texto : FSFLA's articles

The right to enjoy

Article 27. (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

If you're walking on the street and you find a wallet on the ground, you'll probably pick it up and try to locate its owner to return it. If, while searching for some document that identifies the owner, you find a piece of paper with a poem in it, reading it is all right. You don't have to ask for permission (license) from the author of the poem, or from the owner of the wallet: you're entitled to read it and enjoy it. As long as you put it back in place, you won't have taken anything from anyone. On the other hand, taking the money from the wallet wouldn't be right, for it would deprive its legitimate owner of it. Publishing industries attempt to confuse us hiding this crucial difference.

If you walk a bit further and hear your neighbor sing a song in the shower, that's all right. You don't have to ask for permission (license) from the composer of the song, or from its performer: you're entitled to listen to it and enjoy it, and even memorize it and sing it for yourself and your friends at a later time.

You hear the bells from the church and you know that at about that time your VCR will be powering off, after taping your favorite broadcast TV show, so you can watch it as you get back home from work. You don't have to ask for permission (license) from the director, the studio or the TV broadcaster: you're entitled to record it and watch it at a later time, along with your family and friends.

You get home, you power on your portable computer and load into its drive a DVD you rented. You don't have to ask for permission (license) from the director, the studio, the DVD publisher or the rental shop to watch the movie, and this involves such tasks as copying the movie from the DVD media to the computer memory, unscrambling the regional encoding, decompressing the video and the audio, copying the video to the digital display memory and converting it to pixel patterns on the screen and then to light waves, copying the audio to the digital audio amplifier and converting it to mechanical vibrations and then sound waves, and finally converting this all into neural impulses and into temporary or permanent memories. Since you're entitled to watch the movie, you can copy, convert, memorize and replay the whole or the parts, without depending on anyone's permission.

The right to enjoy an artistic work you've had access to is a practical issue. It would be ridiculous to have to ask for permission before reading a piece of paper, and then, once you get it, find out that the permission was spelled out right there. It would be ridiculous to have to somehow refrain from listening to a song that's playing around you. It would be ridiculous to be deprived of a TV show just because it's broadcast to all at an inconvenient time. It would be insane to have to ask for permission for each of the conversion and copying steps involved in enjoying an artistic work. It would be insane to have to ask for permission to retain the work in your memory, or to force yourself to forget it in case you fail to locate someone who could and would grant it.

Fortunately, that's not the way it is! There's nothing wrong in any of these things, and no law stops you from doing them. There shouldn't be any: it would be unjust, and it would violate fundamental human rights. You have a right to enjoy works of art you have access to, and to take part in the cultural life in your society. No law should ever take that right away from you.

The right to share

Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

Say you have a very large collection of books, and you're disappointed that few people get to read them. You decide to donate them to a public library. You don't have to ask anyone for permission to make the donation, and the library doesn't have to ask anyone for permission to lend the books to whomever might be interested in them.

If publishing industries had it their way, you'd have to lock your CD, tape, DVD, and book collections in safes whenever you had guests, lest they should borrow any of them. Instead, you're not only entitled to display them: you can also play them for your visitors, and let them borrow your copies and listen to them, watch them or read them wherever and whenever they like.

Laws that prohibited receiving and imparting information and ideas would violate fundamental human rights.

The right to preserve

Article 28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

When you buy CDs, DVDs, books, etc, what you're buying is access to the work, rather than its supporting medium or a supposed license for enjoying it: you don't need any license for that. In fact, if the medium gets damaged, any decent publisher will replace the broken copy of the work, for no more than a nominal fee that covers media, packaging and shipping costs, so that you can retain the access you'd paid for.

If the publisher goes bankrupt or runs out of copies, you don't have to let your only copy of the work degrade till you lose access. If the publisher is not decent, it might actually plan for the copies to degrade, to sell access repeatedly until it starts denying access to the work, indefinitely, to all of society. Such a plan is not supposed to work. In fact, several jurisdictions explicitly permit, beyond any doubt, backup copies and copies for personal use, in spite of any exclusive copying rights of an artistic work society might have granted to anyone else.

