown included -- is indebted to other composers.

http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/all_creative_work_is_derivative

(See the embedded video there.)