Before the free culture movement even existed:

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to bend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

– Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All, 1990

Having read that, can you honestly feel that the law ought to ban outright artists like Girl Talk and sound advice? We are strangling the innovative, willful, daring mockingbirds of our time.

Crossposted to Civil Disobedient

Last week New York Times’ ran a great article on the new Dell Linux laptops. The interesting part of the article is that it not only pointed out the drawbacks to a Linux including the fact that the new Dell machines do not play DVDs out of the box, but also walked users through the process of enabling the DVD drives that come with the computers to play DVDs.

US users acting on these directions may return some balance to the the market for Operating Systems(OS’s). Microsoft and Apple have been using standards and proprietary drivers to lock users into using their OS’s in a practice that is anti-competitive and harmful to consumers. Civil disobedience may be our only tool for asserting users preference and preventing monopolies from controlling users in a democratic system where the legislative process is being controlled by the deep pockets of said monopolies. Civil disobedience is working to bring down the price of music online and remove DRM it may work here too.

Quote from NY Times:

One challenge for Linux users is finding media players that work with encrypted music and DVDs. Ubuntu comes with a movie player, but it is not automatically configured to play copy-protected commercial DVDs. To watch a movie, the Linux user must install necessary codecs, or decoders. One way to do that is to first download a program called Automatix from www.getautomatix.com. When you run that program you get an ominous warning that downloading and installing “non-free codecs without paying a fee to the concerned authorities constitutes a CRIME in the United States of America.” Users in the United States are advised: “please do not install option AUD-DVD.” Users who ignore that legal warning can then configure Ubuntu to play commercial DVDs.

Full article from NY Times.

Image from NY Times, edited by Brian Rowe.