Today is the Day Against DRM, the official day assigned to oppose Digital Rights Managment. DRM is a technology designed to stop you from reading, listening, and watching books, articles, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, movies, videos, TV, radio, and music. A few corporate groups are strong-arming your government into trying to change the law so that DRM is required in all media, and to make it a crime punishable with jail-time to avoid DRM.

DRM provides you with no value. It doesn’t help you read the newspaper online; it makes it harder to read. It doesn’t make it easier or more enjoyable to watch a movie; it makes it harder or in some cases impossible to watch a movie that you have PAID for. It doesn’t help you listen to music you have purchased; in fact it may require you to pay over-and-over again to keep listening to a single song that you have purchased.

DRM doens’t help artists either. It makes it harder for them to get their work out to an receptive audience. It makes it more expensive for them to publish their work.

Lobby groups for companies that buy the licensing rights for books, music, and movies from the artists that create content are fighting hard to make DRM part of your life. Maybe you want to fight back? Maybe you don’t? Here are a few things you can do either way:

• Don’t use iTunes, don’t buy an iPod, and don’t buy form the iTunes store. The files you get from iTunes can be “turned off” by Apple anytime they want. If they want to make a few extra bucks off you next year, they just have to change the system so that your files won’t play anymore unless you pay for an “upgrade.” There are plenty of places that sell plain-old MP3s.
• Check out MusicIP Mixer from musicip.com. Not only will it play regular old MP3s, but it will play Ogg Vorbis file. Ogg Vorbis files give you better quality for the same size file, AND the format isn’t owned by any company… you will always be able to play your Ogg music… forever and ever.

For more information visit Ten Things for OCT3

The staff from the CBC who are currently locked-out of their jobs by CBC management, have started a website called CBC Unlocked containing their own content. It is interesting to compare the content of the CBC website with that of CBC Unlocked and Google News makes that easy. Google News Canada now indexes the CBC Unlocked content and it shows up right beside similar stories from the “official” CBC website (where news is coming from unedited feeds, management, and probably some contract sources).

In Edmonton, the CJSR radio station is carrying CBC Unlocked radio content each day and it is turning out to be a mix of interesting and not so interesting.

A new book by Peter C. Newman about Brian Mulroney, went on sale today: The Secret Mulroney Tapes. It is based on years of interviews conducted by Mr. Newman and media reports have picked some rather unflattering quotes from the book as examples of its content.

Members of the Edmonton Public Library can subscribe to a special RSS feed I whipped up to find out when the book becomes available. This feed will allow you to find out as soon as they have added it to their catalogue and you can place an hold even before it arrives! The feed is generated every two hours from a Z39.50 search of the EPL catalogue and converted to RSS (for those who care about the details).

For those, not familiar with recent world leaders, Mulroney was the Prime Minister of Canada for a long time. Americans might know him for clowning around and singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” with Ronald Reagan. Germans might recognize him as a friend of the famous criminal Karlheinz Schreiber.

Somewhat interesting are the headlines from Canada’s major media on the subject:

• The National Post: “Mulroney tell-all book slams Trudeau“
• The Globe and Mail: “Years later, ‘he bugs us still’“
• Macleans: “Mulroney “devastated” and “betrayed” by Newman’s tell-all book“
• CBC (staff locked-out): “Mulroney says he’s tops, Trudeau’s not“

Conclusions regarding media bias are left as an exercise for the reader.

The website http://www.howdtheyvote.ca/ shows statistics on the behavior of Canadian Members of Parliment including their abscenteeism and how the vote. The site was created by Cory Horner, a young electrical engineer. Cudos to Cory for taking an interest in Canadian government and enabling others to get this information easily!

Apparently he is working a feature to track civility as well. Civility has become an important issue in the last few months and M.P.s have been behaving in an outrageous manner. I think that last feature would be even better applied to the Alberta Legislature. Every Albertan should watch a few hours of our legislature in session. They may be shocked by what they see.

On the first day of my new blog there is mention of blogging in Helen Sweetheart of the Internet. Helen says she prefers “discourse that’s actually reasoned” to blogs.