The Big Noise gets louder!
 There are 71 days till the World Trade Organisation meets in Hong Kong. This meeting will decide international trade laws for years to come. At the moment trade laws work against poor countries, helping to keep millions of people in poverty. We need to act now to Make Trade Fair.
This month the Big Noise Petition hit 8.8 million. This is an increase of 400,000 sign-ups from one month ago. 64,400 of these sign-ups were ones that we collected at the summer festivals. This is brilliant but we still need another 1.2 million before the ten million target is reached.
The more sign-ups we get the more pressure world leaders will feel and the more likely they will be to listen. If you have not signed up do it now and tell everyone and anyone to do the same.
posted at 3:38 PM
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Comments:
GenerationWhy and Oxfam accept no responsibility for the content of comments in the Blog.
I was very disappointed that Oxfam have made the choice only to support
users of Microsoft products with their new website. Needless to say
Microsoft are a corporation with an extremely sketchy ethical history, see
for example
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profiles/microsoft/microsoft1.htm.
Proprietary software is one of the greatest threats to the global commons
of publicly available digital information (see the Oxfam International
campaign proposal on
http://danny.oz.au/free-software/advocacy/oicampaign.html ).
Microsoft have time after time sought to "embrace and extend" open
standards to which everyone has access in order to dominate the flow of
information and profit from it, check out, for example
http://www.opensource.org/halloween/ . Are Oxfam really only going to
support proprietary closed protocols, and does this not go against some of
your excellent analysis of the negative effects of IP laws, particularly
TRIPS? (e.g. http://www.oxfamamerica.org/advocacy/art5385.html ,
http://www.oxfam.co.uk/what_we_do/issues/trade/trips_wsf2002.htm )
Users of free software (like gnu/linux) or even non-market-dominant
nonfree software (like the safari or opera browsers or Mac OS) should be able to
access digital information in an open way. This is part of the basis of
digital citizenship, which is something that I can't imagine Oxfam not
wanting to support.
Digital Rights Management - something else the website appear to use, probably
at the request of the recording industry, is a further worrying
development. Essentially it redefines ownership in favour of large
corporate interests, rather than in the interest of the person who has
purchased the music (see http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/fair_use_and_drm.html).
Playing a song on more than one machine (especially if it's not a
Microsoft machine) now becomes too difficult for the average user, whilst
not being a serious obstacle to large scale pirates. The people to suffer
are people like me - home users who want to listen to their music on more
than one machine. Fair use becomes eroded, this is only a short way from
creating books that can only be read once, and all the other IP scare
stories one hears about. The only people to gain are M$, the recording
industry and large scale pirating operations.
I understand that the website is probably a great way to raise money,
and fundraising is crucial to the other extremely important work that
Oxfam does, however, when a website goes against so many key principles of
digital and global citizenship I think it's time to reconsider how it
works.
In short, a better website would:
- Support open standards, thereby supporting free software (gnu/linux,
mozilla, etc.) as well as nonfree (M$, MacOS), thus encouraging
participation from all digital citizens.
- Not depend on secret proprietary software products to work, and not
force people to use the software of a single ethically questionable
corporation.
- Eliminate DRM, by using the mp3, or, even better, ogg music formats.
This would allow the people purchasing music control over their tunes,
rather than having to cede it to the corporate interest of the music
industry.
If we're trying to create a fairer world, then I believe people's right
to participate in that world - be it in very simple ways like eating or
choosing a government, or more complex ones like digital rights - should
be at the heart of our strategy. This is a difficult ideal to live up to,
and I don't believe that bignoisemusic.com has quite managed to get there
yet (certainly not for me as a free software user and someone unwilling to
pay for tunes that I can't use as I see fit). I hope it will in the
future!
By ,
October 12, 2005 5:09 PM
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