the flying squirrel

In order to protest the ridiculous BC Court Order targeting people who were sold the new Harry Potter book by mistake, Richard Stallman is calling on you to refrain from perchasing any and all Harry Potter books. He also posted a lovely little spoiler and linked to it from his blog.

Now, Richard Stallman is a bit crazy. (He\'s also the creator of Emacs, the most evil of text editors). But here\'s a time when I kinda have to agree with him. That court order should not have been asked for far less granted. And, while it seems like this might be making a mountain out of a mole hill, it is disturbing that most of the Canadian media is treating this as \"Ha ha, another Harry Potter fluff piece!\" They should be asking serious questions about the Canadian legal system that such a thing would ever be allowed.

I\'d like to post lots of links to Michael Geist\'s site, since he\'s talked about this extensively. But his server seems to be struggling at the moment. Michael Geist is a Canadian law professor who writes a lot of articles for newspapers about the interactions of technology and law, like copyright issues and so forth. He\'s actually very interesting. And not quite as crazy. He doesn\'t go as far as to call a boycott, but he does raise concerns about what all this means.

For the record, I don\'t think I\'m going to be buying the book. But I can\'t really say this is some grand political gesture on my part, since I kinda lost interest in the series somewhere in the middle of Goblet of Fire. I bought Order of the Phoenix thinking maybe I\'d be able to heft the massive weight of it and actually read it one day, but honestly, I don\'t think that\'ll happen.