http://blog.ownyourphone.com Working toward a modern, meaningful definition of freedom Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:59:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We here at OwnYourPhone have a lot of experience with competing with 800-pound gorillas. If you're a musician, you experience this every day. The big labels make you do all the hard work, and control the channels for distribution and promotion so they get all the reward. Well, we're here to ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=9 Copyright law in the US is a circus. And like any circus, there are some great sideshows. Take, for example, one man's crusade to re-assert his ownership of the Electric Slide. Is this a joke? Yes, in that it's funny. But the story is for real. Richard Silver, who claims to have ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=15 A Fair(y) Use Tale, embedded below, is a little intro to copyright law and fair use, made entirely with clips from Disney animated movies. Warning: It's hard to watch. For a much better explanation of copyright, see below. A transcript is available here. Lawrence Lessig explains, better then anyone, the history and ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=14 Pride in work encourages one to make a better product. Pride gives motivation to do better at everything we do, and encourages us to try to bring the rest of the world’s perceptions in line with our own. A perverted sort of pride also prevents people from admitting to mistakes and ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=11 We talk about freedoms that relate to the digital world. We complain when DRM makes download music less valuable then music from a CD. We don't want to have to face interrogation and harassment when we board a flight. ...But we really don't want to be tortured. Despite never delivering an applause-generating ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=10 The freedom award this week goes to KOOPA, who are the first band (that I've heard about) to break into the singles chart...without signing to a label. (To listen to their music, click here. For some strange reason, they decided to make it so you can't listen to a whole ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=8 We've all been presented with long legal agreements when we install software. Most of us don't read these things: they are very long, hard to understand and the software won't install without agreeing anyway. What's a freedom-loving citizen to do? Well, if you happen to have children running around your house, ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=7 In North Korea, you need an internal passport in order to travel between cities. If you are stopped away from home without an internal passport, even on foot, you will be arrested. This is a typical element of a modern fascist state. The U.S.S.R. had the same system, and remnants of ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=4 Computers speak in a string of 1s and 0s. We call each one of these 1s and 0s a "bit." The digital world is incredibly simple: everything is either true (1) or false (0). Ever try to fast-forward in a DVD and had a message that says "operation not permitted" come ... http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=3 This is the offical blog of OwnYourPhone. Run by Daniel Hornal and Adam Eivy out of Seattle, this blog attempts to log and discuss modern issues of freedom, security, copyright law and other interesting evolutions within the digital age. http://blog.ownyourphone.com/?p=2