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

"...This isn't a direct threat to free software, but Sarkozy's proposal is to give control over Internet connections to the Music industry. Internet connections are important for free software users and developers, and the Music industry is practically always our opponent on legislative issues..."

"In high-technology markets, disruptive innovation is something to be taken as a given, like gravity. Businesspeople do their best to exploit it, avoid it or cope with it. Industry upstarts depend on it, while established companies fear it. But no one in the competitive world of high technology thinks they can stop disruptive innovation, any more than they can alter the laws of gravity. But what if you could? What if an industry could banish disruptive innovation, leaving only a "well-mannered marketplace" of incremental innovations that reinforced comfortable business models?

FOSDEM was a week and a half ago, but the SD card containing a few extra pictures just turned up. The first main talk that occurred at FOSDEM was on the major growth of Linux within the motion picture industry and Hollywood. Linux is now the primary operating system being used in the render farms and post-production environments.

After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement.

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.

Hollywood's war on internet freedoms continues.

"Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because 'from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though.' ..."

"...Keynote speeches from FSF board members Mako Hill and Henri Poole and the director of the FSF-backed End Software Patents campaign Ben Klemens will each address the 2008 theme, "Tackling the Big Issues." They will look at the projects that will demand the Free Software Foundation's attention in 2008: from software patents to freedom for web services, from advancing free software adoption to the changing relations with the entertainment industry brought about by this year's Hollywood writers strike..."