Don't Disconnect Us petition surges after Stephen Fry endorsement; Guardian, 11/25/09

Mercedes Bunz, Guardian; Don't Disconnect Us petition surges after Stephen Fry endorsement:

"Don't Disconnect Us petition, asking the government to drop its proposed measure allowing the disconnection of illegal filesharers, has accumulated 22,793 signatures as of 9am today. After Stephen Fry used Twitter to express his lack of confidence in this law and tweeted a link to it, thousands of people signed the petition. Among the 4,550 petitions on the No 10 website, it is currently number six.

A spokesman for the internet service provider TalkTalk, whose Andrew Heaney set up the petition, said: "The Don't Disconnect Us campaign has been given new momentum by Stephen Fry's tweets which have seen signatories on the Downing Street website go from over 1,000 to 18,000 in just a few days."

Fry, who has over a million followers now, had posted on Monday: "I'll keep at this till a million sign! We mustn't let Mandy do this WRONG thing. Please sign & RT: http://is.gd/50gQK #webwar #threestrike". He reminded his followers the next day.

The comedian Alan Davies and the science-fiction author Neil Gaiman have also signed the petition and added their weight to the campaign.

While the website of the campaign makes clear that "copyright infringement through filesharing is illegal and the government is right to tackle the issue", the petition asks the prime minister "to abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial."

Instead of punishing it proposes to deal with the illegal filesharer in the proper way, in a court of law. "This guilty until proven innocent approach violates basic human rights."

It also warns that "illegal filesharers will simply hack into other peoples WiFi networks to do their dirty work. This will result in innocent people being disconnected from the internet."
If you want to sign the connection, go here."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2009/nov/25/digital-media-stephenfry

New petition demands an end to Kindle DRM, faces long odds; Ars Technica, 8/4/09

Nate Anderson via Ars Technica; New petition demands an end to Kindle DRM, faces long odds:

"It was that decision to link the Kindle hardware and store with a new DRM scheme that led the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to add the Kindle to its "Defective by Design" anti-DRM campaign.

The group has now launched a petition asking Amazon to "remove all DRM, including any ability to control or access the user's library, from the Kindle... Whatever Amazon's reasons for imposing this control may be, they are not as important as the public's freedom to use books without interference or supervision."

The Foundation took particular exception to two decisions that Amazon made. First was the company's decision to address publisher concerns about the Kindle's text-to-speech feature by giving book publishers a way to disable the automated reading of their titles. Second was Amazon's almost unimaginably bad decision to remove already purchased books from customers' devices—and not just any books, but the George Orwell titles 1984 and Animal Farm...

These issues are certainly troubling, and the FSF is right to call Amazon to account for them. But to most consumers, the bigger concern about DRM is vendor lock-in...

The shift to electronic books provides obvious advantages in convenience and portability (every Ars staffer who owns a Kindle swears by it), but those books can only be read on devices that support Kindle DRM. Just as with music, people run the risk of making a significant investment into a product that they cannot resell and which may well become obsolete or unreadable in a decade—or whenever they decide to switch e-reader brands. "

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/new-petition-demands-an-end-to-kindle-drm.ars