This explicit permission, albeit welcome, is not strictly necessary. It's all right to remember works one had access to. However, few have perfect or photographic memory, so we're taught to use auxiliary memory to record things that matter: to take notes of classes, meetings and findings, to take pictures and record movies of important events in our lives, and even to make backups of information we store in primary and auxiliary memory.

A backup copy of a work is nothing but a memory extension, so that you can more accurately and better remember the work, to recall it and enjoy it at a later time.

No laws can or should stop you from keeping memories and enjoying them, for without memory, the rights to enjoy and to share cannot be fully realized.

The right to convert

Along the same lines, if your old LPs and cassette tapes are degrading, and you worry about finding needles, magnets or motors to fix your players in case they break, you can find comfort in that you are entitled to preserve your access to the works, even if this requires converting them to another form and storing them in other pieces of auxiliary memory.

Say, you can play them into a computer and record them onto electronic, magnetic, optical or any other kind of memory, to time-shift into the future your remaining ability to play the works as many times as you might want.

You can further convert the works to different encoding formats, if that's what it takes for you to be able to enjoy them, while driving your car, walking on the street or sitting at a bus or train with a portable music or video player, or another kind of computer.

Remember, there isn't, and there shouldn't be, any law that stops you from copying and converting a work as accessory steps in the process of enjoying it, or from backing up the results of these accessory steps for future use. You are not supposed to be bound by the limitations of the medium, format or players selected by the party who granted you access to a work: once you gain access to it, you're entitled to enjoy it however you like.

The combined right to share and preserve

Say a friend wants to borrow a DVD from you, but her dog is famous for its taste for DVDs. You might consider declining your friend's request, but why should you? You might as well just make a backup copy of the DVD, to preserve your access to the work, and then let your friend take home the "original" copy, or the backup copy you made.

Your friend, in turn, might fail to watch the movie before the time she agreed to return it, or want to watch it a few more times. To preserve her access, extending her memory and time-shifting her ability to enjoy the work as many times as she liked, she could return your copy after making a backup copy of her own. Or call you to ask whether she could keep the copy. She may even refrain from calling, if she knows you will just call her if you ever need it.

In fact, you might have an agreement with her, so you'll keep backups for each other. Even over the Internet! Although each of you maintains other backups at home, that won't protect one's files should one's house burn down, for example.

So, she reserves part of her computer's disk space for you to hold your files, and you reserve part of yours for her. You trust each other enough to not be worried about privacy issues, but you also know that you're backing up each others' picture, song and movie collections, and that's as fine as if the pictures, songs and movies were backed up onto off-site CDs, DVDs, tapes, whatever.

And then, since you're not required to police access to works (in fact, we saw you're entitled to share it with your friends), you're not required to encrypt the data or have her agree never to look at those files.

Your arrangement might even include an understanding that you agree that each one can access the pictures, songs and movies in the backups maintained for the other. No further permission is required.

The rights to download and upload files

Say you're going on a trip, taking in your portable computer some papers you want to read. Concerned about theft and loss, you post the files on your web site as well, so that you can get to them on any cybercafe. You don't have to ask anyone for permission to do this: you're just preserving your access to them.

These files are for personal use, so at first you don't tell anyone about the URLs. However, during the trip, you get an e-mail from a friend, and she asks about a paper you'd mentioned to her. It's one of the papers you'd uploaded to your web site, so you send her the URL. You're entitled to share works you have access to with your friends. The fact that you can't meet them personally to hand them copies in physical media shouldn't get in the way. They, in turn, are entitled to enjoy them and preserve them once you grant them access. Neither of you has to ask anyone for permission.

Your friend passes on the URL to another friend, who then posts it to a private mailing list, and the message later on is forwarded to a public mailing list. People from all over start downloading the file from your web site. That's fine, you're entitled to share the work with every one of them. Even if you weren't, you're not required to police access to the site any more than you're required to hide your DVD collection when a friend visits you. Similarly, those who download it aren't required to police you on whether you have any permission you might need in order to grant them access to the work, any more than they'd have to check whether you're entitled to lend them a DVD.

