If you’re interested in digital rights, copyright and digital activism, you really need to grab a ticket to ORGCon on Saturday July 24 at City University. The schedule is really starting to shape up, with keynotes and panels from Jamie Boyle, Cory Doctorow, and Tom Watson.

Tickets prices are:

• Free if you join the Open Rights Group on the day
• £5 for existing supporters
• £10 for the general public

More details:

We’ll have training sessions about how to lobby your MP and more volunteer workshops. There’ll also be discussions on the state of UK politics after #GE2010 and why this is a key moment to push harder for reform on digital issues from surveillance to copyright to DRM. The keynote speaker will be James Boyle, a founder of the modern movement to recognize, protect, and grow the intellectual commons.

Sessions will include

* James Boyle on the future of copyright, in London especially for this talk
* Thriving in the Real Digital Economy: Cory Doctorow talks and then chairs a panel of artists.
* Digital Economy Act: What’s Next? (Tom Watson, Eric Joyce, Julian Huppert)
* What is the ‘Right to Data’? (Heather Brooke, Rufus Pollock)
* Opening up the Data Protection Directive: Can of Worms or Opportunity (Privacy International)
* Dismantling the Database State (NO2ID, ARCH, Big Brother Watch)
* Theft! A History of Music (Jennifer Jenkins)
* ACTA: A Shady Business (La Quadrature du Net, Becky Hogge)

If, like me, you disapprove of Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill you can:

• Sign the petition (currently at 25,970 signatories – let’s get it up over 50k!)
• Join the Open Rights Group who are fighting this bill
• Write a personal message to Lord Mandelson
• Write to your MP
• Or call your MP and tell them you disagree with summary disconnection

Whatever you do, do it now.

Dan Bull’s Dear Lily, [an open letter to Lily Allen]:

Best bit of activism I’ve seen all year!

If you want to do something about this, please write to your MEP and support the Open Rights Group so that they can continue to campaign on your behalf.

Last Friday, Mr Neil, Patron of the Open Rights Group, gave a talk to 200 fans and ORG supporters entitled Piracy vs. Obscurity (a reference to Tim O’Reilly’s quote, “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy”). You’re probably wondering why it has taken me so long to report back – after all, we all know I’m a bit of a fan. Well, the delay is partly because I was waiting for the audio recording of the evening find its way online, and partly just because I’m really just a bit crap. The audio’s finally up, and if this little widget works the way it’s supposed to you’ll be able to listen to Neil right here. Or, if you prefer, you can download an MP3.

The sound is a little faint, and you can’t hear the questions in the Q&A, but you can hear Neil, which is the most important bit. For someone who’d stepped off a plane at noon that day, spent the afternoon doing interviews, the early evening in a graveyard waiting for the light to fail enough so that the photographer’s assistant could run about in the background whilst he stood very still, and had entirely failed to find five minutes to plan what he was going to say, Neil’s talk went beyond merely coherent (a feat in itself with the kind of jetlag you get coming from there to here) and was actually very insightful, intelligent and, above all, funny. Neil’s sense of timing is impeccable – somewhere in a parallel universe he’s known not as a novelist or comic book writer, but the UK’s finest stand-up comedian.

I would particularly encourage any of my not-yet-published author friends to listen, particularly to the question, which you can’t hear but have to infer, about whether or not it’s damaging to put unpublished works online. I agree completely with Neil that you really need to get your stuff out there, that getting read is the most important thing and that the chances of you either having your stuff nicked or putting off a publisher is vanishingly small.

One question I wanted to ask, but didn’t, was whether Neil might one day release something under a Creative Commons license that would allow derivative works. He already has a very generous attitude towards students wanting to make films of his short stories, which is that if they pay a peppercorn fee (he mentioned the sum of one of your American dollars), then they can adapt a story. I think that’s an admirable stance to take.

