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CVSROOT: /web/www
Module name: www
Changes by: GNUN <gnun> 18/03/23 15:28:49
Modified files:
philosophy : copyright-and-globalization.cs.html
copyright-and-globalization.tr.html
greve-clown.de.html
philosophy/po : greve-clown.de-diff.html
proprietary : malware-apple.it.html proprietary-jails.it.html
proprietary/po : malware-apple.it-diff.html
proprietary-jails.it-diff.html
Added files:
philosophy/po : copyright-and-globalization.cs-diff.html
copyright-and-globalization.tr-diff.html
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http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.cs.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.4&r2=1.5
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.tr.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.12&r2=1.13
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/greve-clown.de.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.50&r2=1.51
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http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.cs-diff.html?cvsroot=www&rev=1.1
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http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.4&r2=1.5
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.5&r2=1.6
Patches:
Index: philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.cs.html
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retrieving revision 1.4
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diff -u -b -r1.4 -r1.5
--- philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.cs.html 1 Feb 2017 17:29:35
-0000 1.4
+++ philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.cs.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:48
-0000 1.5
@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<!--#set var="ENGLISH_PAGE"
value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.en.html" -->
+<!--#set var="PO_FILE"
+ value='<a href="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.cs.po">
+ https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.cs.po</a>'
+ --><!--#set var="ORIGINAL_FILE"
value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html"
+ --><!--#set var="DIFF_FILE"
value="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.cs-diff.html"
+ --><!--#set var="OUTDATED_SINCE" value="2018-01-22" --><!--#set
var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.en.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.cs.html" -->
<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
@@ -9,6 +14,7 @@
<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.cs.html" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/outdated.cs.html" -->
<h2>Autorská práva a globalizace ve vÄku poÄÃtaÄových sÃtÃ</h2>
<p>
@@ -1161,7 +1167,7 @@
<p class="unprintable"><!-- timestamp start -->
Aktualizováno:
-$Date: 2017/02/01 17:29:35 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:48 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
Index: philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.tr.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.tr.html,v
retrieving revision 1.12
retrieving revision 1.13
diff -u -b -r1.12 -r1.13
--- philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.tr.html 20 Feb 2015 17:28:09
-0000 1.12
+++ philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.tr.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:48
-0000 1.13
@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<!--#set var="ENGLISH_PAGE"
value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.en.html" -->
+<!--#set var="PO_FILE"
+ value='<a href="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.tr.po">
+ https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.tr.po</a>'
+ --><!--#set var="ORIGINAL_FILE"
value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html"
+ --><!--#set var="DIFF_FILE"
value="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.tr-diff.html"
+ --><!--#set var="OUTDATED_SINCE" value="2018-01-22" --><!--#set
var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.en.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.tr.html" -->
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@@ -9,6 +14,7 @@
<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.tr.html" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/outdated.tr.html" -->
<h2>Bilgisayar AÄları ÃaÄında Telif Hakları ve KüreselleÅme</h2>
<p>
@@ -1298,7 +1304,7 @@
<p class="unprintable"><!-- timestamp start -->
Son Güncelleme:
-$Date: 2015/02/20 17:28:09 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:48 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
Index: philosophy/greve-clown.de.html
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retrieving revision 1.50
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diff -u -b -r1.50 -r1.51
--- philosophy/greve-clown.de.html 31 Dec 2017 08:24:44 -0000 1.50
+++ philosophy/greve-clown.de.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:48 -0000 1.51
@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<!--#set var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/philosophy/greve-clown.en.html" -->
+<!--#set var="PO_FILE"
