EFF/Open Rights Group Speakeasy night in London, June 14

By Cory Doctorow at 2:05 am Saturday, May 19 • Comments • Share

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Rights Group will co-host a speakeasy event -- a kind of pub night -- in east London on June 14. I'll be there, with several ORG employees, supporters and volunteers, and so will Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal director and veteran of many of the Internet's most important legal skirmishes (she's the one who argued the Bernstein case, legalizing civilian use of strong cryptography -- among many other accomplishments).

Speakeasy events are free, informal meetups that give you a chance to mingle with local online rights supporters and speak with the people leading the charge to protect digital civil liberties. It is also our chance to thank you, the supporters who make it possible. For this round, we are pleased to welcome EFF members as well as all friends and guests. REGISTER HERE!

When: June 14th, 2012 6:00 PM through 8:00 PM

Location: The Reliance (upstairs)
336 Old Street
London, EC1V 9DR
United Kingdom

Speakeasy: London with the Open Rights Group

Evidence-based copyright: UK online movie marketplace is expensive, broken, patchy

By Cory Doctorow at 8:08 am Tuesday, Nov 22 • Comments • Share

My latest Guardian column is "Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare," a report on the Open Rights Group's study of the lawful options for people who want to watch great British movies online. The UK government and courts keep ratcheting up Internet censorship proposals because they say that there are so many lawful marketplaces that there's no excuse for "piracy." But ORG's research shows that large swathes of critical material isn't available for sale. And as we saw when major rightsholders pulled out of Hulu and iTunes before, the availability of their material on BitTorrent spiked -- if you don't offer lawful channels, you drive customers to unlawful markets.

Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).

And while recent blockbusters fare better, it's still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).

But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it's hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs.

Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare

Brits: Tell Parliament to keep its hands off social media

By Cory Doctorow at 3:17 am Saturday, Aug 13 • Comments • Share

Jim from the UK Open Rights Group sez, "David Cameron is trying to gain new powers to close social media and mobile messaging when there's 'trouble': he's also thinking about new snooping powers. We need to stop these plans before they get going."

The Government is focusing on entirely the wrong problem in trying to increase their powers to ban, block or monitor people's communications. Social networks like Twitter are used for a huge array of positive purposes such as warnings of danger and organising clean up projects. Blanket surveillance measures of private communications or increased powers to mine users data would undermine people's freedom to communicate in very damaging ways, and would in no way address the problems at hand. Making laws in haste, with limited analysis and information, to deal with an exceptional problem is likely to create unbalanced laws and abuses of our rights.

Save our social media! Stop cut offs and close downs (Thanks, Jim!)

(Image: Riot Police, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from zoonabar's photostream)