Best-Selling Swedish Author Torrents Her Own Audio Book To Protest Pirate Bay Ruling

from the legitimate-uses dept

We've already seen that plenty of content creators use The Pirate Bay for legitimate distribution and promotion purposes, and now Dan writes in to alert us that a best-selling author in Sweden, Unni Drougge, is so annoyed by The Pirate Bay verdict, that she made an audiobook version of her best-selling recent novel and put up a torrent via The Pirate Bay, along with a "manifesto" in support of free file sharing. Apparently, this is getting her plenty of attention, as her book has jumped to the top of the audiobooks list (what were people saying, that the top downloaded lists never include authorized content?).

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Protests Against The Authors Guild For Forcing Amazon To Disable Kindle TTS

from the freedom-to-innovate dept

We were surprised and disappointed when Amazon gave in to the Authors Guild's baseless claim that the TTS somehow violated its copyrights. It looks like a lot of others are disappointed as well. A group is now organizing a protest against the Authors Guild for trying to determine whether or not Amazon was allowed to innovate. As the EFF notes, "The publishing industry shouldn't have veto power over new technology." If you're in New York City, you should look into the details of the protest on Tuesday.

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UK Online Protest Finds Success In Just 48 Hours

from the it's-a-bird,-it's-a-plane,-it's-a...-Facebook-protest? dept

Using social networking tools to organize political protests is nothing new or surprising, but online protests have been growing increasingly efficient, especially on Facebook. In Canada, for example, a group protesting copyright legislation caught the attention of federal parliament last summer, and another opposing strict restrictions on young drivers had the Ontario Premier considering Facebook consultations in the fall.

The latest story comes from the UK where, in a mere 48 hours, a campaign run through Facebook and TheyWorkForYou.com by mysociety.org helped stop legislation that would have exempted MPs' expenses from the Freedom of Information Act (via the Search Engine). Thousands of emails were sent in the two day period, reaching 90% of MPs, before the opposition parties turned and the government backed down. It's not so much the scale that's worth noting, but the sheer speed at which the campaign was successful. The legislation was scrapped before most snail mail would have had time to arrive. Now, the online protest likely wasn't the only factor, but it played an important role in spreading the message. It seems to be getting a lot harder to sneak stuff through the legislature (though that doesn't stop people from trying) when it only takes a couple days to build an opposition.

Blaise Alleyne is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Blaise Alleyne and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Using Amazon To Protest Products You Don't Like

from the virtual-protests dept

The main thing that kicked off all the negative attention over EA's use of SecuROM DRM in Spore was the avalanche of negative reviews on Amazon. It seems consumers are beginning to recognize that such a rush of negative reviews is an effective way to protest and garner attention. The latest product getting the same treatment appears to be TurboTax from Intuit, where people are protesting a big price increase from last year. Any bets on whether or not a "glitch" will cause Amazon to delete the reviews, as has happened with previous waves of negative comments?

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Grad Student Uses Twitter To Get Released From Egyptian Prison

from the twitter-pr-people-must-be-thrilled dept

Recently, Tim wrote about how aspects of Twitter could represent the future of news, and it appears that may be happening faster than some people expected. In a story that must absolutely thrill any PR person working for Twitter, a UC Berkeley grad student who was filming protests in Egypt was able to alert his friends to the fact he was arrested by Egyptian police through a message on Twitter. This resulted in a coordinated effort to get him released, which eventually involved the US State Department. You get the feeling that this story will move into PR legend like the story of the guy who self-diagnosed a heart attack using Google.

Still, it is a rather remarkable example of how Twitter can be quite useful. While there are plenty of people (myself included at one point) who wrote off the service as being rather useless, it's been evolving in very interesting ways. For those who embrace it, it can become a rather useful quick and easy public messaging and conversation tool. While, James Karl Buck could have sent a text message to a friend, the simplicity and public nature of Twitter allowed him to alert a lot of people nearly instantly to the situation he was in -- and they responded. Not only did they reach out to get help, they also quickly responded to James on Twitter, providing advice on how to deal with the fact that he was arrested. Still, what's not entirely clear in this whole story is how he was able to continue to use his mobile phone while under arrest. While the lesson some may learn from this is that arresting officers will quickly take people's mobile phones away, that doesn't lessen the impact of a service like Twitter and its ability to spread a message to a lot of friends and acquaintances extremely quickly.

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