Who says that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn’t have a sense of humour? Anybody who does will be handily proven wrong by a look at its new “Endangered Gizmos” list, over which anybody should get a chuckle (not to mention an education) no matter where you fall along the technopolitical divide.

The list is divided into groups of “extinct,” “endangered,” and even “saved” gizmos. The “extinct” list includes the Replay TV 4000 (”Why it’s extinct: Former Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner called skipping commercials “theft” - and evidently the major motion picture studios agree. They sued the manufacturers of ReplayTV out of existence, and the company that purchased it buckled under and removed the contested features.”), and DVD X-Copy, which the site explains, allowed you to create backup copies of your DVDs as well as to record fair-use excerpts of movies from DVD,” and which is extinct because “Hollywood sued the company that made DVD X-Copy out of existence, successfully arguing that it violated the highly controversial “anti-circumvention” clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).”

Gizmos on the “endangered” list includes iPods…

[Endangered Gizmos - Only You Can Prevent Extinction, continued]