+ value='<a href="/philosophy/po/greve-clown.de.po">
+ https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/po/greve-clown.de.po</a>'
+ --><!--#set var="ORIGINAL_FILE" value="/philosophy/greve-clown.html"
+ --><!--#set var="DIFF_FILE" value="/philosophy/po/greve-clown.de-diff.html"
+ --><!--#set var="OUTDATED_SINCE" value="2018-01-22" --><!--#set
var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/philosophy/greve-clown.en.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.de.html" -->
<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
@@ -12,6 +17,7 @@
<!--#set var="DISABLE_TOP_ADDENDUM" value="yes" -->
<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/greve-clown.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.de.html" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/outdated.de.html" -->
<h2>Geschichte und Philosophie des GNU-Projektes</h2>
<p class="byline"><strong>Georg C. F. Greve</strong> <a
@@ -458,7 +464,7 @@
<p class="unprintable"><!-- timestamp start -->
Letzte Ãnderung:
-$Date: 2017/12/31 08:24:44 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:48 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
Index: philosophy/po/greve-clown.de-diff.html
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retrieving revision 1.2
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diff -u -b -r1.2 -r1.3
--- philosophy/po/greve-clown.de-diff.html 2 May 2012 00:45:44 -0000
1.2
+++ philosophy/po/greve-clown.de-diff.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:49 -0000
1.3
@@ -11,57 +11,47 @@
</style></head>
<body><pre>
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
-<title>Speech at the CLOWN - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
(FSF)</title>
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
+<title>History and Philosophy of the GNU Project
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
<!-- top-addendum is disabled because the original text was written in
German
rather than in English, which is clearly stated in the article itself
-->
<!--#set var="DISABLE_TOP_ADDENDUM" value="yes" -->
-<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/greve-clown.translist" -->
-<h2>Speech by Georg C. F. Greve in Paderborn (Germany), 5. 12. 98 at the
CLOWN.</h2>
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>History and Philosophy of the GNU Project</h2>
-<!-- Changed by: Georg C. F. Greve, 16-Dec-1998 -->
+<p class="byline"><strong>Georg C. F. Greve</strong>
+<a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a></p>
-<p style="text-align:center">
-<small>
- Copyright © 1998 Georg C. F. Greve.<br />
- Permission statement <a href="#Permission">below</a><br />
-<br />
-Dies ist eine Übersetzung der Rede, das<br />
-<a href="/philosophy/greve-clown.de.html">Deutsche
Original</a><br />
-ist ebenfalls verfügbar und wird empfohlen.<br />
-</small>
-</p>
-<h3><a href="http://gnu.org">Georg C. F. Greve</a>
-<a href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a><br
/>
- History and Philosophy of the<br />
- GNU Project<br />
-</h3>
-<p style="text-align:center">
-<em>This speech was given at the CLOWN (Cluster of Working Nodes),
<br />
-a 512-node Cluster project of Debian GNU/Linux machines in the<br />
-University of Paderborn, Germany.<br />
-<br />
- 5. December 1998
-</em>
-</p>
+<p><em>Translation of a speech that was given in German
+at the CLOWN (Cluster of Working Nodes—
+a 512-node cluster project of Debian GNU/Linux machines) in the
+University of Paderborn, Germany, on December 5th, 1998.</em></p>
+
+<p><em>The
+<a href="/philosophy/greve-clown.de.html">German original</a>
+is also available. Reading the original is recommended.</em></p>
+
+<hr class="thin" />
+<div class="article">
+<blockquote>
<p>
-<strong>
-[Note: In translating this speech I have tried to stay as close as
+Author's note: In translating this speech, I have tried to stay as close as
possible to the original speech that I have given in German. Breaking
up the German structures and turning them into reasonable English has
been quite some work, and I would like to thank my roommate Doug
-Chapin, a good friend and native American who helped me with some
+Chapin, a good friend and native American, who helped me with some
phrases and words. The translation will never hold the same emotions
-and implications but I think we got very close…]
-</strong>
+and implications, but I think we got very close…
</p>
-
+</blockquote>
<p>
-During the preparation of this speech I have read several documents
-and spoken to a lot of people. In doing so I realized that even people
-whose jobs have been created more or less directly by the GNU project
-did not know it's true meaning. In the overall rush we are
+During the preparation of this speech, I have read several documents
+and spoken to a lot of people. In doing so, I realized that even people
+whose jobs have been created more or less directly by the GNU Project
+did not know its true meaning. In the overall rush we are
experiencing at the moment, it seems that a basic awareness of the
roots has been lost. Tonight I hope I'll be able to uncover some of
those roots again.</p>
@@ -70,53 +60,53 @@
The origin lies somewhere in the transition from the 70's to the 80's,