The right to P2Preserve

Your cross-backup arrangement works so well that, when you read about a peer-to-peer distributed backup system, you jump into it. As before, each peer offers a portion of their hard disks to host others' backups, and in turn has portions of their own disks backed up on the network.

One major advantage is that the backups are replicated among various participants, so that even if a few drop off the network, the backup files remain available. The system is also clever enough to tell when multiple users want to back up the same file, avoiding wastage.

Of course you keep your personal files encrypted on such a backup system, for you don't trust everyone out there as much as you trust your friend. But for files you'd normally share with friends, why would you prevent wastage reduction?

One day you get an e-mail from another peer in the network, asking whether you'd mind if she kept a copy of a song she found out she was backing up for you. What a silly question! She was already keeping that copy, and she had evidently already gained access to the song, so it's obvious she can keep it. But she thought asking couldn't hurt. It didn't: it gave rise to a good friendship.

The right to P2Participate

One day you accidentally remove a file from your computer. You ask the network for a backup, and you find it's restored so quickly you can hardly believe it! By chance, another peer had just backed up a copy of that file in the network, and it happened to be transferred to your computer shortly before you requested the restore.

Turns out this person seems to like the same songs you do. You recognize most of them, but there are a few you hadn't heard before, and they're just the sort of thing you love! So you keep a copy of the songs that this new friend shared with you. You also send him a thank-you note with some musical tips, and you become close friends.

Nowadays, every time you purchase a CD or a DVD you like, you preserve it in the folder backed up by P2P. Nothing stops you from using the network as memory to preserve your access to the works, or from permitting your friends to gain access to them. And every now and then you get e-mail from a new friend thanking you for that.

One interesting aspect of this network is that, when a peer drops off, the network will make up for the loss creating more replicas of the files that were in the peer. You don't have to ask anyone for permission to transfer around the files you host for others, any more than an ISP needs to ask anyone for permission to transfer the files you requested from third parties, or to cache them.

When you join a P2P network just to download a file, the situation is slightly different, for you have a much better notion of what you're downloading and transmitting. However, as we saw before, it's all right to download an artistic work and to share access to it with a friend. If someone who's entitled to share access with you and others asks for your help in extending it to the others, why not help?

But what about the poor publishing industry?

Article 27. (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

Under the false pretense of helping authors, whom the inhumane publishing industry exploits as much as it does us, it will probably keep on trying to limit what people can do, by technical and legal means, inventing technological barriers to deny fundamental rights, threatening to sue and to throw people in jail for exercising them, and hiring legislators to pass laws that take further rights away from us.

But why should society accept laws that undermine fundamental human rights, as well as such bases of society as friendship and sharing? Sharing with friends yields no material interest, therefore not even an author could invoke the human right of protection of material interests to oppose it.

Fundamental rights and self defense

Article 10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

When some provision of law or proposed bills appear to conflict with fundamental rights, we're entitled to and supposed to stand up for our rights, and oppose laws that deny them or cast doubt on them.

Since these are fundamental rights, they shouldn't be outlawed. Even if there are criminal provisions that appear to cover them, in a state of law the regular enjoyment of civil rights can't be regarded as a crime.

As for private means to attack fundamental rights, that the industry resorts to every now and again to impose restrictions that violate human rights, deflecting the attack to enjoy the civil rights amounts to acting in self defense, which, in a state of law, can't be regarded as a crime either.

Written for the proceedings of the First Congresso Estadual de Software Livre do do Ceará, CESoL-CE, held in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, from August 18-23, 2008.

Copyright 2008 Alexandre Oliva
Copyright 2008 FSFLA

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this entire document worldwide without royalty, provided the copyright notice, the document's official URL, and this permission notice are preserved.

http://fsfla.org/texto/copying-and-sharing-in-self-defense

Definitions

Free Software is defined by the FSF in its web site (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html). The same definition is present in the web site of its main project, that of the GNU Operating System (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), and in FSFLA's web site (http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/19). A summary of the Free Software definition follows.

