Aside from one or two of our more irreverent reviews, few TMT pieces have sparked the kind of fierce debate — both behind the scenes here and on the internet at large — as former TMT contributor Chris Ruen’s 2009 feature, “The Myth of DIY: Towards a Common Ethic of Piracy.” Along with its companion piece, “Fuck Love, Let’s Make Dystopia,” the article called into question the premise that the read availability of free content on the internet is an unambiguously good thing, and in the process, it hit a lot of indie music fans where it hurt the most: their conscience.

Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity provides Ruen with a larger canvass upon which to develop the ideas that he’s sketched out in his shorter works, namely that the act of illegally downloading unlicensed digital content (or “freeloading”) has dire consequences, not just on artists, labels, and the surrounding industry apparatus, but for the future of our cultural development. While Ruen assembles an impressive arsenal of support for his position, the entire crux of his argument lays in a simple premise: that an artist has the exclusive right to “distribute works in a manner as s/he chooses” and are entitled to “extend that right… to any legal business partner.” It’s a statement so self-evident that it shouldn’t even need to be defended; however, given the historical context surrounding the freeloading debate, it becomes much easier to see how we, as a society, have lost sight of this.

Read the full review at Tiny Mix Tapes.

ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS are planning actions in April to focus attention on a dark and deadly corner of U.S. military operations: The Pentagon’s and the CIA’s massively scaled-up use of drone aircraft around the world.

In 2000, the Pentagon had less than 50 drones. Ten years later, that number is 7,500–an increase of 15,000 percent. In 2003, the U.S. Air Force was flying a handful of round-the-clock drone patrols every day. By 2010, that number had reached 40.

“By 2011, the Air Force was training more remote pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined,” explains Medea Benjamin in her book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Benjamin cites Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the Air Force, who said in 2011, “Our number one manning problem in the Air Force is manning our unmanned platform.”

Read the full article at Socialistworker.org.

August 1960, Miami: a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona and organized crime leader Meyer Lansky. Lansky, the impresario of the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba since the 1930s, had owned Havana’s Hotel Riviera and the Montmartre nightclub and their fabulous casinos.

In Cuba, Lansky was known as the “Little Man” for his five-foot-four-inch stature, but his cold, hard eyes and intense demeanor were physical expressions of a man used to wielding power and getting his way. His dream of turning Havana into a tropical paradise for North American tourists had come true. Havana had a reputation for the best gambling and wildest nightlife in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. And since Lansky shared the Mafia’s profits with General Fulgencio Batista and senior Cuban army and police officers, that gambling paradise became the cornerstone of a full-fledged Cuban gangster state.

Read the full excerpt at Alborada.net.

While the publishing world learns to live with the idea that e-books may be good for business, after all, a federal district court judge finds there is no such thing as a used e-book.

“To quote OR Books founder, John Oakes, ‘e-books are God’s gift to publishing,'” Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer, tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “That gem was delivered to PW’s own Craig Morgan Teicher, following our panel at last month’s AWP meeting in Boston. E-books are opening up new avenues of art, and not just commerce, Oakes declares.”

Read the full article and listen to the podcast at Beyond the Book.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference (AWP) began decades ago as a meet-up for academic creative writing departments, students, and writers. It has grown, especially in recent years, into a kind of BEA of the small press and literary publishing world, a massive event where not only writers, writing teachers, and students but also publishers come to make contact, show off their wares, and attend readings and panels about literary and industry trends. PW has covered the conference for years, but at this year’s conference, held in Boston March 6–9, is the first time we presented a panel ourselves, called Breaking Digital Ground: E-books and Small Press Literary Publishing.

E-books still account for so many of the question marks in the book business, especially for smaller publishers, most of whom let the big trade houses test the waters, develop the technology, take the big risks, and absorb the failures. It is only in the past couple of years, as e-reading has become widespread and migrated from standalone e-ink devices to smartphones and the ubiquitous tablets that seem to be in everyone’s hands, that many indie publishers have engaged with e-books in a big way. We figured it was about time to find out how indie presses were doing in the e-book arena, what successes and failures they’d had, and what their plans were for the near and distant future.

Read the full article at Publishers Weekly.

Listen to the full segment on You & Yours at BBC Radio 4.

Last year, the Internet briefly upended everything we know about American politics.

It was January and a pair of bills designed to squelch online piracy of movies, music, and pharmaceuticals — known by the acronyms SOPA and PIPA — seemed poised for passage.

Hollywood had put its considerable political muscle behind the legislation. And it enjoyed broad, bipartisan support.

But Silicon Valley and Internet freedom activists feared the legislation was so blunt, so poorly written, that it would cripple the web’s open architecture and stifle innovation.

Read the full article at the Providence Phoenix.

Ever one to buck tradition, NYC’s irreverent Reverend Billy, aka Bill Talon begins his published treatise on global warming with a chapter entitled ‘Happy Endings.’ Rev., who’s in all ways, an exception to rules, famously, ones destined to destroy man’s environment, describes himself here as, ‘a modern man stumbling towards what the old cultures always knew,’ aka staying attuned with Mother Nature.

