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CVSROOT: /web/www
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Changes by: GNUN <gnun> 16/01/25 11:58:59
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philosophy : copyright-versus-community.pl.html
Added files:
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<h2>Prawo autorskie kontra spoÅecznoÅÄ w Erze Sieci Komputerowych</h2>
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-$Date: 2015/05/31 21:02:25 $
+$Date: 2016/01/25 11:58:58 $
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+<body><pre>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
+<title>Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/copyright-versus-community.translist"
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+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks</h2>
+
+<blockquote class="note">
+<p><a href="http://defectivebydesign.org/ebooks.html">Join our
mailing list about the dangers of eBooks</a>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><b>Keynote speech at LIANZA conference, Christchurch Convention
Centre, 12
+October 2009</b></p>
+
+<dl>
+<dt>BC:</dt>
+<dd><p>Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Today I have
the
+privilege of introducing Richard Stallman, whose keynote speech is
+being sponsored by the School of Information Management at Victoria
+University of Wellington.</p>
+
+<p>Richard has been working to promote software freedom for over 25
+years. In 1983 he started the GNU project to develop a free operating
+system [the GNU system], and in 1985 he set up the Free Software
+Foundation. Every time you read or send a message to nz-libs, you use
+the Mailman software which is part of the GNU project. So whether you
+realize it or not, Richard's work has touched all of your lives.</p>
+
+<p>I like to describe him as the most influential person most people
+have never heard of, although he tells me that that cannot possibly be
+true because it cannot be tested.</p></dd>
+
+<dt>RMS:</dt>
+<dd>We can't tell.</dd>
+
+<dt>BC:</dt>
+<dd><p>I said that—I still like it. His ideas about software
+freedom and free access to information were used by Tim Berners-Lee
+when he created the world's first web server, and in 1999 his musings
+about a free online encyclopedia inspired Jimmy Wales to set up what
+is now Wikipedia.</p>
+
+<p>Today Richard will be talking to us about copyright vs community in
+the age of computer networks, and their implications for libraries.
+Richard.</p></dd>
+
+<dt>RMS:</dt>
+<dd><p>I've been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks, and in the
+North Island it was raining most of the time. Now I know why they
+call gumboots “Wellingtons”. And then I saw somebody who
+was making chairs and tables out of ponga wood, and he called it
+fern-iture. Then we took the ferry to get here, and as soon as we got
+off, people started mocking and insulting us; but there were no hard
+feelings, they just wanted to make us really feel Picton.</p>
+
+<p>The reason people usually invite me to give speeches is because of
+my work on free software. This is not a talk about free software;
+this talk answers the question whether the ideas of free software
+extend to other kinds of works. But in order for that to make sense,
+I'd better tell you briefly what free software means.</p>
+
+<p>Free software is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of
+“free speech”, not “free beer”. Free software
+is software that respects the user's freedom, and there are four
+specific freedoms that the user deserves always to have.</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.</li>
+
+<li>Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code of the program
+and change it to make the program do what you wish.</li>
+
+<li>Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbour; that is, the
+freedom to redistribute copies of the program, exact copies when you
+wish.</li>
+
+<li>And Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community.
+That's the freedom to publish your modified versions when you
+wish.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>If the program gives you these four freedoms then it's free
+software, which means the social system of its distribution and use is
+an ethical system, one which respects the user's freedom and the
+social solidarity of the user's community. But if one of these
+freedoms is missing or insufficient, then it's proprietary software,
+nonfree software, user-subjugating software. It's unethical. It's
+not a contribution to society, it's a power grab. This unethical
+practice should not exist; the goal of the free software movement is
+to put an end to it. All software should be free, so that all users
+can be free.</p>
+
+<p>Proprietary software keeps the users divided and helpless: divided,
+because they're forbidden to share it, and helpless, because they
+don't have the source code so they can't change it. They can't even
+study it to verify what it's really doing to them, and many
+proprietary programs have malicious features which spy on the user,
+restrict the user, even back doors to attack the user.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, Microsoft Windows has a back door with which
+Microsoft can forcibly install software changes, without getting
+permission from the supposed owner of the computer. You may think
+it's your computer, but if you've made the mistake of having Windows
+running in it, then really Microsoft has owned your computer.
