The free font manifesto on Lupton’s site caught my eye. There are some handsome fonts with names like Linux Libertine, Freefont, and Ubuntu. The manifesto sets out that a free font is has been licensed to be free and can be altered to form a new font (sound familiar?) and has been made available beyond a group of friends or buyers of a software package or operating system. There is a short discussion on if all fonts should be free. The manifesto points out that typeface design in a profession and business and that if all fonts were free these people would be out of a job. The manifesto continues:
Most typefaces created in the free font movement are designed to serve relatively small or underserved linguistic communities. They have an explicit social purpose, and they are intended to offer the world not a luxurious outpouring of typographic variation but rather the basics for maintaining literacy and communication within a society.
Telecentre is a global community of people and organizations who share a vision of a world where people everywhere have the opportunity to access technology and use it to join the knowledge economy on their own terms. Telecentre is an initiative of Canada’s International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), Microsoft, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
The battle for fair copyright in Canada is heating up! Check out this graphic novel explaining the history of the “Canadian DMCA”, through this link from culturelibre.ca Une bande dessinée en attendant la loi
Alarmed that Bell Canada is throttling and degrading P2P traffic, David Fewer and some of his friends have created a wiki to list “all of the legitimate things that P2P can and is doing. Kind of a one stop shop for evidence of how this technology has the capacity to change the world.” The idea is that this can be used in regulatory proceedings and other policy fora to establish the legitimacy of P2P. They want your input!
Canada launches privacy probe into Facebook
Associated Press, June 2, 2008
Canada’s federal privacy commissioner has launched an investigation into Facebook after four students complained that the popular Web site violates Canadian law by disclosing personal information to advertisers without proper consent. The University of Ottawa law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users, allege in a complaint lodged Friday that the social networking Web site has committed 22 violations of the law. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hpMWm7pPdLssNR9Uu4OksMSOpZcgD910STD80
