The Open Rights Group posted today its annual review, including its first full year’s accounts. (Like a number of people who read here, I’m on its Advisory Board.) ORG wants the link blogged as widely as possible…

Some months back a photographer practically made the sign of the cross when I mentioned ORG in an interview. I think one of the challenges ORG has is to make people understand that it’s not against people making a living from IPR - after all, many of its AB members, its patron (Neil Gaiman), and one of its founders (Cory Doctorow) all make their livings by creating and selling intellectual property. What it’s against is the extension of copyright beyond all reason. Since the primary beneficiaries of that are the same publishers who have been grabbing rights from people like photographers, journalists, et al it’s hard for me to understand why the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” principle doesn’t apply…

For Blindside, I suppose the relevance is that if you make a sufficient number of sufficiently anti-public access laws for long enough, eventually you will spark enough opposition to create something like ORG, which really seems to me to have grown on Internet time.

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