The Real Threats to Society Include Software Patents and the Corporations That Promote Them
THE last video ("Ignore Buzzwords and Pay Attention to Attacks on Software Developers") ended by speaking about the real threats that we're faced with, not only as Free software users/developers but also as proprietary software users/developers, i.e. everybody! A friend wrote to say: "Looking at this TV stuff some more today and the rights one had in the non-networked era do not exist in the networked era. With an antenna one can both view and timeshift/mediashift. With the Internet (or specifically the WWW) one cannot even view due to barriers like Google (i.e. Widevine). Actually the rights do exist, but they simply are inaccessible any more."
And if you cannot exercise those rights, they're as good as non-existent. "Basically," said this friend, "but I realize that it is important to understand that the rights do exist regardless of the illegal (but widely accepted) behavior of various companies."
In the area of multimedia there are also many software patents and they're being used to intimidate/blackmail developers (some, including Unified Patents, initiate proceedings to invalidate them in Europe and the US, but not as fast as new ones get granted). Some people who make Kodi distributions, who have not done anything to run afoul of copyright law, are being targeted by lawyers who make patent claims, typically via patent trolls or "assertion" entities.
Our team still speaks to one distro developer who does Kodi, but we don't talk about the pertinent details publicly. So yes, it's about software patents, so he consults various groups that understand the topic. "Kodi is a program but it can be packaged into a single-purpose distro or two," my friend said, and "the fight against software patents needs as many skilled people as possible."
Lakka was mentioned on the Web a few days ago and OSMC is still going despite prior setbacks. But unless or until we eliminate all software patents, there cannot be peace of mind for coders. There are trolls working in the dark, blackmailing Free software developers, and the IBM-connected OIN won't tell the public about that, as it doesn't give a shit about community-run distros and apparently it does not even reply to developers!
"I gathered both of those," my friend said. "There is a lot of skulduggery against software freedom going on at many levels. Anyone who is effective is going to attract heat."
The OIN issue isn't a new one and many recognise this by now. We already saw that and wrote about it a decade ago, as we sought to make it widely understood that OIN works for IBM, i.e. for lobbyists in favour of software patents.
What we expect to happen in years to come is more ad hominem assault/skulduggery against community actors, notably rms, Professor Moglen etc. (mostly high-profile people) because the goal is to eliminate community voices, usually under the guise of "safe space" with some "Code of Conduct" brought up (pretext for banishing reasonable people).
Folks doing similar activism, or simply writing about these issues, are being censored. In some cases there are efforts (by IBM and Debian) to even hijack their domains in order to silence them. Well, in practice it's hard to mute them all because it doesn't scale well and it is expensive. They need to actually try to refute claims, but that's harder than hijacking people's domain/s (DNS namespace lawfare).
An associate recently told me "that [the] case that Debian is perpetrating against Daniel [Pocock] is problematic for the reasons you already wrote about."
The same militants who attacked us in recent years also attack Daniel Pocock, Professor Moglen, and others. They use the same sockpuppets (reused and repurposed), so it's not hard to see the pattern (yes, they have harassed them too). Threatening behaviour like this only contributes to the idea that the "diversity" crowd is a bunch of aggressive trolls.
"It is important to get that shit out in the daylight," the associate said. We shall do it without haste/hurry as it's more effective this way and it also gives more time for the perpetrators to make additional errors (like attacking women a little more). █