But I have to admit that I would walk over fields of broken glass to be allowed to record and share an audio book version of something – anything – by Neil. I am currently reading Stardust to Kevin, who has seen the film but not read the book. Indeed, Kev’s never really read anything by Neil – I don’t think he’d even heard of Neil til the first time I started gushing about him – so it’s nice to be able to read Stardust whilst he’s away. We are, of course, having to both time- and space-shift it, so I am recording it in sections of about 10 pages at a time, and then shoving it up on a private wiki that only we can access. It is huge amounts of fun to read aloud, and I really wish I could read something of Neil’s that I could legitimately share with more people than just my husband.

(As a digression, some books are fabulous to read aloud, and some really aren’t. Stardust flows beautifully off the tongue and I hardly ever stumble. I introduced Kev to Terry Pratchett too, and that’s a joy to read out loud. But Neal Stephenson’s Cobweb, on the other hand, is not only the worst thing he’s ever written, it’s also nigh on the worst thing I’ve ever read: long and overly complex sentences turn into interminable paragraphs which leave one wanting to set the damn thing afire rather than continue forcing all those words through your poor, beleaguered brain.)

Finally, if you want to hear more of Mr Neil, then I highly recommend that you watch the readings of his latest novel, The Graveyard Book. Not only is it a wonderful book, it’s also beautifully read and a joy to listen to.

Blatant copy from Ian Brown’s blog, but it was so good I wanted to keep it for myself:

“I admit, I questioned the wisdom of giving the games to a city with such a poor human rights record — every citizen under surveillance, police executing suspects, people interrogated just for taking a photo in a railway station — but maybe London can rise to the occasion.” —Dave Garner

The Open Rights Group has organised an evening with Neil Gaiman, its Founding Patron, on Friday, 24 October (7.00 – 9.00 pm), where Neil will talk about Piracy and Obscurity:

In this, the first public appearance of his Graveyard Book UK tour, he invites fans and ORG supporters to discuss piracy from the perspective of a creator, what it means to be one of the tribe of readers, and why most people discover their favourite authors for free.

The venue – The Crypt on the Green, St James Church, Clerkenwell – is tiny compared to many events Neil does, with only 150 places, so it’s going to feel very intimate and personal.

The schedule for the evening is:

19.00 – Doors open. We’ll welcome you into the crypt with wine and nibbles.
19.30 – Neil’s talk starts and will be followed by an extended Q&A
21.00 – The talk finishes and all attendees are invited for a drink to the private upstair rooms of an adjacent pub, The Three Kings

If you’re a Neil fan, then you really need to sign up fast. I meant to blog about this when the announcement was made last Thursday, but have been insanely busy what with one thing and another. In the meantime, the ‘£10 on the door’ tickets have all sold out, leaving only the New ORG Supporter tickets (join between now and the event, and entry is free, 20 left), and the Existing ORG Supporter (£5 on the door, 28 left) tickets.

(UPDATE: ORG have released some more ‘£10 on the door’ tickets, and there are currently 24 left. Grab them now whilst you can!)

I would highly recommend that you sign up asap, because these tickets aren’t going to be around for long! And, as you can see from the counter to the left (if you’re reading this on the site rather than RSS), ORG is up to 921 supporters now. Hopefully this fundraiser will push it over the 1000 mark. That would finally get ORG the same number of supporters that originally pledged, and that we were supposed to launch with (although, of course, we were working on campaigns before we even had a name or a bank account!).

The aim is to get ORG up to 1500, and it’s important that they reach that goal. The list of issues that they need to campaign on isn’t getting any shorter, and there aren’t any more hours in the week, so the best way to continue being as effective as they have been is to expand. And they can’t do that without money!!

So, don’t just sign up to support ORG, don’t just come along to see Neil, convince a friend to sign up too!

Here’s the deal – if you join the Open Rights Group, and send your confirmation code to Danny O’Brien, he has said he will produce:

• A daily blog post for another month (worth five ORG memberships) [He's now up to 2 months - let's see if we can make it 3]
• A special one-off issue of NTK (five ORG memberships)
• A special podcast issue of NTK (five ORG memberships)
• What I really think of Andrew Orlowski (five ORG memberships, even though I know I should probably price this one higher) [He's taken this off the list as he says it's bound to happen sooner or later anyway.]
• A mini-version of Life Hacks, the book he nearly wrote with Merlin Man (ten ORG memberships)

Alternatively, if you send me your ORG confirmation codes, and I get five of them, I’ll blog here every day for a month too (apart from the time we’re on holiday!).