+Computers need to be defenestrated, which means either throw Windows
+out of the computer, or throw the computer out the window.</p>
+
+<p>But any proprietary software gives the developers unjust power over
+the users. Some of the developers abuse this power more, and some
+abuse it less, but none of them ought to have it. You deserve to have
+control of your computing, and not be forcibly dependent on a
+particular company. So you deserve free software.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of speeches about free software, people sometimes ask
+whether these same freedoms and ideas apply to other things. If you
+have a copy of a published work on your computer, it makes sense to
+ask whether you should have the same four freedoms—whether it's
+ethically essential that you have them or not. And that's the
+question that I'm going to address today.</p>
+
+<p>If you have a copy of something that's not software, for the most
+part, the only thing that might deny you any of these freedoms is
+copyright law. With software that's not so. The main ways of making
+software nonfree are contracts and withholding the source code from
+the users. Copyright is a sort of secondary, back up method. For
+other things there's no such distinction as between source code and
+executable code.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, if we're talking about a text, if you can see the
+text to read it, there's nothing in the text that you can't see. So
+it's not the same kind of issue exactly as software. It's for the
+most part only copyright that might deny you these freedoms.</p>
+
+<p>So the question can be restated: “What should copyright law
+allow you to do with published works? What should copyright law
+say?”</p>
+
+<p>Copyright has developed along with copying technology, so it's
+useful to review the history of copying technology. Copying developed
+in the ancient world, where you'd use a writing instrument on a
+writing surface. You'd read one copy and write another.</p>
+
+<p>This technology was rather inefficient, but another interesting
+characteristic was that it had no economy of scale. To write ten
+copies would take ten times as long as to write one copy. It required
+no special equipment other than the equipment for writing, and it
+required no special skill other than literacy itself. The result was
+that copies of any particular book were made in a decentralized
+manner. Wherever there was a copy, if someone wanted to copy it, he
+could.</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing like copyright in the ancient world. If you had
+a copy and wanted to copy it, nobody was going to tell you you weren't
+allowed—except if the local prince didn't like what the book
+said, in which case he might punish you for copying it. But that's
+not copyright, but rather something closely related, namely
+censorship. To this day, copyright is often used in attempts to
+censor people.</p>
+
+<p>That went on for thousands of years, but then there was a big
+advance in copying technology, namely the printing press. The
+printing press made copying more efficient, but not uniformly. [This
+was] because mass production copying became a lot more efficient, but
+making one copy at a time didn't benefit from the printing press. In
+fact, you were better off just writing it by hand; that would be
+faster than trying to print one copy.</p>
+
+<p>The printing press has an economy of scale: it takes a lot of work
+to set the type, but then you can make many copies very fast. Also,
+the printing press and the type were expensive equipment that most
+people didn't own; and the ability to use them, most literate people
+didn't know. Using a press was a different skill from writing. The
+result was a centralized manner of producing copies: the copies of any
+given book would be made in a few places, and then they would be
+transported to wherever someone wanted to buy copies.</p>
+
+<p>Copyright began in the age of the printing press. Copyright in
+England began as a system of censorship in the 1500s. I believe it
+was originally meant to censor Protestants, but it was turned around
+and used to censor Catholics and presumably lots of others as well.
+According to this law, in order to publish a book you had to get
+permission from the Crown, and this permission was granted in the form
+of a perpetual monopoly to publish it. This was allowed to lapse in
+the 1680s, I believe [it expired in 1695 according to the Wikipedia
+entry]. The publishers wanted it back again, but what they got was
+something somewhat different. The Statute of Anne gave authors a
+copyright, and only for 14 years, although the author could renew it
+once.</p>
+
+<p>This was a totally different idea—a temporary monopoly for
+the author, instead of a perpetual monopoly for the publisher. The
+idea developed that copyright was a means of promoting writing.</p>
+
+<p>When the US constitution was written, some people wanted authors to
+be entitled to a copyright, but that was rejected. Instead, the US
+Constitution says that Congress can optionally adopt a copyright law,
+and if there is a copyright law, its purpose is to promote progress.
+In other words, the purpose is not benefits for copyright holders or
+anybody they do business with, but for the general public. Copyright
+has to last a limited time; publishers keep hoping for us to forget
+about this.</p>
+
+<p>Here we have an idea of copyright which is an industrial regulation
+on publishers, controlled by authors, and designed to provide benefits
+to the public at large. It functioned this way because it didn't
+restrict the readers.</p>
+
+<p>Now in the early centuries of printing, and still I believe in the
+1790s, lots of readers wrote copies by hand because they couldn't
+afford printed copies. Nobody ever expected copyright law to be
+something other than an industrial regulation. It wasn't meant to
+stop people from writing copies, it was meant to regulate the
+publishers. Because of this it was easy to enforce, uncontroversial,
+and arguably beneficial for society.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy to enforce, because it only had to be enforced against
+publishers. And it's easy to find the unauthorized publishers of a
+book—you go to a bookstore and say “where do these copies
+come from?”. You don't have to invade everybody's home and
+everybody's computer to do that.</p>
+
+<p>It was uncontroversial because, as the readers were not restricted,
+they had nothing to complain about. Theoretically they were
+restricted from publishing, but not being publishers and not having
+printing presses, they couldn't do that anyway. In what they actually
+could do, they were not restricted.</p>
+
+<p>It was arguably beneficial because the general public, according to
+the concepts of copyright law, traded away a theoretical right they
+were not in a position to exercise. In exchange, they got the
+benefits of more writing.</p>
+
+<p>Now if you trade away something you have no possible use for, and
+you get something you can use in exchange, it's a positive trade.