when the software industry became what we accept so willingly
today. In the initial competition, some firms took to hording code as
-a survival strategy. While attempting to support this behaviour's
-legality, they created phrases like “Software Piracy”
+a survival strategy. While attempting to support this behavior's
+legality, they created phrases like “software piracy”
because they suggest that something is lost when software is
-copied. People were forced to yield to licenses that bound them to
+copied. People were forced to yield to licenses that bound them, to
make sure that no one else had access to these programs.</p>
<p>
When a friend asked you whether he could copy a program from you, you
immediately faced a dilemma. There are no disadvantages for you in
copying the program, and it doesn't deteriorate during the copying
-process… it would be more restrictive if he asked you to pass
+process. It would be more restrictive if he asked you to pass
the salt, since you can't both use it at the same time. The politics
-of the companies forced you to <b>choose</b> between legality and
+of the companies forced you to <em>choose</em> between legality and
friendship.</p>
<p>
-A lot of people were upset about this and most of them copied the
+A lot of people were upset about this, and most of them copied the
program anyway—very often using lame excuses that were mostly
aimed at calming their own troubled consciousness (induced by the
firms' choice of words). The absolute hit was probably “If I
-would use it more often I would pay it” … a phrase that
+would use it more often I would pay it,” a phrase that
probably everyone caught himself using if he ever had to rely on
proprietary software.</p>
<p>
One man found this situation unbearable. Used to the early days, the
-(as he says himself) “paradise,”, where freedom and
+(as he says himself) “paradise,” where freedom and
responsible use of the possibilities determined the situation, Richard
Stallman envisioned the concept of a completely free system. Very
quickly it became clear that this system would be Unix-compatible and
it was baptized—recursive acronyms were very popular back
-then—GNU, which means “GNU's Not Unix.”<br />
+then—GNU, which means “GNU's Not Unix.”
Stallman gathered some people who shared his fascination with a free
-system and founded the GNU Free Software Foundation, of which he is
+system, and founded the GNU Free Software Foundation, of which he is
still the president today.</p>
<p>
Since first of all a Unix system requires a large set of components,
-it became clear that these were the the first step towards a
+it became clear that these were the <span
class="removed"><del><strong>the</strong></del></span> first step towards a
completely free system. The GNU FSF worked on implementing them, and
by the beginning of the 90's the GNU system was complete (with the
-exception of the kernel).<br />
-The GNU kernel—project name “HURD”—has an
+exception of the kernel).
+The GNU kernel—project name “Hurd”—has an
extremely ambitious layout that proved to be very slow and clumsy in
-development. Fortunately at this point Linus Torvalds's first Linux
+development. Fortunately, at this point Linus Torvalds' first Linux
kernel was in the test phase, and when he saw the work already done by
-the GNU FSF he put his kernel under the GNU GPL and made it the kernel
+the GNU FSF, he put his kernel under the GNU GPL and made it the kernel
of the GNU system.</p>
<p>
@@ -125,75 +115,75 @@
<p>
A little earlier I said that Richard Stallman envisioned the concept
-of Free Software—what I didn't tell you about was the Philosophy
+of free software. What I didn't tell you about was the philosophy
that stands behind it.</p>
<p>
-The “Free” in Free Software does not refer to the price
-but to “Freedom”. This is no unproblematic topic and
+The word “free” in “free software” does not refer to
price,
+but to freedom. This is no unproblematic topic, and
recently some of the visionaries of the movement (like Eric Raymond)
-have begun to talk about “Open Source” because
-“Freedom” has an uneasy sound to it for most
-people. Freedom rings of “making world a better place” and
+have begun to talk about “open source” because
+“freedom” has an uneasy sound to it for most
+people. Freedom rings of “making world a better place,” and
insecurity. It rings of change, and change frightens many people. To
numb this fear, other licenses for free software have been invented in
order to make the concept digestible for more people and to avoid
scaring the industry.</p>
<p>
-That is the reason why the GNU Project dislikes the term “Open
-Source.” We think it makes more sense to take away people's
+That is the reason why the GNU Project dislikes the term “open
+source.” We think it makes more sense to take away people's
fears of the idea instead of blurring the concept. Only if users and
firms are aware of the importance of freedom can we avoid falling back
into old patterns.</p>
<p>
-The philosophy of the GNU Project says that <b>everyone</b> shall
have
+The philosophy of the GNU Project says that <em>everyone</em>
shall have
the granted right to use a program, to copy it, and to change it to