We Westerners are up to our eyeballs in voyeurism, to the point where we tend to bypass its inherent obscenity, i.e. what such self-gratifying tendencies do to our earth. Snooze-papers are chock full of who’s looking at who, what they’re wearing, how we/they can impress, and vice versa, while our atmosphere literally closes in on us. Clearance sales may continue into ad infinatum, but no matter how much we buy, it will never be enough, as long as the mass hypnosis of consumerism plagues us…

Read the full review at EXTRA! EXTRA!.

While there are a several programs already in existence to aid both publishing hopefuls and industry vets in expanding their horizons, the City University of New York (CUNY) hopes to throw its own hat in the ring with the CUNY Publishing Institute, a week-long program planning its pilot session in June. Helmed by Institute Director and Co-founder of OR Books, John Oakes, this program will aim to educate by combining a varied roster of industry professionals from startups to goliaths like Amazon and Random House to present an important “cross-section of views.”

For Oakes, the reason for starting this new program came from the fact that, “looking at other programs, the value expected didn’t add up with value provided.” In particular, he saw the need to fill a gap in resources with a publishing course that took new businesses into account. The question, Oakes points out, is that the “industry has to change—but how?” Using CUNY as the place to develop the Publishing Institute also seemed like a natural fit, as Jeff Jarvis’s apprenticeship program for CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism had a similar aim to combine new developments with older methods.

Read the full article at Publishing Trendsetter.

I’m early for my interview with Chris Ruen, author of Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity, and going over my notes at the bar. Eventually I circle one question from my list, the inquiry I kept penning into the margins of my review copy: why do people believe music should be free?

Ruen never thought about the ethics surrounding downloading until he was directly confronted with the reverberations of its impact. He got a job slinging coffee in his Brooklyn neighborhood and began serving many of the local artists that filled your iPod a decade ago. Up until that point, like most of us, he had never thought much about the ethics behind downloading. It wasn’t until he began hearing their stories, the inability of many popular musicians to make ends meet, that he began realizing the contours of the debate were completely skewed. “I pirated hundreds of songs during my college years,” he writes, “but I sensed disposability and devaluation infecting my relationship with music.”

Read the full article at Vice.

The Orwell Prize is Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing. Every year, we award prizes for the work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.

See the whole list at the Orwell Prize website.

James Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was.

The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration “has a particular, chilling intolerance” for those who leak. If the Obama administration indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to “end-run” the First Amendment.

Read more at the Columbia Journalism Review.

There are about 80 of us, Savitri and myself and an eclectic mixed up group of Europeans, South Americans and Russians.

First, we gather in the courtyard of Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Amen? Savitri announces that the name of our action is “Naked Grief,” and that we will have to learn how to cry energetically — with tears all the better! — in public. We’ll do this in Deutsche Bank — a bank that finances CO2 emissions. As we sob and moan, we will remove our clothing. Then we will rub ourselves with coal and cry even harder.

So — we practice crying in that courtyard. Savitri coaches us in our exercises in public wailing. It is easy for a few seconds, but out-and-out crying, sobbing, retching, really sorrowing for ten minutes? It is hard to do. We have to start crying over and over again.

Read the full feature on the Utne Reader.

“History has never been recounted in this fashion”

Reading these words on the back cover of Tweets from Tahrir, indicates a remarkable change in the way history is documented. Usually history is written by historians who study the past by the rules of their discipline, and sometimes they apply a public-oriented form of historiography, by which we mean the scientific study of the way normal people comment about the distant or recent past. In addition to this, there exists a special category of books that concentrates on the assemblage of historical accounts, and it is in this category that we should put Tweets from Tahrir, the book we will be discussing here. Tweets from Tahrir gives a compilation of historical accounts describing the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 by means of selected tweets, but the book does more than just that. The book zooms in on the cultural importance of the services that Twitter provides for our time, as it also tries to place the feelings of the tweeters who were involved in the Egyptian Revolution, all of this urgently with the intention to define the tweeter’s role in history. To a considerable extent it were the new media who attributed to the scope of the revolutionary year 2011 and made a substantial contribution to the way people organised themselves politically.

Read the full review at the Eutopia Institute of Ideas.

What can we learn from Private Bradley Manning’s explanation for leaking US documents? Is Manning a hero or a villain? To discuss this on Inside Story Americas, with presenter Shihab Rattansi, are guests: Chase Madar, an attorney and author of The Passion of Bradley Manning; Joe Glenton, a British army Afghanistan veteran, writer and filmmaker; Jesselyn Radack, a national security and human rights director at Government Accountability Project; and JD Gordon, the former defence department spokesman.

Watch the full interview on Al Jazeera English.