+Whether or not you could have gotten a better deal some other way,
+that's a different question, but at least it's positive.</p>
+
+<p>So if this were still in the age of the printing press, I don't
+think I'd be complaining about copyright law. But the age of the
+printing press is gradually giving way to the age of the computer
+networks—another advance in copying technology that makes
+copying more efficient, and once again not uniformly so.</p>
+
+<p>Here's what we had in the age of the printing press: mass
+production very efficient, one at a time copying still just as slow as
+the ancient world. Digital technology gets us here: they've both
+benefited, but one-off copying has benefited the most.</p>
+
+<p>We get to a situation much more like the ancient world, where one
+at a time copying is not so much worse [i.e., harder] than mass
+production copying. It's a little bit less efficient, a little bit
+less good, but it's perfectly cheap enough that hundreds of millions
+of people do it. Consider how many people write CDs once in a while,
+even in poor countries. You may not have a CD-writer yourself, so you
+go to a store where you can do it.</p>
+
+<p>This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as
+it used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they
+wouldn't have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on
+publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to
+the public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled
+mainly by the publishers, in the name of the authors.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, it's tyranny. It's intolerable and we can't allow
+it to continue this way.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of this change, [copyright] is no longer easy to
+enforce, no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial.</p>
+
+<p>It's no longer easy to enforce because now the publishers want to
+enforce it against each and every person, and to do this requires
+cruel measures, draconian punishments, invasions of privacy, abolition
+of our basic ideas of justice. There's almost no limit to how far
+they will propose to go to prosecute the War on Sharing.</p>
+
+<p>It's no longer uncontroversial. There are political parties in
+several countries whose basic platform is “freedom to
+share”.</p>
+
+<p>It's no longer beneficial because the freedoms that we conceptually
+traded away (because we couldn't exercise them), we now can exercise.
+They're tremendously useful, and we want to exercise them.</p>
+
+<p>What would a democratic government do in this situation?</p>
+
+<p>It would reduce copyright power. It would say: “The trade we
+made on behalf of our citizens, trading away some of their freedom
+which now they need, is intolerable. We have to change this; we can't
+trade away the freedom that is important.” We can measure the
+sickness of democracy by the tendency of governments to do the exact
+opposite around the world, extending copyright power when they should
+reduce it.</p>
+
+<p>One example is in the dimension of time. Around the world we see
+pressure to make copyright last longer and longer and longer.</p>
+
+<p>A wave of this started in the US in 1998. Copyright was extended
+by 20 years on both past and future works. I do not understand how
+they hope to convince the now dead or senile writers of the 20s and
+30s to write more back then by extending copyright on their works now.
+If they have a time machine with which to inform them, they haven't
+used it. Our history books don't say that there was a burst of vigor
+in the arts in the 20s when all the artists found out that their
+copyrights would be extended in 1998.</p>
+
+<p>It's theoretically conceivable that 20 years more copyright on
+future works would convince people to make more effort in producing
+those works. But not anyone rational, because the discounted present
+value of 20 more years of copyright starting 75 years in the
+future—if it's a work made for hire—and probably even
+longer if it's a work with an individual copyright holder, is so small
+it couldn't persuade any rational person to do anything different.
+Any business that wants to claim otherwise ought to present its
+projected balance sheets for 75 years in the future, which of course
+they can't do because none of them really looks that far ahead.</p>
+
+<p>The real reason for this law, the desire that prompted various
+companies to purchase this law in the US Congress, which is how laws
+are decided on for the most part, was they had lucrative monopolies
+and they wanted those monopolies to continue.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, Disney was aware that the first film in which Mickey
+Mouse appeared would go into the public domain in a few years, and
+then anybody would be free to draw that same character as part of
+other works. Disney didn't want that to happen. Disney borrows a lot
+from the public domain, but is determined never to give the slightest
+thing back. So Disney paid for this law, which we refer to as the
+Mickey Mouse Copyright Act.</p>
+
+<p>The movie companies say they want perpetual copyright, but the US
+Constitution won't let them get that officially. So they came up with
+a way to get the same result unofficially: “perpetual copyright
+on the installment plan”. Every 20 years they extend copyright
+for 20 more years. So that at any given time, any given work has a
+date when it will supposedly fall into the public domain. But that
+date is like tomorrow, it never comes. By the time you get there they
+will have postponed it, unless we stop them next time.</p>
+
+<p>That's one dimension, the dimension of duration. But even more
+important is the dimension of breadth: which uses of the work does
+copyright cover?</p>
+
+<p>In the age of the printing press, copyright wasn't supposed to
+cover all uses of a copyrighted work, because copyright regulated
+certain uses that were the exceptions in a broader space of
+unregulated uses. There were certain things you were simply allowed
+to do with your copy of a book.</p>
+
+<p>Now the publishers have got the idea that they can turn our
+computers against us, and use them to seize total power over all use
+of published works. They want to set up a pay-per-view universe.
+They're doing it with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)—the
+intentional features of software that's designed to restrict the user.