-make it fit his or her needs. The <b>only</b> restriction the GNU
-General Public License makes, is that <b>NO ONE</b> has the right
to
+make it fit his or her needs. The <em>only</em> restriction the GNU
+General Public License makes, is that <em>NO ONE</em> has the
right to
take away this freedom from anyone else.</p>
<p>
When an author puts his code under the GNU GPL, the freedom is an
-inseperable part of his program. Of course, this is a thorn in the
-side of a lot of businesses eyes because it stops them from taking the
+inseparable part of his program. Of course, this is a thorn in the
+side of a lot of business'es eyes because it stops them from taking the
code, modifying it, and then selling it as a proprietary program. As
-long as there are people who try to live the dream of instant wealth
+long as there are people who try to live the dream of instant wealth,
it is this freedom that stops firms like Microsoft from corrupting the
future development of our system.</p>
<p>
-The most used argument against the GNU Philosophy is probably that
-software is the “intellectual property” of the programmer
+The most used argument against the GNU philosophy is probably that
+software is the “intellectual property” of the programmer,
and it is only right if he can decide the price for which the program
-is distributed. This argument is easy to understand for everyone since
+is distributed. This argument is easy to understand for everyone, since
it is exactly what we have been told to believe during the last 20
years.</p>
<p>
Reality is a little different, though. Private programmers who can
live off selling self-written software are the exception. Usually they
-give their rights to the firm they work at and this firm earns the
+give their rights to the firm they work at, and this firm earns the
money by restricting access to that program. Effectively, the
-firm has the rights for that program and decides it's price
-—not the programmer.</p>
+firm has the rights for that program and decides it's price,
+not the programmer.</p>
<p>
A lawyer who invents an especially brilliant strategy has no right to
-claim it as his “intellectual property;” the method is
+claim it as his “intellectual property.” The method is
freely available to anyone. Why do we so willingly accept the concept
that every line of code—no matter how poorly written or
-uninspired it may be—is so unique and incredibly personal ? The
+uninspired it may be—is so unique and incredibly personal? The
zeal for control has taken over in a way that even human genes are
-subject to patents…although usually not by the people who
-“use” them. Should really <b>everything</b> be allowed
to
+subject to patents… although usually not by the people who
+“use” them. Should really <em>everything</em> be
allowed to
be patented and licensed?</p>
<p>
This is the question that is one of the core thoughts of the GNU
Project. Let us just imagine there would be no such concept as
-patented software or patenting software would be unusual because
+patented software, or patenting software would be unusual because
everyone published his programs under the GNU GPL.</p>
<p>
@@ -201,24 +191,24 @@
again can be accessed easily. No one has to waste his time ever again
to work on the same problem dozens of times—programmers could
search for new ways and approach new problems. If a group of users
-needs a certain feature in a program they just hire a programmer and
-let him implement it. Freed of the limitations of licenses and money
+needs a certain feature in a program, they just hire a programmer and
+let him implement it. Freed of the limitations of licenses and money,
only two criteria would determine the development of programs: demand
and quality.</p>
<p>
Speaking of quality—nowadays more and more firms realize that
-allowing the users to access the sourcecode gives them a huge
+allowing the users to access the source code gives them a huge
advantage. To say it in a simple way: more eyes can see
more. Solutions that are unimaginable for one person are painfully
-obvious for someone else. Due to this advantage Free Software is very
+obvious for someone else. Due to this advantage, free software is very
often so much better than its proprietary counterpart. The train of
thought that now appears to be establishing itself within some firms
is to give users access to the source code but not grant any other
-rights. Improvements are obediently being sent back to the firm that
-advances it's product with them. Basically as a gigantic gratis
+rights. Improvements are obediently being sent back to the firm, which
+advances its product with them. Basically a gigantic gratis
development division. If we do not pay attention to these
-things <b>now</b> it might happen that in 5 years we will have to
pay
+things <em>now</em>, it might happen that in 5 years we will have
to pay
for a version that has been produced by applying our own patch.</p>
<p>
@@ -226,7 +216,7 @@
the seed of doom inside itself (please forgive me for the pathos
here). As long as we accept this concept, we accept the danger that
another firm will attempt to take control. Microsoft is
-<em>not</em> evil incarnate as some people seem to percieve.
