A look at four eBooks, all free.
- Freedom of Expression
- An astonishing look at the way overzealous copyright and patent laws are stifling everything from the artists to farmers, independent movie makers to the Girl Scouts. This book will suprise you at every turn with the way our hypocritical "intellectual property" laws are often harmful.
- The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
- The year is 1990. Crackers are bragging that they can bring down the phone system. Then one day, suddenly, it happens. AT&T has a massive nationwide failure, millions of calls are lost. The DOJ, Secret Service, and local law enforcement coordinate in a series of raids called Operation Sundevil. Hackers, Phreaks, as well as legitimate BBS operators and business owners are all arrested. It later turns out the blackout was caused by a missing break statement in AT&T fault handling code. Information in a pirated 911 document (valued at $77K, used to jail many of the hackers) was available to anyone for $13. Sterling gets to know many of the people on both sides, and the lawyers and libertarians who tried to figure out how things had gotten so out of control.
- Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
- Can't say too much about this one as I've just started it, but it concerns the struggle between those who would lock down the permissions on digital media, and those who believe we are best served by opening them up. How do we balance the rights of artists and consumers? Should we allow distributors to make money in perpetuity off of the works they have purchased, or what is gained by limiting this.
- Free As In Freedom by Sam Williams
- A biography of Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. As a grad student, he gets fed up with bad, buggy, unfixable, unshareable software, so he aims to create a completely free version of unix and all of its applications. He invents a mechanism ("copyleft", the GNU Public License) for preserving freedom in addition to copy rights. Step forward 25 years and free software powers the biggest businesses on the web, runs your TiVo and powers supercomputers. The story of a pretty ordinary hairy freak who helped make it all possible.