+And often the computer itself is designed to restrict the user.</p>
+
+<p>The first way in which the general public saw this was in DVDs. A
+movie on a DVD was usually encrypted, and the format was secret. The
+DVD conspiracy kept this secret because they said anyone that wants to
+make DVD players has to join the conspiracy, promise to keep the
+format secret, and promise to design the DVD players to restrict the
+users according to the rules, which say it has to stop the user from
+doing this, from doing that, from doing that—a precise set of
+requirements, all of which are malicious towards us.</p>
+
+<p>It worked for a while, but then some people figured out the secret
+format, and published free software capable of reading the movie on a
+DVD and playing it. Then the publishers said “since we can't
+actually stop them, we have to make it a crime”. And they
+started that in the US in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright
+Act, which imposed censorship on software capable of doing such
+jobs.</p>
+
+<p>So that particular piece of free software was the subject of a
+court case. Its distribution in the US is forbidden; the US practices
+censorship of software.</p>
+
+<p>The movie companies are well aware that they can't really make that
+program disappear—it's easy enough to find it. So they designed
+another encryption system, which they hoped would be harder to break,
+and it's called AACS, or the axe.</p>
+
+<p>The AACS conspiracy makes precise rules about all players. For
+instance, in 2011 it's going to be forbidden to make analog video
+outputs. So all video outputs will have to be digital, and they will
+carry the signal encrypted into a monitor specially designed to keep
+secrets from the user. That is malicious hardware. They say that the
+purpose of this is to “close the analog hole”. I'll show
+you a couple of analog holes (Stallman takes off his glasses): here's
+one and here's another, that they'd like to poke out permanently.<a
href="#footnote1">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>How do I know about these conspiracies? The reason is they're not
+secret—they have websites. The AACS website proudly describes
+the contracts that manufacturers have to sign, which is how I know
+about this requirement. It proudly states the names of the companies
+that have established this conspiracy, which include Microsoft and
+Apple, and Intel, and Sony, and Disney, and IBM.</p>
+
+<p>A conspiracy of companies designed to restrict the public's access
+to technology ought to be prosecuted as a serious crime, like a
+conspiracy to fix prices, except it's worse, so the prison sentences
+for this should be longer. But these companies are quite confident
+that our governments are on their side against us. They have no fear
+against being prosecuted for these conspiracies, which is why they
+don't bother to hide them.</p>
+
+<p>In general DRM is set up by a conspiracy of companies. Once in a
+while a single company can do it, but generally it requires a
+conspiracy between technology companies and publishers, so [it's]
+almost always a conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p>They thought that nobody would ever be able to break the AACS, but
+about three and a half years ago someone released a free program
+capable of decrypting that format. However, it was totally useless,
+because in order to run it you need to know the key.</p>
+
+<p>And then, six months later, I saw a photo of two adorable puppies,
+with 32 hex digits above them, and I wondered: “Why put those
+two things together? I wonder if those numbers are some important
+key, and someone could have put the numbers together with the puppies,
+figuring people would copy the photo of the puppies because they were
+so cute. This would protect the key from being wiped out.”</p>
+
+<p>And that's what it was—that was the key to break the axe.
+People posted it, and editors deleted it, because laws in many
+countries now conscript them to censor this information. It was
+posted again, they deleted it; eventually they gave up, and in two
+weeks this number was posted in over 700,000 web sites.</p>
+
+<p>That's a big outpouring of public disgust with DRM. But it didn't
+win the war, because the publishers changed the key. Not only that:
+with HD DVD, this was adequate to break the DRM, but not with Blu-ray.
+Blu-ray has an additional level of DRM and so far there is no free
+software that can break it, which means that you must regard Blu-ray
+disks as something incompatible with your own freedom. They are an
+enemy with which no accommodation is possible, at least not with our
+present level of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Never accept any product designed to attack your freedom. If you
+don't have the free software to play a DVD, you mustn't buy or rent
+any DVDs, or accept them even as gifts, except for the rare
+non-encrypted DVDs, which there are a few of. I actually have a few
+[of these]—I don't have any encrypted DVDs, I won't take
+them.</p>
+
+<p>So this is how things stand in video, but we've also seen DRM in
+music.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, about ten years ago we started to see things that
+looked like compact disks, but they weren't written quite like compact
+disks. They didn't follow the standard. We called them 'corrupt
+disks', and the idea of them was that they would play in an audio
+player, but it was impossible to read them on a computer. These
+different methods had various problems.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually Sony came up with a clever idea. They put a program on
+the disk, so that if you stuck the disk into a computer, the disk
+would install the program. This program was designed like a virus to
+take control of the system. It's called a 'root kit', meaning that it
+has things in it to break the security of the system so that it can
+install the software deep inside the system, and modify various parts
+of the system.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, it modified the command you could use to examine the
+system to see if the software was present, so as to disguise itself.
+It modified the command you could use to delete some of these files,
+so that it wouldn't really delete them. Now all of this is a serious
+crime, but it's not the only one Sony committed, because the software
+also included free software code—code that had been released
+under the GNU General Public License.</p>
+
+<p>Now the GNU GPL is a copyleft license, and that means it says
+“Yes, you're free to put this code into other things, but when
+you do, the entire program that you put things into you must release
+as free software under the same license. And you must make the source
+code available to users, and to inform them of their rights you must
+give them a copy of this license when they get the
+software.”</p>
+
+<p>Sony didn't comply with all that. That's commercial copyright
+infringement, which is a felony. They're both felonies, but Sony
+wasn't prosecuted because the government understands that the purpose
+of the government and the law is to maintain the power of those
+companies over us, not to help defend our freedom in any way.</p>
+
+<p>People got angry and they sued Sony. However, they made a mistake.
+They focused their condemnation not on the evil purpose of this
+scheme, but only on the secondary evils of the various methods that
+Sony used. So Sony settled the lawsuits and promised that in the
+future, when it attacks our freedom, it will not do those other
+things.</p>
+
+<p>Actually, that particular corrupt disk scheme was not so bad,
+because if you were not using Windows it would not affect you at all.
