James Bridle – UK Guardian: “In my last column I wrote about Tesco’s graceful exit from the ebook business, offloading its customers – and their precious libraries – to Kobo. While applauding the commitment to preserving customers’ purchases, it remains a shame that this sort of transfer is even necessary. Storing books – or anything else – in “the cloud” always comes with a trade-off: everything you put there is backed up and presumably safe for a while, but it’s also still controlled by the retailer- – not by the customer who legally purchased it. More than just a question about books, this is a fundamental issue at the heart of the content industry and the internet itself. And now the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has fought for digital civil liberties since 1990, has launched a campaign to eradicate digital rights management (DRM) called Apollo 1201, referring to the section of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevents users tampering with the digital locks on the things they own, such as books, music and movies…Legal challenges to DRM strike at the heart of this issue: is it us, or distant, unaccountable corporations that control not only our media, but the software in our phones, our cars, and our fire alarms? The name Apollo 1201 also refers to the scale of the struggle: it’s a moonshot; it might take a decade, but it’s a stand worth taking, and fighting for.”