The Institute for Policy Innovation suggests that the Digital Freedom Coalition should exand its scope to include financial freedom:

All we want is the freedom to have access to the main thing everyone needs--money. . . . But our freedom to access the money we want will be taken away if the Big Banks are able to use government laws and regulations to get their way.

Your financial freedom is at risk, if the Big Banks and Government and Law and bad stuff like that gets its way.

See, all I want to do is be able to walk into a bank and take out all the money I need. But "the man" won't let me. The "man" guards the money with locks, and safes, and armed thug guards. . . . .

New technologies today make it easier than ever to find creative ways to access the money we need. But The Man and Big Banks are standing in our way of using this exciting new technology, passing laws and regulations designed to restrict our ability to hack into banks and financial services companies.

Read the whole thing. The real story here is that the Consumer Electronics Association wants to commoditize content so that more of the returns from the total content/player system wind up in the hands of CEA's members. Over the long term, this will stultify the whole system, but CEA seems concerned with the next quarter, and there is a backlog of content that can be pirated.

Anyone who thinks that CEA is on the side of the little guy or the artists better check out its membership roster, which is a long roll of very large multinational companies.Unfortunately, CEA is entlisting lots of useful idiots* in this venture to give it a patina of respectability.

*From Wikipedia: In political jargon, the term "useful idiot" was used during the Cold War by anti-communists to describe Soviet sympathizers in western countries (particularly in the United States) and the alleged attitude of the Soviet government towards them. The implication was that the person in question was naïve, foolish, or in willful denial, and that he or she was being cynically used by the Soviet Union, or another Communist state. The term is still in use and used more broadly to describe someone who is perceived to be manipulated by political movement, terrorist group, or hostile government, whether or not the group is Communist in nature.

posted by James DeLong @ 10:24 AM | Free Culture Movement

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