We – ORG and a number of other groups – have been campaigning against the extension of copyright term on sound recordings for quite a while now. My last big campaign as Executive Director of the Open Rights Group was Release The Music, wherein we called on the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property to reject calls by the music industry to extend the term. We were successful.

Not only does extending the term not make sense economically, it doesn’t make sense for musicians either, as only a tiny, tiny minority of them will actually benefit. The rest will just have to sit and watch their back catalogue recordings sit and rot in the vaults of record companies who don’t want to be bothered to re-release or promote them. Sir Cliff will rake in the cash whilst jobbing musicians will get nothing.

Now the fight has moved to the EU: Commissioner Charlie McCreevy announced in February that he intends to extend the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. In response, ORG and EFF Europe have put together a petition, which I strongly urge you to sign. It’s says, very simply:

The following individuals state their opposition to a copyright term extension for sound recordings.

We ask the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers to ensure that policy in this area reflects all concerned stakeholders, including consumer and public interest organisations, and not just the commercial rights-holders who advocate for extended copyright term.

ORG’s briefing pack will be helpful if you want to understand the issues more thoroughly, as will the posts on the ORG blog.

But please do sign the petition – it only takes a moment to do, and it’s really very important.

A little unashamed pimping and cross-posting…

Over the last few months I’ve working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era research project (hence my quietude here), which is examining the way in which businesses are using open intellectual property as a central pillar of their business model.

The project culminates in three free seminars in central London during March – a full day on 17th March, and two evening seminars on 18th/19th (with roughly the same content in each) – during which we’ll talk about what we’ve discovered about open IP businesses, and talk to people who are actually giving stuff away whilst also making money from it. We’ve managed to recruit three fabulous guest speakers:

Monday 17 March
- Tom Reynolds, blogger, ambulance technician and author of Blood, Sweat and Tea, published under Creative Commons licence and in paper by The Friday Project.
- John Buckman, entrepreneur, musician and founder of CC music label Magnatune.

Tuesday 18 March (evening)
- Tom Reynolds graces our presence again.

Wednesday 19 March (evening)
- David Bausola, the creative mind behind interactive online comedy Where are the Jonses?

The seminar is aimed at people within the creative industry – e.g. music, publishing, film, TV, radio, visual arts, photography – and from any size of company, whether they are freelances or a C-level exec. The course materials are all being prepped out in the open, under CC licence.

As mentioned, the seminar is free to attend – if you are interested, all you need to do is to fill in our application form.

If you’re interested yourself, please do apply! If you have a blog, podcast or Twitter account and would like to mention our seminar, please do. And if you know of anyone who might be interested in coming, feel free to tell them about it.

Our deadline for applications is 15th February, so apply now!

At last, applications for the Creative Business seminar that I’ve been working on, examining new business models based around giving away creative works, are open!

If you are interested in coming along, you can read more on the site, or download the application pack.

It seems very hard to believe, but it’s over two years since the Open Rights Group was started by myself, Danny O’Brien, Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, Stef Magdalinski, and Cory Doctorow at OpenTech, on 23 July 2005. We rapidly brought Louise Ferguson, James Cronin, William Heath and Ben Laurie on board (and onto the Board), gathered a fabulous group of keen thinkers and technology experts onto our Advisory Council, and recruited Neil Gaiman as our Patron. Then, after many months of behind the scenes work, ORG took its first tentative steps out into the big wide world.

Today, ORG has published its first annual report (although I’ll leave you to make the joke about how ‘annual’ doesn’t normally mean ‘after 28 months’!). This is a really big landmark – this is a sign of how well ORG has matured from a wobbly-knee’d start-up to a real, responsible and well-governed organisation. Indeed, the Report of Activities follows hot on the heels of our recent recruitment of three new Board members, Vijay Sodiwala, Dan McQuillan, and David Harris, each of whom brings new skills to the table. ORG truly is growing up, and as one of the people to have been there from the beginning, I’m really proud of what we have achieved and am honoured to have played a small part in that success.