In his new book, Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite For Free Content Starves Creativity, author Chris Ruen provides a glimpse into his personal transition from consumer of free media to advocate for artists’ rights and a more rational conversation about copyright in the digital age. Ruen shares his own thoughts about common justifications for online piracy, about the mechanics behind the anti-SOPA protest, and about his own proposals for a renewed dialogue about copyright reform and enforcement. While certain professionals on either side of the debate may take issue with Ruen’s specific, legal proposals, I believe the general reader with even a passing interest in the cultural aspects of what Ruen calls “freeloading,” can learn a great deal from this book. In particular, the middle third of the work is comprised of interviews with musicians and producers from the independent punk scene — guys who are about as anti-establishment as it gets — and their no-nonsense views on the rationales supporting online piracy are well worth the attention of anyone who thinks he’s stickin’ to The Man by downloading torrents.

Listen to more on the Illusion of More podcast.

The end of the world just keeps on coming. Climate, drones, GMOs — pick your apocalypse. No one reminds us of this more than Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping who, with their strategic theater and activism have strengthened movements that run the gamut from fair-trade coffee to Occupy Wall Street to efforts to end mountaintop removal and fracking. Fusing the forms of old-time religion with the content of contemporary struggles for justice, Billy and his Church are a jolt to our ability to recognize the crises of the present and to imagine new possible futures.

Reverend Billy’s latest book, The End of the World, is now available from OR Books. This Sunday, there will be a launch event celebrating the book and the spirit it stands for. Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider will be among those reading from the book. (Nathan is no stranger to apocalypse; his book Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is forthcoming in the fall.) Be there, because every day might be the last.

Read more at Waging Nonviolence or join the Reverend at the event, Sunday February 24 at the Culture Project.

There are about 80 of us, Savitri and myself and an eclectic mixed up group of Europeans, South Americans and Russians.

First, we gather in the courtyard of Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Amen? Savitri announces that the name of our action is “Naked Grief,” and that we will have to learn how to cry energetically – with tears all the better! – in public. We’ll do this in Deutsch Bank – a bank that finances CO2 emissions. As we sob and moan, we will remove our clothing. Then we will rub ourselves with coal and cry even harder.

So – we practice crying in that courtyard. Savitri coaches us in our exercises in public wailing. It is easy for a few seconds, but out-and-out crying, sobbing, retching, really sorrowing for ten minutes? It is hard to do. We have to start crying over and over again.

To help the people who are having trouble crying on purpose, we go down into the politics of this act. Deutsch Bank is among the banks that finance Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Do you want to cry? Imagine a mountain in Appalachia. The coal company inserts dynamite into deep holes, then lifts the whole ecosystem into the air to die. The cries of surprise and pain range across the mountain. Nests fall from trees, deer try to run but catapult dead through the air, the creatures on the forest floor are crushed, the mountain is uprooted and broken. Then bulldozers with wheels 40 feet high begin to push the dead “over-burden” into the neighboring valley, into the pristine mountain streams below, where the fish lay their eggs and the delicate frogs sing courtship songs. Where Mountain Laurel drops its petals and ferns grow from hundred year old beds of moss.

Do you want to cry?

Read the full excerpt at Reality Sandwich.

For a rather different take on the apocalypse, there’s the latest offering from Reverend Billy, New Internationalist’s favourite anti-consumerist evangelist from the Church of Stop Shopping. In The End of the World (OR Books ISBN 9781 935 928935) the good preacher rouses us not to forgiveness or supplication but to shameless, loving and living direct action. A book to brandish in the face of the next riot cop. Revolujah!

Read more in the latest issue of the New Internationalist.

Thursday’s confirmation hearing for CIA nominee John Brennan was briefly postponed to clear the room of activists from CODEPINK after they repeatedly disrupted Brennan’s testimony. One woman held a list of Pakistani children killed in U.S. drone strikes. Former U.S. diplomat Col. Ann Wright interrupted Brennan while wearing a sign around her neck with the name of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. Wright and seven others were arrested. We speak to CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin, who also disrupted the meeting and recently visited Pakistan to speak with victims of drone strikes. “It’s not only the killing, it’s the terrorizing of entire populations, where they hear the drones buzzing overhead 24 hours a day, where they’re afraid to go to school, afraid to go to the markets, to funerals, to weddings, where it disrupts entire communities,” Benjamin says. “And we are trying to get this information to our elected officials, to say, ‘You are making us unsafe here at home,’ to say nothing of how illegal, immoral and inhumane these policies are.”

Watch the full interview on Democracy Now!

The Egyptian January 25th revolution is the first cyber revolution in history. It started by an event on Facebook, and throughout its 18 days so many of the revolutionists were lively covering the incidents of the revolt minute by minute on Twitter – at a time when the media coverage were either poor or deliberately misleading (by the state media of Mubarak’s regime).

Tweets from Tahrir book is a compilation of selected tweets (twitter posts), in chronological order, by the Egyptian revolutionists in Tahrir square, allowing the story of the revolution to unfold directly by those who made it.

The Egyptian revolution swept Egypt as a whole, with particularly strong movements in Suez and Alexandria. But the book is only about the Cairene Tahrir side of the revolution. Whole sizeable books could – and should – be written about the rest of the revolution’s intricate saga.

It is weird to read a whole book based on discrete tweets, but what can get you closer to the ground of the Egyptian Revolution than this?

Read the full review at OnIslam.net

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