Microsoft
+<em>not</em> evil incarnated, as some people seem to perceive.
Microsoft
is <em>the natural consequence</em> of the widely accepted
system.</p>
<p>
@@ -234,14 +224,14 @@
spread, but completely irrational. Better programs lead to more users
that have other needs and new ideas, creating more demand. The
structure will change to fit the new situation but work will increase
-rather than decrease—and it will become less routine and hence
+rather than decrease, and it will become less routine, hence
more interesting.</p>
<p>
The last common fear that remains is the fear over lack of
recognition. Well, the respect held for the frontmen of the different
philosophies speaks for itself. I on my part would prefer to be as
-respected as Linus Thorvalds or Richard Stallman than having the
+respected as Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman than to have the
reputation of Bill Gates.</p>
<p>
@@ -251,65 +241,65 @@
<p>
And to settle one point very clearly: no, the GNU Project is not
-agains capitalism or firms in general and it is not against software
+against capitalism or firms in general, and it is not against software
firms in particular. We do not want to diminish the potential for
-profit—quite to the contrary. Every firm is being told to make
-as much money as they can off the sale of software, the documentation
-and the service—as long as they stick to the basic principles of
-Free Software.<br />
-The more these firms earn the more they can invest into the
+profit, quite the contrary. Every firm is being told to make
+as much money as they can off the sale of software, documentation
+and service—as long as they stick to the basic principles of
+Free Software.
+The more these firms earn, the more they can invest into the
development of new software. We do not want to destroy the market, we
just want to fit it to the times.</p>
<p>
-One short note about the basic principles: of course Free Software
+One short note about the basic principles: of course free software
also requires free documentation. It doesn't make any sense to free
the successor of the book—software—while accepting control
of the direct digital equivalent. Free documentation is as important
-as Free Software itself.</p>
+as free software itself.</p>
<p>
Maybe someone discarded my statement about seeking to “fit the
-market to the times” as a rethorical stament—but it is an
-important point in the GNU Philosophy:<br />
+market to the times” as a rhetorical statement, but it is an
+important point in the GNU Philosophy:
the time when software was only relevant for a few freaks and some
-firms is long gone. Nowadays software is the pathway to information. A
-system that blocks the pathways to information and in doing so the
-access to the information itself <b>must</b> be
reconsidered.</p>
+firms is long gone. Nowadays, software is the pathway to information. A
+system that blocks the pathways to information, and in doing so the
+access to information itself, <em>must</em> be
reconsidered.</p>
<p>
When Eric Raymond published the so called “Halloween
-Document” it triggered emotions from euphoria to paranoia. For
+Document,” it triggered emotions from euphoria to paranoia. For
those of you who did not read it: it is a Microsoft internal study in
-which the strengths and weaknesses of Free Software in general and
-Linux especially are analyzed. The author basically concluded that
+which the strengths and weaknesses of free software in general, and
+Linux in particular, are analyzed. The author basically concluded that
Microsoft has two possibilities to counter the threat.</p>
<p>
-The first is the creation of new or modification of old protocols
+The first is the creation of new or modification of old protocols,
documenting them only poorly or not at all, so that only Windows-based
