GREEN PIRATE

“Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another.” — Stephen Fry

This comes right on time after recently getting my Nook Tablet which I promptly had to root before expecting it to function properly. So what is Document Freedom day about?

Quite simply, Document Freedom day is a collective call for open standards from us readers to the ebook publishing industry.

I must say that I am a bit disappointed just now hear of this. Even more so to find that there are no scheduled events in the USA. Nevertheless, I know an awesome cafe here in Austin where I can post some flyers and I also happen to have a blog to tell people they can go to http://documentfreedom.org/ to learn more. How convenient.

Mirrored at KAT.ph

Neil Gaiman offers some wise advice to the Open Rights Group and shares his personal transformation from viewing file-sharing as a threat to understanding the important role it has played in supporting his career as a writer.

As this is my favorite author, I am very excited to be able to post this today. For a long time, the following quote from a blog post by Mr. Gaiman titled “Why defend freedom of icky speech?” could be found in my signature:

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

This gave me a great deal of respect for Neil Gaiman as a man. It also served to reinforce my opinion of him as an excellent writer and weaver of fantastic stories because it made me realize the importance allowing the creative mind to roam free. If Mr. Gaiman had not had the opportunity, the world would have lost some very special works of art without ever even having known what it was missing out on.

Thankfully, we can enjoy great works such as Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and American Gods today. I highly recommend getting your hands on some of his novels in whatever way you can. I’d be willing to bet my bandwidth that once you read his work you will want to buy a printed version. In fact, come to think of it, it wasn’t until Anansi Boys that I had purchased one of his books without reading a friend’s copy first. It all started with the Sandman series I used to read at my uncle’s comic book store and the graphic novels I would borrow from my friend.

Anyway, check out the video below!

A study sponsored by the New York Times looks at our natural human instinct to share. The highlights below aim to explain the motivation behind sharing and offers some insight as to how this trait aids in advertising and marketing.

Green Pirate is posting this here to say on behalf of all pirates, “we told you so! Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. ”

Found via TCblog; a Spanish marketing blog.

Share Cop is a service that claims they can protect people from “cyber thieves” who share digital content on the internet. All pirates and anyone with the slightest tech sense, and most probably Share Cop, realize that such services are little more than a scam because their is no known way to prevent piracy on the internet. Much to the dismay of intellectual property industries, that is an old fact.

Perhaps this fact has become so apparent that Share Cop is struggling to find clients and, being the geniuses that they are, have resorted to spamming blog that clearly are in favor of copyright reform and keeping online file-sharing legal. Rather than treat it as the usual spam and block it, Green Pirate is going to allow Share Cop to publicly expose themselves as the lowest life form on the internet. Behold, the spammer.

Now I would like to address a few words from the spammer’s website.

Warning

The illegal sharing of your digital product is killing your profits.

No it’s not. Prove it.

It’s heart-wrenching, but true! If you have a digital product, then it is or will be shared or sold illegally throughout warez sites, file sharing networks, torrent sites, forums, and more.

Ok, at least you got that part right.

Let us protect your digital product from cyber thieves.

It’s heart-wrenching, but true! If you have a digital product, then it is or will be shared or sold illegally throughout warez sites, file sharing networks, torrent sites, forums, and more… In other words, you just you can’t do a damn thing about it. Suck my balls. GTFO.

busker – a person who entertains people for money in public places (as by singing or dancing), usually while asking for money

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, has recently raised over $10.7M and counting for the website. His personal appeal banners became an instant meme, possibly due in part to his intense, sincere gaze.

But as the lulz continue and his campaign is showing great success, thus far, I have to pose the question: Is Jimmy Wales the greatest busker in the history of busking?
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It is a shame that a majority of people still focus largely on issues surrounding bittorrent that are only relevant to a minority of special interest groups (AKA Hollywood copyright holders).
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