On the constitutional preference for Free Software

Starting from the principles of sovereignty, economy, efficiency, publicness, and impersonality, that the Constitution establishes for the Union and the public administration, as well as the principles established for the economic order, we will argue that the Constitution already requires a preference for Free Software.

On laws that codify preference for Free Software

As we have shown, the Constitution establishes principles for the Union, the public administration and the economic order that lead to choosing Free Software.

One has to agree that, even though the evidence is clear once the arguments are formalized, the comprehension of the mechanics of Free Software is not easily accessible to minds used to a market based on the proprietary licensing model.

This is the context in which laws such as that of RS appear, proposed by a few people who understood the extent of the ongoing constitutional violation and sought, through a more direct formalization of the thoughts exposed herein, to fix this distortion and subject the public administration, at least in the levels that they could reach, to compliance to constitutional principles.

Even though many such laws have made the same definition mistake as the RS law that this case is about, pretty much voiding their juridic effects, they served and serve the purpose of guiding decisions on software acquisition by several levels of public administration where they apply, even because many of the decision makers did not realize that the definition is in error and/or follow the spirit of the law when the equivocal letter rendered them inoperative.

Due to the way in which such laws have defined the software class that they intend to be Free Software, they do not seem to be leading to compliance with the constitutional principles for the Union, the public administration, and the economic order, so there is indeed room for questioning their constitutionality.

Should, however, they use the correct definition, with the arguments exposed herein, it appears to us that it would be difficult to argue against their constitutionality, since they would only codify in a more immediate way what the Constitution already codifies implicitly.

We thus suggest to and request from the powers that can correct or revise such laws to use a correct definition to do so. Our suggested writing follows:

"In order to comply with the constitutional principles of economy, efficiency, publicness, sovereignty, morality, impersonality, free market, consumer's defense, reduction of regional and social inequalities, seek for complete employment and favorable treatment for small businesses constituted under Brazilian law with head quarters in the country, the public administration must prefer software licensed under terms that offer access to their source code and permits the user to run it for any purpose, to study it, adapt it and distribute it, with or without modifications, at least under the same terms in which it was received, with a possible permission for distribution under different terms. Restrictions to such permissions are acceptable with purposes of ensuring the offer of the same freedoms to third parties, for example, the requirement that any distribution be made under the same terms; with purposes of preserving credit to authors, for example, the requirement of preserving copyright notices; and other restrictions that do not affect significantly the actual enjoyment of such permissions, for example the requirement that a certain sentence be included in promotional material or advertising of software derived from the original.

By source code we understand the preferred form to study and modify the software, including documentation normally present in source code. In the case of software in the form of object code, we understand its source code as all the modules it contains, definition and interface files associated with them, files used to control compilation and installation of the object code, i.e., anything that may have been needed to create the object code and whatever else is needed to enable its execution in the target environment, starting from its source code, from general-purpose tools that, although not part of the program, are used in the process of creating the object code, and from components normally distributed as part of the operating system for which the object code was created."

If there's any need to name the class of software covered by the definition, we suggest the term `Free-Governments Software', to avoid potential doubts or confusions arising from potential differences from the less-formal definition of the term `Free Software'. We'd prefer people to focus on the freedoms rather than on often-misapplied labels, so we recommend leaving the term out if at all possible.

Until such corrections take place, we position ourselves publicly contrary to the law, since we profoundly dislike the equivocal definition that was meant to be that of Free Software, even though it uses a similar and less appropriate term open software. We understand, however, that our dislike obviously is not an argument to make the law unconstitutional: the bad writing, even if it does not codify the implied preference in the Constitution, does not contradict it either.

While the spirit of the law is followed, even if the letter is ineffective, the law will serve the common good, bringing great savings to the public coffers, if not in the very short term, because of potentially high migration costs, certainly in the long term, in which the advantages of a free market for services and zero cost for additional licenses prevail. Since this is Economic Law matter, we understand that deliberations regarding such choices are not limited to the Union, but also to states and cities.

We argue, thus, that the law is constitutional, even if its juridic effect is nearly nonexistent.