machines will have a working implementation.</p>
<p>
One example of this tactic is the protocol used by HP
-“Cxi” printers which have entered the market as extremely
+“Cxi” printers, which have entered the market as extremely
cheap “Windows-Printers.” The specifications have only
been given to Microsoft, so these printers are not usable by any other
system.</p>
<p>
I have been told by a “professionally trained” computer
-salesperson that the “for Windows” sticker means that the
-printer needs a very special kind of RAM that only Windows machines
-have—that's why it cannot be used under Linux. Something like
+salesperson that the “for Windows” sticker means the
+printer needs a very special kind of RAM, which only Windows machines
+have; this is why it cannot be used under Linux. Something like
this confuses the typical user, which brings me directly to the second
described tactic.</p>
<p>
-These tactics are usually gathered under the synonym “FUD”
-(Fear Uncertainty Doubt) and were used by IBM long before Microsoft
-unconvered them. The idea is clear: If you make someone uncertain
-enough, he or she will not dare to make <b>any</b> decission,
+These tactics are usually gathered under the acronym “FUD”
+(Fear Uncertainty Doubt), and were used by IBM long before Microsoft
+uncovered them. The idea is clear: if you make someone uncertain
+enough, he or she will not dare make <em>any</em> decision,
effectively remaining in his or her current position. That is the
thought.</p>
@@ -319,68 +309,68 @@
become split.</p>
<p>
-The most recogniziable split in the recent history has been the
-already noted distinction between “Open Source” and
-“Free Software.” Telling both concepts apart is not an
-easy task even for most insiders and it is only understandable if
-viewed in a historical context. Since this is a central point I'd like
+The most recognizable split in the recent history has been the
+already noted distinction between “open source” and
+“free software.” Telling both concepts apart is not an
+easy task, even for most insiders, and it is only understandable if
+viewed in a historical context. Since this is a central point, I'd like
to say a few words about it.</p>
<p>
-With the completion of the GNU System with the Linux Kernel there was
+With the completion of the GNU system with the Linux kernel, there was
suddenly a complete, powerful, free system available. This inevitably
had to raise the public's attention sooner or later.</p>
<p>
-When this attention came a lot of firms were disconcerted by the word
-“Free.” The first association was “no money”
-which immediatly meant “no profit” for them. When people
-then tried to tell them the “Free” truly stands for
-“Freedom” they were completely shaken.</p>
-
-<p>
-Infected by this insecurity and doubt the idea arose to avoid words
-like “Free” and “Freedom” at all costs. The
-term “Open Source” was born.</p>
-
-<p>
-Admittedly it is easier to sell the idea is you use the term
-“Open Source” instead of “Free
-Software.”<br />
-But it has the consequence that the “newbies” have no
-knowledge or understanding of the original idea. It splits the
-movement and leads to incredibly unproductive trench wars that waste a
+When this attention came, a lot of firms were disconcerted by the word
+“free.” The first association was “no money,”
+which immediately meant “no profit” for them. When people
+then tried to tell them that “free” truly stands for
+“freedom,” they were completely shaken.</p>
+
+<p>
+Infected by this insecurity and doubt, the idea arose to avoid words
+like “free” and “freedom” at all costs. The
+term “open source” was born.</p>
+
+<p>
+Admittedly it is easier to sell the idea if you use the term
+“open source” instead of “free
+software.”
