p2pnet.net News- Here’s a development you can put your name to, says Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian Unlimited Online blog.

“Danny O’Brien – NTK founder, EFF activist and occasional Online contributor – chaired a debate [at Opentech 2005] on why there isn’t a fully-functioning digital rights lobby group here in the UK.”

O’Brien subsequently promised a standing order of £5 per month to Pledgebank to, “support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK”.

But, “only if 1000 other people will too".

“Well, at the risk of sounding ‘Just Five Pounds Will Free This Poor DRMed Document And Let It Roam Free In One of Our Free Range Open Standards’, we did some back of the envelope calculations after the talk, and agreed we could do something,” Johnson quotes him as saying.

“Probably two staffers and an office.

“One would act as a media conduit. Half our problem in the UK right now is that the press just don’t have anyone in their address books that they can confidently call about on these issues … Just having someone at the end of a phone, handing out quotes and press releases, and pro-actively calling journalists to make sure they know what’s going on, putting them in contact with all the other orgs in this area in the UK, is half the work.

“The rest of the job is actual activism and bootstrapping more funding.”

There you go., And as Johnson adds, "if you don’t like what they do with it, you don’t have to carry on donating".

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
Online blog – Digital rights in the UK: you can help, July 25, 2005

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2017 times