It’s amazing, how much we’ve done over the last 28 months. We cut our teeth on the Data Retention Directive, managing to get some much needed press attention for a directive that was marched through the European legislature with alarming speed. We’ve helped the UK Podcasters Association defend their rights. We’ve lobbied hard to have the term of copyright on sound recordings protected, as part of a wider project to respond to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. We’ve helped the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group (APIG, now APComms) understand why we are against DRM. We’ve been one of the first organisations in the UK to observe the use of e-voting and e-counting in England and Scotland, touring our report around the party conferences.

We’ve done consultations, white papers, MPs briefings, press interviews and briefings, radio interviews, TV news slots, events, meetings, conferences, and blogs posts galore. The ORG wiki has become a valuable repository of information on a wide variety of digital rights issues, written mainly by some amazingly knowledgeable volunteers who have given up hours of their time to make sure that the wiki is up to date, accurate and free of spam.

I hope you don’t think that I’m bigging ORG up too much – I’m just genuinely amazed at how much we have achieved in such a short time and with so few resources. But of course, it doesn’t stop here. There is so much more work to do on e-voting, as the government has failed to take on board the severity of the problems identified not just by ORG, but also the Electoral Commission. We are also working hard on the Creative Business in the Digital Era project, examining new and developing business models that involve giving away creative works for free (and also, sometimes, the rights to that work). And there’s a lot more to come – the list of issues we want to tackle just keeps getting longer.

So far, we’ve been funded by our supporters, who’ve dipped into their own pockets and donated a little of their hard-earned cash each month, and through grants from organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and the London Development Agency. Grants are important – they allow us to focus our efforts on campaigning. But the support from you, the public, is most important of all. Your money doesn’t just provide ORG with a dependable income, it also adds your voice to ours, ensuring that we are taken seriously by the MPs, Lords and policy makers that we seek to influence.

Originally, over one thousand people pledged financial support to ORG, but many did not keep their promise and we’ve never managed to recruit our full Founding 1000. Now, more than ever, is a good time for you to donate to ORG or, if you already are a supporter, to persuade a friend to donate. The Josteph Rowntree Reform Trust is offering us a grant, £10,000 of which is in the form of matched funds, meaning that we won’t get that money if we can’t raise an equal amount ourselves. JRRT will count both one-off donations and the full year’s value of a subscription, whether you pay monthly or annually.

The best way to support ORG is with a monthly donation via standing order. Whilst you can also donate via PayPal, that’s far from ideal, because not only do they charge a fee, but if your credit or debit card expires your subscription is automatically cancelled by PayPal. We have lost a lot of supporters like this, so a standing order really is the best way to go. You can set one up by sending us a standing order form, or using your own online banking (our bank details are on the form).

Danny O’Brien put it well:

So, here’s the most amazing thing. ORG doesn’t do that on a thousand people’s fivers at all. ORG does it on less.

To get our ballpark income, ORG would have had to have converted every single one of the pledge-signers. I think we got around 50%.

So to celebrate two years, I encourage everyone to try and push the membership up to the promised one thousand. No, two thousand.

If you’re an ORG supporter, pressgang two of your friends to join. Find that online pal who is even more fanatical than you in pursuit of digital rights. Tell the blowhards on Digg or Slashdot it’s time to put their pounds where their posts are. Heck, buy one in your mum or niece’s name for Christmas: it’s their Internet too. And check whether your own membership has lapsed (It happens – *blush* mine expired earlier this year, and I missed the memo – I’m back in the black now). Just click here.

Think what ORG can do in the next two years. Think what we can do with 2000 members. Think what we can do with 20,000.

Most of all, think what will happen if we don’t do something.