+But the consequence is that the “newbies” have no
+knowledge or understanding of the original idea. This splits the
+movement, and leads to incredibly unproductive trench wars, which waste a
huge amount of creative energy.</p>
<p>
A larger interested audience does not mean we should talk less about
-the underlying philosophy. Quite to the contrary: the more people and
+the underlying philosophy. Quite the contrary: the more people and
firms do not understand that this freedom is also in their interest,
-the more we need to talk about it. The Freedom of software offers a
+the more we need to talk about it. The freedom of software offers a
huge potential for all of us—firms and users.</p>
<p>
The plan is not to remove capitalism or destroy firms. We want to
change the understanding of software for the benefit of all
-participants to fit the needs of the 21 century. This is the core of
+participants, to fit the needs of the 21th century. This is the core of
the GNU Project.</p>
<p>
-Each of us can do his share - be it in form of a program,
+Each of us can do his share—be it in form of a program or
documentation, or just by spreading the word that there is another way
of handling things.</p>
<p>
-It is crucial to explain to the firms that Free Software is <b>no
-threat</b>, but an opportunity. Of course this doesn't happen
-overnight but when all participants realize the possibilities and
-perspectives, all of us will win. So if you are working in the
+It is crucial to explain to the firms that free software is <em>not a
+threat</em>, but an opportunity. Of course this doesn't happen
+overnight, but when all participants realize the possibilities and
+perspectives, all of us will win. So, if you are working in the
software business, make yourself at home with the topic, talk about it
with friends and colleagues. And please refrain from trying to
“missionize” them—I know most of us have this
-tendency - the arguments speak for themselves. Give them the time and
-the peace to think it over and to befriend themselves with the
-concept. Show them that the concept of Freedom is nothing to be
+tendency—the arguments speak for themselves. Give them the time and
+peace to think it over, and to befriend themselves with the
+concept. Show them that the concept of freedom is nothing to be
feared.</p>
<p>
@@ -388,70 +378,72 @@
consideration of some new ideas. If you have questions or would like
to discuss some things, I'll be here all night and all questions are
welcome. I wish everyone a very interesting night. Thank you.</p>
-
</div>
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
-<p>
-Please send FSF & GNU inquiries to
-<a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><em>address@hidden</em></a>.
+<p>Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.
There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
-the FSF.</p>
-<p>
-Please send comments on this speech to Georg Greve
-<a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><em>address@hidden</em></a></p>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.</p>
-<p>
-Please see the
-<a href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
-README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting
-translations of this article.
-</p>
+<p>Please send comments on this speech to Georg Greve
+<a
href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.</p>
-<p>
-Copyright © 1998 Georg C. F. Greve
-<br />
-<a id="Permission">Permission</a> is granted to make and distribute
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:address@hidden">
+ <address@hidden></a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
+ our web pages, see <a
+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a>. -->
+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
+ Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
+ years, as long as each year in the range is in fact a copyrightable
+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ 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 © 1998 Georg C. F. Greve</p>
+
+<p id="Permission">Permission is granted to make and distribute
verbatim copies of this transcript as long as the copyright and this
permission notice appear.</p>
-<p>
-Updated:
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
<!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2012/05/02 00:45:44 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
</div>
-
-<!-- <div id="translations"> -->
-<!-- <h4>Translations of this page</h4> -->
-<!-- -->
-<!-- Please keep this list alphabetical by language code. -->
-<!-- Comment what the language is for each type, i.e. de is German. -->
-<!-- Write the language name in its own language (Deutsch) in the text.
-->
-<!-- If you add a new language here, please -->
-<!-- advise address@hidden and add it to -->
-<!-- - /home/www/html/server/standards/README.translations.html -->
-<!-- - one of the lists under the section "Translations Underway" -->
-<!-- - if there is a translation team, you also have to add an alias -->
-<!-- to mail.gnu.org:/com/mailer/aliases -->
-<!-- Please also check you have the language code right; see: -->
-<!-- http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php -->
-<!-- If the 2-letter ISO 639-1 code is not available, -->
