If your family chooses to participate in obligatory holiday purchasing, try adopting this rule: buy only second-hand goods, with a stated maximum price.

The article suggests that books and music ought to "go digital" -- meaning, using internet distribution. Beware of that! Don't "buy" DRM-restricted copies or copies with End-User License Agreements. Insist on paying anonymously.

For books and music from major publishers, the only digital copies that do not oppress their users are the unauthorized ones.

US citizens: call on Obama to dismantle the NSEERS program so that Trump can't use it to register all Muslim visitors.

Everyone: call on Cameroon to free Fomusoh Ivo Feh, who has been imprisoned for sending a joke mocking Boko Haram via SMS message.

What makes the joke so funny is the idea that Boko Haram would want recruits to have western education (i.e., to study from the "boko", books, that it calls "haram", anathema).

US citizens: call on Obama not to let Arch Coal do mining in roadless Colorado forest.

A new US law prohibits companies from restricting how their customers post reviews of the company's products or services.

The article ends with a fatuous statement that companies "should protect" their "intellectual property". That term is so broad that it is fatuous to say that people "should" (or "shouldn't") do any particular thing with it.

If we make the subject narrower and concrete by replacing "intellectual property" with something specific, such as copyrights, then it becomes mistake. It is wrong to endorse in a blanket way all the things that companies do to enforce copyrights. Some are legitimate, and some are not.