Open Rights Group launches in UK, immediately sparks online spat
The Open Rights Group (which does need a proper website not just a blog) has been launched as a kind of British Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’m sure it will do some sterling work but it’s a shame that almost immediately some digital rights extremists (an unlikely grouping) came along to a brainstorm for its founding and put a cat among the pigeons by being very rude about it (entertainingly).
It’s hard to take seriously their argument that corporations should be encouraged to behave more and more badly until their digital abuses are recognised by the public, but they seem to have managed to spark a lot of online flaming. You’d think the respondents, most of whom have more than a decade of online experience would know better than to respond to trolling?
Update: The ORG doesn’t have a ‘proper’ website yet but when searching for something rights related I did find the Campaign for Digital Rights which seems to share a lot of the ORGs objectives and has quite a bit of useful information about the state of UK and European law and why it should be changed.
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:32 pm
I’m not sure what to make of being called a “digital rights extremist”. If you mean, perhaps, that I’m extremely in favour of digital rights, then you’d be right.
Perhaps you merely take exception to our assertion that the great unhosed, bless ‘em, don’t actually give a toss about such things. The recent jump in Sony’s music sales from the free publicity being a case in point.
In which case, we rather think the evidence supports our argument, and you’re just running scared, ensnared by the evils of Tony’s broad church.
It is both lazy, and intellectually dishonest of you, to suggest we are wrong using, and then fail to back up your assertion with nothing more than a lazy ad hominem.
If we are wrong, and our logic is flawed, please explain why. Otherwise, why chip into this discussion at all?
As regards the future of ORG, in the absence of any statement from anybody in a position of ?authority? that ORG is going to do anything at all, we must assume that it intends to remain a flaccid talking shop.
Mailer, I and Levine would be happy to be ?digital rights extremist? rent-a-quotes, if that would be of help to ORG.
Rather than the vapid ?media hub? outpourings of Sue (Suw? Sujje? Psujjewe?) and her flappy ilk, we?d be happy to give people something meaty to chew on.
Martin Coxall
December 3rd, 2005 at 11:41 pm
I fear that, for all their apparent milky-tea support, the Consensual Brigade are not quite with the Geist, which appears to be flowing in extremis:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/01/mp3tunes_oboe_analysis/
and
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/lf/view/48581/
Sorry to be all Hegelian about it (or even Marxist, if you will), but institutions are usually brought down by their own insupportable internal inconsistencies: see Prohibition, Apartheid, West Germany and so on. All one can do is to catalyse these effects in a crucible of eschatological hubris. If anything, this is quite a conservative historiographical analysis of progress, and hardly “extreme”.
December 4th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
They’re not trolling. They mean it.
http://skimmed.cream.org/?p=17
December 5th, 2005 at 11:39 am
[...] workasone.net” title=”Media @ LSE Group Weblog”> « Open Rights Group launches in UK, im [...]