Update: the event video is now available in .mov and .ogg format.
With the rise of the database state and firms profiting from user-profiling, it’s vital to resist surveillance and ensure the integrity of your digital personality. From technologies like PGP and Tor to the arguments that will convince people - friends and family as well [...]

Read the rest of "Event - Doctorow and Stross: Resisting the all-seeing eye"

Update (22.01.09): The European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) and French digital rights activists La Quadrature du Net have added their support to the joint statement,

Today, organisations representing consumers, citizens and libraries around the world united to condemn copyright term extension in Europe. The joint statement was sent to MEPs who sit [...]

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The European Parliament is set to vote on whether to double the term of copyright in sound recordings in early 2009. The Open Rights Group Sound Copyright campaign invites you to register your concern at an event on the proposed Term Extension Directive, on Tuesday 27 January 2009, in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Update: this [...]

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Update 3: And here’s links to the recording in MP3 and Ogg
Update 2: Here’s the audio recording of Neil Gaiman talking at our event last week
Update (15:00) - That’s it, guys - I’m afraid all our 200 tickets are now spoken for. Anyone not lucky enough to have secured a place for tonight, [...]

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With the games industry apparently enthralled by DRM and committed to criminalising their customers, our upcoming event as part of the London Games Fringe is especially timely. Open Rights Group in conjunction with Own-It will co-host a panel discussion on the role of open source in the games industry and invites all our readers and [...]

Read the rest of "Open Source for Games Developers - A Debate on New Business Models"

Thanks to everyone who came along to Parliament Square this morning and made the ORG/No2ID “Big Picture” event such a success. The sun was shining as we constructed a massive 4m x 5m collage of all the photos you’ve been uploading of UK surveillance state ephemera over the past couple of weeks.

The result was [...]

Read the rest of "Freedom Not Fear: the Big Picture unveiled on Parliament Square"

I’m pleased to announce that I can now reveal the location for our live collage of the hundreds of surveillance state photos you’ve been taking this week for the Freedom Not Fear, Big Picture event.
On 11 October, we’ll gather underneath the statue of Winston Churchill on Parliament Square in London to build an image showing [...]

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Happy-snappers unite! We need as many people as possible to take photos of stuff that embodies the database state, and the UK’s world-famous surveillance society (wake up! You’ve just walked into it).
On 11 October, No2ID and the Open Rights Group will make a live collage of the images you’ve taken in a prominent location in [...]

Read the rest of "Capturing the database state: community photocall"

Open Tech 2008 is an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.
We don’t usually flag events on this blog, instead we use Upcoming to publish events. Open Tech is exceptional because Open Rights Group was conceived [...]

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Will consumer pressure for a safer net mean the end of open platforms and rapid innovation? And should the geeks who “get” the net care if the rest of the world prefer TiVos and iPhones?
On Wednesday of this week we co-hosted an event at the British Computer Society to discuss the problems raised by Jonathan [...]

Read the rest of "The Future of the Internet in Focus"