Alexandre Oliva
FSFLA Secretary and Brazilian citizen

Pedro Antonio Dourado de Rezende
FSFLA Board member and Brazilian citizen

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the contributions of Federico Heinz, FSFLA President and Beatriz Busaniche, FSFLA Treasurer, both Argentinian citizens, and Richard M. Stallman, FSF (USA) President, in the preparation of this document.

Verbatim copying of this document is permitted in any medium, as long as this note is preserved.

What is DRM?

DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) are technical mechanisms which restrict the user's ability to access and copy works distributed in digital formats. Although their promoters like to call them "Digital Rights Management" systems, when we analyze their goals, it becomes obvious that they're only useful to manage restrictions.

Promoters of these systems argue that they are needed for the authors to be able to exercise their copyright in the digital world.

They do not tell us, though, that these systems may be (and actually are) used to restrict works which aren't under copyright, or to restrict them further than copyright law allows for. They also keep silent on the fact that the implementation of DRM is not something authors can do by themselves, but only through large publishers, record companies and producers, over which authors have no control.

There are different DRM Mechanisms, developed by different companies, but they all share some characteristics:

• they detect who, when and under which conditions gains access to each work, and reports this information to the distributor;
• they irrevocably grant or deny access to the work, according to rules which can be unilaterally changed by the distributor;
• when they grant access, they do so under restrictive conditions, unilaterally imposed by the distributor of the work, regardless of the actual rights granted by law to the author or the public.

A particular feature of DRM is that its implementation isn't just technical, it includes legislative aspects: their proponents are pushing, through worldwide lobbying campaigns, bills that aim at forbidding the production, distribution an sale of electronic devices unless they are equipped with DRM, and criminalizing any effort to circumvent DRM, regardless of whether this circumvention actually infringes on copyright or not.

Where are they?

DRM are being included on many kinds of digital devices, without even telling buyers about the consequences

The electronic infrastructure needed to implement DRM is being sold by the industry under the tempting name of "Trusted Computing" (TC). The name suggests that a device equipped with this technology can be trusted by the user. When we realize that the main function of TC is to enable DRM to restrict the user, however, it easy to realize that "Treacherous Computing" is a more accurate interpretation of the acronym.

There are many devices equipped with treacherous computing hardware on the market. Some of them are computers, of course, but also DVD players, audio players, phones, televisions, radios, toys, answering machines, photocopiers, printers and many others.

If some bills being pushed by parts of the industry actually become law, it will be forbidden to produce or sell any device which can record or play sound, video, text or any other form of expression, unless it's equipped with hardware suitable to DRM implementations.

Even before the hardware infrastructure for it becomes omnipresent, as their proposers wish, there are many software-only DRM systems which, while not strong enough to effectively restrict copying, are annoying enough to complicate the life of a person who, for example, wants to listen to her own CDs on her own computer.

Most proprietary media players actually on the market include quite sophisticated DRM implementations without hardware support.

Who controls them?

The name "Trusted Computing" is obviously designed to evoke the feeling that these systems allow us to exercise better control over what the devices we own do.

If this were true, of course, we'd have to question the motivations behind the demand that every single digital device be equipped with this technology, or that its circumvention be criminalized.

This attitude shows that the real objective is to take control of the devices *away* from the user, and to transfer it to third parties: the software provider, the publisher, the record company, etc. It is them, not the public nor the authors, who operate the servers and distribution chains that make DRM systems work.

Put it another way: these mechanisms, which are able track what we listen to, read, look at and produce, and can even prevent us from doing so, are being run by strangers who use them to exercise control over us.

In the vision of DRM proponents, this control shall become even stronger than law itself: if the mere circumvention of DRM becomes a crime, companies turn into private legislators. They can implement arbitrary restrictions and controls on the works, without any regard for what the law actually allows, and then sue anybody for the simple act of attempting to exercise his or her own rights.

For instance, there are many countries in which people have the right to make copies for private use, even for works that are under copyright. But if the user can't make a copy without circumventing a DRM system designed to prevent it, the company who controls the DRM has just effectively suppressed a legitimate right of the user, since any attempt to exercise this right turns him into a criminal.