But giving money is not the only thing you can do. We need to spread the ORG word, so if you have a blog, please write even just a small post about ORG today. If you’re on Twitter, Jaiku, Seesmic, or any other social messaging service, please write or talk about ORG today. If you’re on IM or Skype, change your status to something suitably supportive. If you’re on Facebook, change your status and join our Facebook group. If you’re on Upcoming, there’s a group there too.

There’s so much you can do to spread the world – please be generous with your time and words.

Finally, there are so many people without whom ORG simply wouldn’t be the success it is: our current supporters and our cadre of committed volunteers. I can’t name them all, but they all deserve thanks and a big round of applause.

Support ORG. Help us keep your bits safe.

It doesn't seem like it, but it's nearly two years since I started ORG, along with Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, Cory Doctorow, and Danny O'Brien, at the OpenTech conference. In the following weeks, we got together with Stef Magdalinski, James Cronin, Louise Ferguson and Ben Laurie and William Heath to form the ORG Board. Later on we acquired Neil Gaiman as our patron, and gathered a group of digital rights experts together to form our Advisory Council.
At the beginning of this year, I moved from the Executive Director role to the Board when we recruited Becky Hogge to be our full-time ED, with able support from Michael Holloway.
We've campaigned on data retention, copyright term extension, DRM and evoting, just to name a few. We've had some spectacular successes, some great press, and have built strong relationships with a host of other rights organisations, journalists and MPs.
All in all, it's been a busy two years, but now the time has come to recruit some new blood to the Board and are looking for people to take up non-executive positions.
So what are we after? Well, your expertise. Not so much your knowledge of digital rights issues – although interest in that area is helpful, we have the Advisory Council to set policy – but your expertise in how to run an organisation like ORG. This is all about the stuff that keeps ORG working, keeps it successful – deciding strategy, guiding the Executive Director and staff, and helping the organisation meet our goals.
We meet once a month, and you'll be expected to take part in two low-volume mailing lists (Board and Advisory Council) and our internal wiki, as well as attend Advisory Council meetings once a quarter. You'll need to be able to dedicate 1-2 days a month to ORG. Although unpaid, your out-of-pocket expenses will be covered.
Again, it's worth stressing that this isn't about digital rights policy, so you don't have to be an expert, you just have to be interested in helping to protect our digital freedoms and liberties. We'd much rather see people who have experience in a business area such as finance, long-term business planning, or management. Maybe you've worked as an entrepreneur, in big business, or in an SME – NGO or non-profit experience isn't essential, but a good head for Board-level matters is!
Full job description is on the ORG site, and the closing date is 22 June. To apply, send covering letter and CV to michael [AT] openrightsgroup.org.

I don't know if posting videos is sort of cheating on my whole 'will blog daily' thing… but this one is so fab you really have to see it. (Thanks John!)


Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger on Vimeo
Later… Whilst I was googling for Harvey Danger to see if it really is spelt 'sitta', I discovered that not only is the band still going, they've also got a new album out, Little by Little…. They've made it available for free download, either via bit torrent or direct from their site in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format, as well as selling really nice packages from their store which include sets of badges and stickers, as well as a second bonus CD.
I think this is a fabulous idea, and one that I'm really glad to see bands experimenting with. Indeed, I think Harvey Danger really have their heads screwed on right, as their explanation for why they are giving their music away for free chimes very much with the way I look at things.

Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.
Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99). [...]
However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships.
We realize that digital files are the primary means by which a huge segment of the population is exposed to new music; we also believe that plenty of music lovers in the world will buy a record once they’ve heard it – whether via radio or computer.

I've downloaded the album and I'm going to give it a good listening to. If I like it I'll buy it and, if I do, then that will be a sale they made explicitly because some people at some company called Connected Ventures did a mad lip-dub version of Flagpole Sitta and because Harvey Danger let me hear their music for free.

