I’ve been “taking copyright back” by making sure I release at least one normally copyrighted work for every CC work I release. Confuses the heck outa the freetards.
Google is not a major financial supporter of EFF, except to the extent that they had to pay EFF $1M as part of the Google Buzz settlement, where EFF helped sue Google.
This is just wrong on its face.
EFF has been adverse to Google in more legal proceedings than I can count. EFF is a 501©3. You can see its 990s online – they’re public after they’re filed with the IRS.
It’s true that there are some former EFF staffers who work for Google, but this isn’t extraordinary – lots of technical people end up working for Google. There are no Google employees on EFF’s board.
Google has a charitable giving program whereby it will match its employees’ donations to 501©3s, and EFF benefits from that, but so do lots of other charitable nonprofits. What’s more, there are plenty of companies whom EFF has been adverse to in court that have similar donation-matching programs, like Microsoft, from whom EFF takes in sizable donations, thanks to the generosity of the firm’s employees. To my knowledge, Google is not extraordinary in this regard.
I don’t know where you get your information on this, but it is just plain factually incorrect.
Here’s a good article on EFF’s financial relationship with Google:
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/08/30/the-effs-relationship-with-google-a-conflict-of-interest/
In a nutshell:
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Google paid EFF $1M when EFF successfully threatened it with legal consequences for its privacy breach (it’s very hard to characterize this as Google being EFF’s benefactor)
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A $10K unrestricted grant in 2010 (a very small part of the organization’s multimillion dollar annual budget)
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Employee matching (not directed by Google at all, which, as noted, has a nondiscrimatory policy of matching employee donations to registered charities)
No, I explicitly mentioned the matching grants.
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