Laws of this kind are already in effect in some countries, thanks to the pressure exercised by big media companies, and in spite of the opposition of public rights' organizations and of many authors.

The more prominent examples of such laws are the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in the USA and DADVSI (Droid d'Auteur et Droits Voisins Dans la Société de l'Information) in France. Free Trade Agreements with USA, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas, require as a non-negotiable clause that member countries adopt legislation supporting DRM.

How do they affect Free Software?

DRM implementations and the legislations that legitimize them are in direct contradiction with Free Software ideals.

Laws such as DMCA and DADVSI not only turn those who circumvent DRM into criminals, they even enable content distributors to forbid the development of software to access those works, which violates Free Software developers' freedom of speech.

For Free Software users, this means that we can't legally run Free Software to access digital content, even though we wouldn't be violating any copyright by doing so, thus denying us our right to free access to culture.

In this way, distributors choose for us which software we should use if we want to access their contents.

The access to digital content under DRM using software modified by the user is not allowed, and generally requires the use of proprietary operating systems. This places a serious obstacle to the production and dissemination of Free Software.

Why are DRM Defective by Design?

When a device equipped with DRM doesn't do what the user expects it to do, it's not because of a mistake. It's due to the device being deliberately designed to prevent the user from doing it, granting the publishers' desires regardless of the users' rights. These defects are not accidents, they are part of the design, so the device is defective by design.

Which rights do they violate?

Some of the rights violated by DRM systems are:

The right to read and to participate freely in cultural life

DRM enables third parties to keep track of everything we see, hear, read and express in digital formats, and lets them monitor, control and even keep us from doing it.

The right to privacy

In order to grant or deny access to each work, those systems need to watch and communicate what we do. Thus, third parties get information about what, how and when we read books, listen to music, listen to radio, watch movies or access any digital media.

The right to make copies under particular circumstances

many copyright legislations recognize people's right to make private copies of any work, including the right to make backup copies, copies to enable access to the work on different devices, and even copies to share with people who are close to you, provided there is no commercial involved. These rights are rendered completely useless by DRM.

The right to produce derivative works

derivative works are a common and basic phenomenon in cultural production. Many works are derivative works from others, in some way. This includes translations, re-mixes, parodies and others. The very basic process of deriving works from materials who are enclosed in DRM becomes impossible.

Criticism and commentary, including the right of free speech, particularly by journalists

anybody working on literary, cinematographic, musical or political criticism uses quotation as the basic resource for commenting published works. DRM imposes technical obstacles to this quoting, which amounts to putting the freedom of speech in shackles.

"Fair use" and the copyright exceptions

this salient feature of US jurisprudence is another victim of the implementation of DRMs. Copyright laws leaves room for several exceptions for educational uses, or for handicapped people who may need to make copies of works in order to access them (for instance, to load them into a braille reader, or to convert text into an audio book). This recourse is still valid, in law, but DRMs make it inaccessible.

Public domain

copyright has an expiration date, DRMs don't. So, when a work under DRM finally becomes part of the public domain, the restrictions will remain in place, still preventing users from accessing and copying material that is no longer under copyright. The same happens with works which already are in the public domain, yet are deemed inaccessible to people when someone distributes them under DRM.

The presumption of innocence

DRMs assume citizens are guilty until they get proof of their innocence, preemptively denying them a number of rights, without them having committed any crime.

Freedom to tinker

the development and use of devices for circumventing DRM becomes a crime, even when it's done for research purposes or in order to access legally acquired contents, without any copyright infringementinvolved.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 8

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 11

1. Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 27

1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Actions in march

The Free Software Foundation started the Defective By Design campaign to publicly denounce the DRM threat. Join the campaign as http://defectivebydesign.org/

As part of the campaign, you will find the "Et Tu Bono" letter, by means of which activists for digital freedom will try to involve Bono in the public fight against DRM. Sign the petition!

At Free Software Foundation Latin America we have much work to do about DRM. Join our campaign Team!.

Campaign Resources and work in progress at our wiki.