A lawsuit filed last year by TorrentSpy--a BitTorrent search engine--that accused the movie studios' trade group of intercepting the company's private e-mails, was tossed out of court last week.

Google’s ultra high speed Internet project aims to bring Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri Internet speeds 100 times the current U.S. average. This has Hollywood petrified. Will users with gigabit connections pirate enough movies to decimate the movie industry’s revenue? Will piracy crush Hollywood in the way that it crushed the music industry?

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

I was reading an article about Freesoftware adoption and it noted that the freedoms afforded by the GNU Gpl were written largely for developers not end users. So I figured I would take a shot at positing the four freedoms to general users.

Amendments to the European Telecommunications directive being rushed through the European Parliament propose a "Soviet internet" where software publishers and internet service providers watch traffic and data for Hollywood. Software and services that run on the internet would have to ask for permission of the regulators.

« This is a response to A balance of freedoms. "Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn." - RMS ... » (Submitted by aboutblank on fsdaily.com - Free Software News)

Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open the door for big business, Hollywood and the indecency police to exert even more influence on the Net than they do now.

I'm damn fed up with the FSF being the "protector of freedoms", and also feeling that they can define what those freedoms mean.

The GPLv2 is a *legal*license*. And no, the FSF doesn't get to define what the words mean to suit their agenda.

Richard Stallman recommends reduced exposure to Hollywood's so-called "premium content", which increasingly excludes or punishes users of Free software like GNU/Linux