+Even if you were using Windows, there's a key on the keyboard—if
+you remembered every time to hold it down, then the disk wouldn't
+install the software. But of course it's hard to remember that every
+time; you're going to slip up some day. This shows the kind of thing
+we've had to deal with.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately music DRM is receding. Even the main record companies
+sell downloads without DRM. But we see a renewed effort to impose DRM
+on books.</p>
+
+<p>You see, the publishers want to take away the traditional freedoms
+of book readers—freedom to do things such as borrow a book from
+the public library, or lend it to a friend; to sell a book to a used
+book store, or buy it anonymously paying cash (which is the only way I
+buy books—we've got to resist the temptations to let Big Brother
+know everything that we're doing.)</p>
+
+<p>Even the freedom to keep the book as long as you wish, and read it
+as many times as you wish, they plan to get rid of.</p>
+
+<p>The way they do it is with DRM. They knew that so many people read
+books and would get angry if these freedoms were taken away that they
+didn't believe they could buy a law specifically to abolish these
+freedoms—there would be too much opposition. Democracy is sick,
+but once in a while people manage to demand something. So they came
+up with a two-stage plan.</p>
+
+<p>First, take away these freedoms from ebooks, and second, convince
+people to switch from paper books to ebooks. They've succeeded with
+stage 1.</p>
+
+<p>In the US they did it with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
+and in New Zealand, that was part of the year-ago Copyright Act;
+censorship on software that can break DRM was part of that law.
+That's an unjust provision; it's got to be repealed.</p>
+
+<p>The second stage is convince people to switch from printed books to
+ebooks; that didn't go so well.</p>
+
+<p>One publisher in 2001 had the idea they would make their line of
+ebooks really popular if they started it with my biography. So they
+found an author and the author asked me if I'd cooperate, and I said
+“Only if this ebook is published without encryption, without
+DRM”. The publisher wouldn't go along with that, and I just
+stuck to it—I said no. Eventually we found another publisher
+who was willing to do this—in fact willing to publish the book
+under a free license giving you the four freedoms—so the book
+was then published, and sold a lot of copies on paper.</p>
+
+<p>But in any case, ebooks failed at the beginning of this decade.
+People just didn't want to read them very much. And I said,
+“they will try again”. We saw an amazing number of news
+articles about electronic ink (or is it electronic paper, I can never
+remember which), and it occurred to me probably the reason there's so
+many is the publishers want us to think about this. They want us to
+be eager for the next generation of ebook readers.</p>
+
+<p>Now they're upon us. Things like the Sony Shreader (its official
+name is the Sony Reader, but if you put on 'sh' it explains what it's
+designed to do to your books), and the Amazon Swindle, designed to
+swindle you out of your traditional freedoms without your noticing.
+Of course, they call it the Kindle which is what it's going to do to
+your books.</p>
+
+<p>The Kindle is an extremely malicious product, almost as malicious
+as Microsoft Windows. They both have spy features, they both have
+Digital Restrictions Management, and they both have back doors.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the Kindle, the only way you can buy a book is to
+buy it from Amazon, and Amazon requires you to identify yourself, so
+they know everything that you've bought.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is Digital Restrictions Management, so you can't lend
+the book or sell it to a used bookstore, and the library can't lend it
+either.</p>
+
+<p>And then there's the back door, which we found out about about
+three months ago, because Amazon used it. Amazon sent a command to
+all the Kindles to erase a particular book, namely 1984 by George
+Orwell. Yes, they couldn't have picked a more ironic book to erase.
+So that's how we know that Amazon has a back door with which it can
+erase books remotely.</p>
+
+<p>What else it can do, who knows? Maybe it's like Microsoft Windows.
+Maybe Amazon can remotely upgrade the software, which means that
+whatever malicious things are not in it now, they could put them in it
+tomorrow.</p>
+
+<p>This is intolerable—any one of these restrictions is
+intolerable. They want to create a world where nobody lends books to
+anybody anymore.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine that you visit a friend and there are no books on the
+shelf. It's not that your friend doesn't read, but his books are all
+inside a device, and of course he can't lend you those books. The
+only way he could lend you any one of those books is to lend you his
+whole library, which is obviously a ridiculous thing to ask anybody to
+do. So there goes friendship for people who love books.</p>
+
+<p>Make sure that you inform people what this device implies. It
+means other readers will no longer be your friends, because you will
+be acting like a jerk toward them. Spread the word preemptively.
