Whatever you think about Richard Stallman, you have to admit he is prescient. I came across Vivek Haldar's post about how Stallman's 1997 article "The Right to Read, about a dystopian future, predicted current rules around ebooks on the Kindle and iPad, basically that sharing equals stealing. Here's an excerpt:
...if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.
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The next thing in my queue was a news post from The Command Line, which contains the following items:
- Australian government widens spy agency’s powers again, The Sydney Morning Herald via Slashdot
- New Zealand libraries consider shutting off internet access to avoid three strikes hassle, NZ Herald News via Techdirt
- France lobbies G8 for Internet control and censorship, La Quadrature du Net via BoingBoing
If you're not mad you're not paying attention. In case you haven't gotten the cyberpunk-dystopian-future-that's-actually-the-present vibe yet, The Command Line also includes this item:
- Neuromancer film going forward, /Film via Slashdot
William Gibson's most famous quote is probably, "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet". Looks like our future already arrived in China...