It's just over a week til the Open Rights Group's Support ORG (and Party!) event, at which there will be public domain DJs, free culture goodie bags and the chance to win some really cool schwag. Our special guest speaker is the wonderful Danny O'Brien, who is always fantastic value for money and well worth coming along to see. So, if that sounds like fun, come along – it's free! Well… it's sort of free – we just ask that you bring someone who might like to become a new ORG supporter.
If you can't make it, then you can still support ORG by buying a raffle ticket for just £2.50 (link to PayPal is at the bottom of that page). Prizes up for grabs include:

• a signed copy of Code 2.0 from Lawrence Lessig
• ¬£150 in O‚ÄôReilly book vouchers
• a signed copy of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property from Andrew Gowers
• a signed copy of Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear
• a set of a dozen Beatpick compilations
• a signed author's galley of Cory Doctorow's next novel, Little Brother and the opportunity to be written into it
• … and the pi?®ce de r?©sistance, as far as I am concerned – a 'very battered keyboard with a key missing and everything!', signed by our Patron, Neil Gaiman.

Many thanks to everyone who has donated! Buy your tickets on the night, or online via PayPal. At £2.50 each, they're a snip!

Oh… and also, please blog about this as widely as you can. ORG has a busy year ahead and we really need to spread the word – your blog post is as valuable a way of showing support for the work that ORG does as buying a raffle ticket or becoming a supporter.

From the ORG blog:
Should the term of copyright protection on sound recordings stay at 50 years or be extended?
This question has been hanging in the air for the last couple of years, with the music industry lobbying government for an extension on the grounds that the royalties they earn from old recordings are essential to bringing new acts to the stage and supporting ageing musicians. They believe that copyright term on sound recordings should be the same length as the copyright in the composition, which currently stands at life plus 70 years.
On the other hand, copyright reformers argue that term should remain the same in order to protect the public domain and to free the huge number of old recordings which are no longer commercially viable and therefore not being released by the record labels. They also argue that there is a greater economic benefit to allowing works to pass into the public domain after 50 years so that new works can be made from them and new businesses that specialise in niche markets can flourish.
This question of term extension, along with many others, is now being considered by Andrew Gowers in his Review of Intellectual Property which was commissioned by the Treasury and is due to report before the end of the year.
The Open Rights Group believes that term extension is such an important issue that it deserves focused and rigourous discussion, so we've invited people from number of backgrounds to give us their thoughts and opinions.
We would be delighted if you could join us – the event is free to all, but places are limited so book now!
Schedule:
6.00pm – Registration.
6.30pm – Keynote by Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University.
7.30pm – Panel Discussion, moderated by John Howkins, RSA & Adelphi Charter; guests include Caroline Wilson, University of Southampton, Faculty of Law; others TBC.
8.30pm – DJ set by The Chaps, playing a pre-1955 public domain set.
10.00pm – Close.
Date:
Monday 13 November 2006
Location:
Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square
London, WC1
United Kingdom
Nearest tube:
Holborn
If you sign up, but find you are not able to come, please do let us know so we can release your seat to someone else.

Cory Doctorow, ORG Advisory Council member, famous novelist, copyright activist and one of the driving forces behind BoingBoing, has kindly donated a Razr mobile phone and a signed fist edition of his novel Eastern Standard Tribe, to the Open Rights Group for us to auction. We have duly put both together as one lot on eBay, with a starting price of just £5. (Rather fuzzy photo.)
Bargain!
Details for the Motorola Razr:
Flipphone
Condition: New
GSM/GPRS 850/900/1800/1900 Mzh
Unlocked
Camera with 4x zoom
Bundled Items: Battery, Wall Charger
Features: Bluetooth, Colour Screen, Email / Web, GPRS, MMS enabled, Polyphonic ringtones, Streaming video, Vibration
And the blurb for Eastern Standard Tribe:

Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth into the world
Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. he may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.
The comm – instant wireless communication – puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. but one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by common time zones, less than families and more than nations. And Art is working oto humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people.
The world of next week is overflowing with ubiquitous computing, where an idea scribbled onto one's comm can revolutionize an industry. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted – not happiness, not money, and, most certainly, not love.
Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on teh roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain. Happiness or smarts? What's it going to be, Art?

If you want to check out Cory's book before you buy this signed hardback, then you can – he's made it available for download under a Creative Commons licence.
So, whilst you're checking out the full spec for the ultra-slim Razr and reading through Cory's download to make sure you're into time-shifting double-dealing hackers, why not bid? Just in case…
And if you don't want to bid, but want to support ORG, please blog the links!