+This device is your enemy. It's the enemy of everyone who reads. The
+people who don't recognize that are the people who are thinking so
+short-term that they don't see it. It's our job to help them see
+beyond the momentary convenience to the implications of this
+device.</p>
+
+<p>I have nothing against distributing books in digital form, if they
+are not designed to take away our freedom. Strictly speaking, it is
+possible to have an ebook reader:</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>that is not designed to attack you,</li>
+
+<li>which runs free software and not proprietary software,</li>
+
+<li>which doesn't have DRM,</li>
+
+<li>which doesn't make people identify yourself to get a book,</li>
+
+<li>which doesn't have a back door, [and]</li>
+
+<li>which doesn't restrict what you can do with the files on your
+machine.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>It's possible, but the big companies really pushing ebooks are
+doing it to attack our freedom, and we mustn't stand for that. This
+is what governments are doing in cahoots with big business to attack
+our freedom, by making copyright harsher and nastier, more restrictive
+than ever before.</p>
+
+<p>But what should they do? Governments should make copyright power
+less. Here are my specific proposals.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, there is the dimension of time. I propose copyright
+should last ten years, starting from the date of publication of a
+work.</p>
+
+<p>Why from the date of publication? Because before that, we don't
+have copies. It doesn't matter to us whether we would have been
+allowed to copy our copies that we don't have, so I figure we might as
+well let the authors have as much time as it takes to arrange
+publication, and then start the clock.</p>
+
+<p>But why ten years? I don't know about in this country, but in the
+US, the publication cycle has got shorter and shorter. Nowadays
+almost all books are remaindered within two years and out-of-print
+within three. So ten years is more than three times the usual
+publication cycle—that should be plenty comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>But not everybody agrees. I once proposed this in a panel
+discussion with fiction writers, and the award-winning fantasy writer
+next to me said “Ten years? No way. Anything more than five
+years is intolerable.” You see, he had a legal dispute with his
+publisher. His books seemed to be out of print, but the publisher
+wouldn't admit it. The publisher was using the copyright on his own
+book to stop him from distributing copies himself, which he wanted to
+do so people could read it.</p>
+
+<p>This is what every artist starts out wanting—wanting to
+distribute her work so it will get read and appreciated. Very few
+make a lot of money. That tiny fraction face the danger of being
+morally corrupted, like J.K. Rowling.</p>
+
+<p>J.K. Rowling, in Canada, got an injunction against people who had
+bought her book in a bookstore, ordering them not to read it. So in
+response I call for a boycott of Harry Potter books. But I don't say
+you shouldn't read them; I leave that to the author and the publisher.
+I just say you shouldn't buy them.</p>
+
+<p>It's few authors that make enough money that they can be corrupted
+in this way. Most of them don't get anywhere near that, and continue
+wanting the same thing they wanted at the outset: they want their work
+to be appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted to distribute his own book, and copyright was stopping
+him. He realized that more than five years of copyright was unlikely
+to ever do him any good.</p>
+
+<p>If people would rather have copyright last five years, I won't be
+against it. I propose ten as a first stab at the problem. Let's
+reduce it to ten years and then take stock for a while, and we could
+adjust it after that. I don't say I think ten years is the exact
+right number—I don't know.</p>
+
+<p id="details">What about the dimension of breadth? Which activities
should
+copyright cover? I distinguish three broad categories of works.</p>
+
+<p>First of all, there are the functional works that you use to do a
+practical job in your life. This includes software, recipes,
+educational works, reference works, text fonts, and other things you
+can think of. These works should be free.</p>
+
+<p>If you use the work to do a job in your life, then if you can't
+change the work to suit you, you don't control your life. Once you
+have changed the work to suit you, then you've got to be free to
+publish it—publish your version—because there will be
+others who will want the changes you've made.</p>
+
+<p>This leads quickly to the conclusion that users have to have the
+same four freedoms [for all functional works], not just for software.
+And you'll notice that for recipes, practically speaking, cooks are
+always sharing and changing recipes just as if the recipes were free.
+Imagine how people would react if the government tried to stamp out
+so-called “recipe piracy”.</p>
+
+<p>The term “pirate” is pure propaganda. When people ask
+me what I think of music piracy, I say “As far as I know, when
+pirates attack they don't do it by playing instruments badly, they do
+it with arms. So it's not music “piracy”, because piracy
+is attacking ships, and sharing is as far as you get from being the
+moral equivalent of attacking ships”. Attacking ships is bad,
+sharing with other people is good, so we should firmly denounce that
+propaganda term “piracy” whenever we hear it.</p>
+
+<p>People might have objected twenty years ago: “If we don't
+give up our freedom, if we don't let the publishers of these works
+control us, the works won't get made and that will be a horrible
+disaster.” Now, looking at the free software community, and all
+the recipes that circulate, and reference works like
+Wikipedia—we are even starting to see free textbooks being
+published—we know that that fear is misguided.</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to despair and give up our freedom thinking that
+otherwise the works won't get made. There are lots of ways to
+encourage them to get made if we want more—lots of ways that are
+consistent with and respect our freedom. In this category, they
+should all be free.</p>
+
+<p>But what about the second category, of works that say what certain
+people thought, like memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers,
+and various other <span
class="removed"><del><strong>things?</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>things?<a
href="#footnote2">[2]</a></em></ins></span> To publish a modified
version of somebody
+else's statement of what he thought is misrepresenting [that]
+somebody. That's not particularly a contribution to society.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore it is workable and acceptable to have a somewhat reduced
+copyright system where all commercial use is covered by copyright, all
+modification is covered by copyright, but everyone is free to
+non-commercially redistribute exact copies.</p>
+
+<span class="inserted"><ins><em><p>[2015 note: publishing scientific
papers under the CC Attribution
+license (CC-BY) is widely done, in accessible journals and arxiv.org,
+and it works well, so that is what I now recommend for scholarly
+publications.]</p></em></ins></span>
+
+<p>That freedom is the minimum freedom we must establish for all
+published works, because the denial of that freedom is what creates
+the War on Sharing—what creates the vicious propaganda that
+sharing is theft, that sharing is like being a pirate and attacking
+ships. Absurdities, but absurdities backed by a lot of money that has
+corrupted our governments. We need to end the War on Sharing; we need
+to legalize sharing exact copies of any published work.</p>
+
+<p>In the second category of works, that's all we need; we don't need
+to make them free. Therefore I think it's OK to have a reduced
+copyright system which covers commercial use and all modifications.
