I'm sending this because I am looking for concerned individuals who understand the importance of the following cause: Content control is a dead end. The legal tradition in copyright has always drawn a distinction between facts and ideas on one hand, which nobody can own; and expression on the other hand, which is what has been allowed to be copyrighted. The thing is, data elements are facts, whether they are part of an expressive work or not. Free speech, the use of information and the very purpose of copyright are being revised by publishers and other "content" stakeholders by means of "content" control measures, such as the American Digital Millennium Copyright Anticircumvention Act, and the provisions of the international TRIPS treaty. Currently, a Russian citizen, Dmitry Sklyarov, is being prosecuted for felony charges under the DMCA, for work he did in developing software that decrypts the Adobe e-Book. The Copyright Clause in the US Constitution is geared toward allowing Congress to grant artificial monopolies ("exclusive Right" for "limited Times" to "Writings and Discoveries") in order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." It does not grant copyright as a natural right, and it does not provide for the superseding of free speech by this power of Congress. Do you agree that content control must not be allowed to enable copyright to supersede our free speech right to process and distribute information? We need outreach volunteers and coordinators who wish to help get the word out about what is going on, and to build the constituency of those who are affected by these developments. If you agree that content control must not be allowed to enable copyright to supersede free speech rights, then please contact me, or subscribe to the C-FIT Content Control Outreach discussion list by sending an email saying "subscribe C-FIT_Release_Community" to ListServ@realmeasures.dyndns.org. Seth Johnson seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org Information Producers Initiative Basic Position Statement: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/C-FIT/Theory1.htm