Was the headline that I chose not to run with in today's Open Rights Group press release, despite the fact that's pretty much how I felt about it.
If you're a regular reader of either my or Neil's blog, you will of course already know that Neil's our Patron, but it's nice to finally fess up publicly about it. I'm pleased about it for a few reasons. Neil's very clued in when it comes to copyright, digital rights and authors' freedoms. He even won the Defender of Liberty Award* from the CBLDF in 97. It's wonderful to see someone whose creative processes are so very analogue – Neil writes his first drafts longhand with a nice pen and a Moleskine notebook – becoming so deeply immersed in the digital world.
It's also great because Neil and Cory Doctorow, who is on our Advisory Council, are the very people that the rights-grabbing publishing oligarchies claim that they are trying to 'protect' using that annoying DRM crap, plus they're the people that you are I are supposedly 'stealing' from every time we read their books more than once. I've always found Cory to be quite pleased to have his work downloaded, repurposed and redistributed (within the terms of his Creative Commons licence, of course). And I know for a fact, because he's said so on his blog, that Neil's very keen on people reading his works more than once, turning them into tattoos, and using them as inspiration for interpretative dance.
Plus, of course, and you know how much I love stating the blindingly obvious, I'm chuffed because I've been a huge fan of Neil's for a long time, and finally I have a good excuse to email him and ask for quotes. To wit:
“We're in a world in which digital rights, the world of the internet, and the exchange of information is getting more and more important and relevant to all our lives, wherever we are,” said my new friend Neil. “I'm delighted that there's now a group of people committed to preserving and extending civil liberties in a digital world and to being sane and sensible as we careen into a digital future. I was honoured to be asked to be Patron of the Open Rights Group, and I look forward to working with them for years to come.”
So, don't forget to sign up to support ORG, and especially don't forget that we have an evening of free drinks, nibbles and Cory Doctorow on Feb 7th.
* Hm… wonder if ORG should start a Defender of The Digital Realm awards…

The second Open Rights Group, featuring ubergeek Cory Doctorow, is set for the evening of Tuesday 7 Feb 2006.
Don't let Hollywood hijack your rights
Cory Doctorow
American entertainment companies say they're fighting piracy, but they're going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital television restrictions proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all digital TV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It's not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe's coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for digital TV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks — and you shouldn't take it lying down!
This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do send this information to anyone you think may be interested.
Refreshments and nibbles will be provided free of charge.
When: Tuesday 7 February 2006, 6pm–9pm
Where: 01Zero-One Hopkins Street (corner of Peter Street), Soho, London, W1F 0HS
Map: http://www.01zero-one.co.uk/map.htm
Note: 01Zero-One is sometimes a difficult venue to find if you've never been there before. On the corner of Hopkins and Peter Street, you'll see a featureless brick wall, with nothing but a black door in it. That anonymous black door is the one you want — just ring the buzzer and it'll be opened for you, if it's not propped open with a brick, that is.
Only 100 people can attend, so please book your place by signing up on the Open Rights Group wiki.

The Open Rights Group pledge finally matured on Christmas day, and now we're proud to announce that the supporters' database is up and running and you can officially now give us cash! We've had a surge of donations since the email went out to pledge signatories, so please do join the stampede and let us have your fiver a month.
We have two levels of support: normal is £5 per month, or £60 per year; and concession is £30 per year. You can pay by cheque, credit/debit cards via PayPal, or standing order – we'll even create your own personalised standing order form which you can either send to us or use to set up your standing order via your own online banking system.
The first 1000 people to give us actual cold hard cash will be given a special status, that of 'Founding 1000', which basically means that we will give you special treats as soon as we've figured out what those special treats are. In the meantime, you get a warm rosy glow of satisfaction (batteries not included).
If you can't donate, then please help us by spreading the word and blogging about ORG. We also have, for your delectation and delight, a wiki and a discussion list where you can join in the flame wars fun.