+And this will provide a revenue stream to the authors in more or less
+the same (usually inadequate) way as the present system. You've got
+to keep in mind [that] the present system, except for superstars, is
+usually totally inadequate.</p>
+
+<p>What about works of art and entertainment? Here it took me a while
+to decide what to think about modifications.</p>
+
+<p>You see, on one hand, a work of art can have an artistic integrity
+and modifying it could destroy that. Of course, copyright doesn't
+necessarily stop works from being butchered that way. Hollywood does
+it all the time. On the other hand, modifying the work can be a
+contribution to art. It makes possible the folk process which leads
+to things which are beautiful and rich.</p>
+
+<p>Even if we look at named authors only: consider Shakespeare, who
+borrowed stories from other works only a few decades old, and did them
+in different ways, and made important works of literature. If today's
+copyright law had existed then, that would have been forbidden and
+those plays wouldn't have been written.</p>
+
+<p>But eventually I realized that modifying a work of art can be a
+contribution to art, but it's not desperately urgent in most cases.
+If you had to wait ten years for the copyright to expire, you could
+wait that long. Not like the present-day copyright that makes you
+wait maybe 75 years, or 95 years. In Mexico you might have to wait
+almost 200 years in some cases, because copyright in Mexico expires a
+hundred years after the author dies. This is insane, but ten years,
+as I've proposed copyright should last, that people can wait.</p>
+
+<p>So I propose the same partly reduced copyright that covers
+commercial use and modification, but everyone's got to be free to
+non-commercially redistribute exact copies. After ten years it goes
+into the public domain, and people can contribute to art by publishing
+their modified versions.</p>
+
+<p>One other thing: if you're going to take little pieces out of a
+bunch of works and rearrange them into something totally different,
+that should just be legal, because the purpose of copyright is to
+promote art, not to obstruct art. It's stupid to apply copyright to
+using snippets like that—it's self-defeating. It's a kind of
+distortion that you'd only get when the government is under the
+control of the publishers of the existing successful works, and has
+totally lost sight of its intended purpose.</p>
+
+<p>That's what I propose, and in particular, this means that sharing
+copies on the Internet must be legal. Sharing is good. Sharing
+builds the bonds of society. To attack sharing is to attack
+society.</p>
+
+<p>So any time the government proposes some new means to attack people
+who share, to stop them from sharing, we have to recognize that this
+is evil, not just because the means proposed almost invariably offend
+basic ideas of justice (but that's not a coincidence). The reason is
+because the purpose is evil. Sharing is good and the government
+should encourage sharing.</p>
+
+<p>But copyright did after all have a useful purpose. Copyright as a
+means to carry out that purpose has a problem now, because it doesn't
+fit in with the technology we use. It interferes with all the vital
+freedoms for all the readers, listeners, viewers, and whatever, but
+the goal of promoting the arts is still desirable. So in addition to
+the partly reduced copyright system, which would continue to be a
+copyright system, I propose two other methods.</p>
+
+<p><a id="tax-money-for-artists">One [works via]
+taxes</a>—distribute tax money directly to artists. This
+could be a special tax, perhaps on Internet connectivity, or it could
+come from general revenue, because it won't be that much money in
+total, not if it's distributed in an efficient way. To distribute it
+efficiently to promote the arts means not in linear proportion to
+popularity. It should be based on popularity, because we don't want
+bureaucrats to have the discretion to decide which artists to support
+and which to ignore, but based on popularity does not imply linear
+proportion.</p>
+
+<p>What I propose is measure the popularity of the various artists,
+which you could do through polling (samples) in which nobody is
+required to participate, and then take the cube root. The cube root
+looks like this: it means basically that [the payment] tapers off
+after a while.</p>
+
+<p>If superstar A is a thousand times as popular as successful artist
+B, with this system A would get ten times as much money as B, not a
+thousand times.</p>
+
+<p>Linearly would give A a thousand times as much as B, which means
+that if we wanted B to get enough to live on we're going to have to
+make A tremendously rich. This is wasteful use of the tax
+money—it shouldn't be done.</p>
+
+<p>But if we make it taper off, then yes, each superstar will get
+handsomely more than an ordinary successful artist, but the total of
+all the superstars will be a small fraction of the [total] money.
+Most of the money will go to support a large number of fairly
+successful artists, fairly appreciated artists, fairly popular
+artists. Thus the system will use money a lot more efficiently than
+the existing system.</p>
+
+<p>The existing system is regressive. It actually gives far, far more
+per record, for instance, to a superstar than to anybody else. The
+money is extremely badly used. The result is we'd actually be paying
+a lot less this way. I hope that's enough to mollify some of these
+people who have a knee-jerk hostile reaction to taxes—one that I
+don't share, because I believe in a welfare state.</p>
+
+<p>I have another suggestion which is voluntary payments. Suppose
+every player had a button you could push to send a dollar to the
+artist who made the work you're currently playing or the last one you
+played. This money would be delivered anonymously to those artists.
