This is an artful peice of journalism that gives you pause to reflect about the nature of conflict...

Atop Church, Another, Less Deadly Holy War

"I would not argue that downloading and copying are the only factors at work," Geoff Garin, chief executive of Hart Research, said. "But we have clear evidence that downloading and copying do not have a favorable effect on record sales."

Repeat after me, correlation is not causation.

Downloads Blamed for Low CD Sales

"Yet even Naderites should recognize that Barr's defeat in Georgia's Republican primary last week removes the fiercest champion of privacy in the U.S. House of Representatives, and his electoral loss will be a gain for the surveillance state. "

Yuck... Games being played with Grubb cannot replace the loss of a congressional leader...

Internet privacy loses a voice in D.C. - Tech News - CNET.com

Storing this in my MemeStream so I can keep up with it.

Lawrence Lessig's weblog

"The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling released yesterday."

The court system is often an effective check against excess by the legislature and executive. This is one of the pieces of the system that works most of the time. Exceptions include drug related search and seizure.

Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft (washingtonpost.com)

"At this juncture in the history of the software industry, more so than ever before, 10 years doesn't amount to a hill of JavaBeans--not when you're attempting to build up brand, distribution and customer loyalty in an increasingly fragmented and competitive market. "

This is a silly editorial. I can't think of anyone who is running 10 year old software outside of corporate legacy systems, and those are already paid for. But this guy gets reced for calling out Lessig in public.... :)

Why Larry Lessig gets an F

"Real estate agent Tara Sue Grubb is fed up with what she calls "individual rights sacrificed for big corporate politics." Grubb, 26, is running as a Libertarian candidate against North Carolina's Howard Coble, the 71-year-old Republican congressman whose public opposition to P2P file-sharing networks has made him the target of an online backlash. "

It begins. Wired is running a story on Grubb. A few arrogant comments from Coble are thrown in for good measure. A call for donations is made. I love Wired. They don't even pretend to be objective.

She Wants P2P for the People

This is an interesting story. As previously memed, Grubb is running against Coble in North Carolina. Coble co-sponsored the P2P hacking legislation. Grubb is understaffed and underclued, but she is opposed to the P2P law, she has started a weblog, and she is talking to people in a few of the forums on Radio Userland. She needs serious assistance.

There is some amount of excitement starting to build about this in the weblog community. The weblog community wants to flex its muscles in front of Congress. This could coalesce into an effort to throw Coble out. If the internet gets behind Grubb they may be able to muster the resources to mount a serious campaign, but time is extremely limited, and this is a district which is gerrymandered for Coble. The Dems haven't run a candidate against him in years. He won the last election with 91% of the vote.

Its going to be interesting to see what happens with this over the next few days. If this spreads like warchalking it could be the biggest political upset of all time. Or it could be a complete dud.

I'm hopefull...

Tara Sue Grubb for Congress

"Declan McCullagh misses the boat at least twice in his August 19th column concerning the potential impact on computer science research of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

Ed Felton slams McCullagh on DMCA...

Freedom To Tinker: Response to Declan's DMCA Piece

How? Here's the simplest thing we could do: identify 2 luddite members of Congress -- one Republican and one Democrat. Organize and defeat them in November. If Congress saw bad ideas cost seats, they'd begin to do something about their bad ideas."

I was complaining a few days ago that Lessig's fund raising wasn't the right answer and that we needed to organize computer people and actually throw someone out of Congress. And here he is planning exactly that! At this URL two people are IDed. Opposing candidates are IDed. This is good stuff. Whats important to understand is that its not important who wins or looses these campaigns, but the SIZE and VISIBILITY of the geek contingent. If we can demonstrate actual political muscle people will include us as parts of coallitions in preparing campaigns. That will get us the legislation we want.

Please make sure that everyone you know in the respective districts (10th IL, 6th NC) is aware of this. I presume that more organized information will be forthcoming.

Throw bad Congress people out this fall!