+I think a lot of people would push that button fairly often.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, all of us could afford to push that button once every
+day, and we wouldn't miss that much money. It's not that much money
+for us, I'm pretty sure. Of course, there are poor people who
+couldn't afford to push it ever, and it's OK if they don't. We don't
+need to squeeze money out of poor people to support the artists.
+There are enough people who are not poor to do the job just fine. I'm
+sure you're aware that a lot of people really love certain art and are
+really happy to support the artists.</p>
+
+<p>An idea just came to me. The player could also give you a
+certificate of having supported so-and-so, and it could even count up
+how many times you had done it and give you a certificate that says
+“I sent so much to these artists”. There are various ways
+we could encourage people who want to do it.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, we could have a PR campaign which is friendly and
+kind: “Have you sent a dollar to some artists today? Why not?
+It's only a dollar—you'll never miss it and don't you love what
+they're doing? Push the button!” It will make people feel good,
+and they'll think “Yeah, I love what I just watched. I'll send
+a dollar.”</p>
+
+<p>This is already starting to work to some extent. There's a
+Canadian singer who used to be called Jane Siberry. She put her music
+on her website and invited people to download it and pay whatever
+amount they wished. She reported getting an average of more than a
+dollar per copy, which is interesting because the major record
+companies charge just under a dollar per copy. By letting people
+decide whether and how much to pay, she got more—she got even
+more per visitor who was actually downloading something. But this
+might not even count whether there was an effect of bringing more
+people to come, and [thus] increasing the total number that this
+average was against.</p>
+
+<p>So it can work, but it's a pain in the neck under present
+circumstances. You've got to have a credit card to do it, and that
+means you can't do it anonymously. And you've got to go find where
+you're going to pay, and the payment systems for small amounts,
+they're not very efficient, so the artists are only getting half of
+it. If we set up a good system for this, it would work far, far
+better.</p>
+
+<p>So these are my two suggestions.</p>
+
+<p>And in mecenatglobal.org, you can find another scheme that combines
+aspects of the two, which was invented by Francis Muguet and designed
+to fit in with existing legal systems better to make it easier to
+enact.</p>
+
+<p>Be careful of proposals to “compensate the rights
+holders”, because when they say “compensate”,
+they're trying to presume that if you have appreciated a work, you now
+have a specific debt to somebody, and that you have to
+“compensate” that somebody. When they say “rights
+holders”, it's supposed to make you think it's supporting
+artists while in fact it's going to the publishers—the same
+publishers who basically exploit all the artists (except the few that
+you've all heard of, who are so popular that they have clout).</p>
+
+<p>We don't owe a debt; we have nobody that we have to
+“compensate”. [But] supporting the arts is still a useful
+thing to do. That was the motivation for copyright back when
+copyright fit in with the technology of the day. Today copyright is a
+bad way to do it, but it's still good to do it other ways that respect
+our freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Demand that they change the two evil parts of the New Zealand
Copyright Act.
+They shouldn't replace the three strikes punishment<a <span
class="removed"><del><strong>href="#footnote2">[2]</a>,</strong></del></span>
<span
class="inserted"><ins><em>href="#footnote3">[3]</a>,</em></ins></span>
because sharing is
+good, and they've got to get rid of the censorship for the software to break
+DRM. Beware of ACTA—they're trying to negotiate a treaty between various
+countries, for all of these countries to attack their citizens, and we don't
+know how because they won't tell us.</p></dd>
+
+</dl>
+
+<p><a
href="/philosophy/copyright-versus-community-2000.html">Click here</a>
+for an older version of this talk from 2000.</p>
+
+<h4>Footnotes</h4>
+<ol>
+<li id="footnote1">In 2010, the encryption system for digital video
output was
+definitively cracked.<br /><a
href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369280,00.asp">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369280,00.asp</a></li>
+<li <span
class="removed"><del><strong>id="footnote2">New</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>id="footnote2">2015: I included scientific papers
because I
+thought that publishing modified versions of someone else's paper
+would cause harm; however, publishing physics and math papers under
+the Creative Commons Attribution License
+on <a href="arxiv.org">arxiv.org</a> and many libre journals seems
to
+have no problems. Thus, I subsequently concluded that scientific
+papers ought to be free.</li>
+<li id="footnote3">New</em></ins></span> Zealand had enacted a system of
punishment
+without trial for Internet users accused of copying; then, facing
+popular protest, the government did not implement it, and announced a
+plan to implement a modified unjust punishment system. The point here
+was that they should not proceed to implement a replacement —
+rather, they should have no such system. However, the words I used
+don't say this clearly.
+<br />
+The New Zealand government subsequently implemented the punishment
+scheme more or less as originally planned.</li>
+</ol>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
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+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.</p>
+
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+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
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+ being publicly visible on the web or in a revision control system).
+
+ There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
+ Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
+
+<p>Copyright © 2001, 2007, 2009, 2014, <span
class="removed"><del><strong>2015</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>2015, 2016</em></ins></span> Free Software
Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2016/01/25 11:58:59 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+</pre></body></html>
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