-<!-- use the 3-letter ISO 639-2. -->
-<!-- Please use W3C normative character entities. -->
-<!-- -->
-<!-- <ul class="translations-list"> -->
-<!-- German -->
-<!-- <li><a
href="/philosophy/greve-clown.de.html">Deutsch</a> [de]</li>
-->
-<!-- English -->
-<!-- <li><a
href="/philosophy/greve-clown.html">English</a> [en]</li>
-->
-<!-- French -->
-<!-- <li><a
href="/philosophy/greve-clown.fr.html">Français</a> [fr]</li>
-->
-<!-- </ul> -->
-<!-- </div> -->
</div>
</body>
</html>
Index: proprietary/malware-apple.it.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/proprietary/malware-apple.it.html,v
retrieving revision 1.28
retrieving revision 1.29
diff -u -b -r1.28 -r1.29
--- proprietary/malware-apple.it.html 31 Dec 2017 12:29:58 -0000 1.28
+++ proprietary/malware-apple.it.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:49 -0000 1.29
@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<!--#set var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html" -->
+<!--#set var="PO_FILE"
+ value='<a href="/proprietary/po/malware-apple.it.po">
+ https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/po/malware-apple.it.po</a>'
+ --><!--#set var="ORIGINAL_FILE" value="/proprietary/malware-apple.html"
+ --><!--#set var="DIFF_FILE" value="/proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html"
+ --><!--#set var="OUTDATED_SINCE" value="2018-01-22" --><!--#set
var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.it.html" -->
<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
@@ -9,6 +14,7 @@
<!--#include virtual="/proprietary/po/malware-apple.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.it.html" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/outdated.it.html" -->
<h2>I sistemi operativi di Apple sono malware</h2>
<p><a href="/proprietary/proprietary.html">Altri esempi di malware
@@ -559,7 +565,7 @@
<p class="unprintable"><!-- timestamp start -->
Ultimo aggiornamento:
-$Date: 2017/12/31 12:29:58 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
Index: proprietary/proprietary-jails.it.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/proprietary/proprietary-jails.it.html,v
retrieving revision 1.14
retrieving revision 1.15
diff -u -b -r1.14 -r1.15
--- proprietary/proprietary-jails.it.html 31 Dec 2017 12:29:58 -0000
1.14
+++ proprietary/proprietary-jails.it.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:49 -0000
1.15
@@ -1,4 +1,9 @@
-<!--#set var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/proprietary/proprietary-jails.en.html" -->
+<!--#set var="PO_FILE"
+ value='<a href="/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it.po">
+ https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it.po</a>'
+ --><!--#set var="ORIGINAL_FILE" value="/proprietary/proprietary-jails.html"
+ --><!--#set var="DIFF_FILE"
value="/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html"
+ --><!--#set var="OUTDATED_SINCE" value="2018-01-22" --><!--#set
var="ENGLISH_PAGE" value="/proprietary/proprietary-jails.en.html" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.it.html" -->
<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
@@ -8,6 +13,7 @@
<!--#include virtual="/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.it.html" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/outdated.it.html" -->
<h2>Prigioni proprietarie</h2>
<p><a href="/proprietary/proprietary.html">Altri esempi di malware
@@ -287,7 +293,7 @@
<p class="unprintable"><!-- timestamp start -->
Ultimo aggiornamento:
-$Date: 2017/12/31 12:29:58 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
Index: proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html,v
retrieving revision 1.4
retrieving revision 1.5
diff -u -b -r1.4 -r1.5
--- proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html 28 Nov 2017 16:00:10 -0000
1.4
+++ proprietary/po/malware-apple.it-diff.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:49 -0000
1.5
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
</style></head>
<body><pre>
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
-<!-- Parent-Version: <span
class="removed"><del><strong>1.83</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>1.84</em></ins></span> -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
<title>Apple's Operating Systems are Malware
- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
<!--#include virtual="/proprietary/po/malware-apple.translist" -->
@@ -51,7 +51,8 @@
<li><a href="#sabotage">Sabotage</a></li>
<li><a href="#interference">Interference</a></li>
<li><a href="#surveillance">Surveillance</a></li>
-<li><a href="#drm">Digital restrictions
+<li><a <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>href="#incompatibility">Incompatibility</a></li>
+<li><a</em></ins></span> href="#drm">Digital restrictions
management</a> or “DRM” means functionalities designed
to restrict what users can do with the data in their computers.</li>
<li><a href="#jails">Jails</a>—systems
@@ -89,20 +90,21 @@
<h3 id="censorship">Apple Censorship</h3>
<ul>
-<span class="inserted"><ins><em><li>
+<li>
<p>Apple <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/technology/china-apple-censorhip.html">
deleted several VPNs from its app store for China</a>,
thus using its own censorship power to strengthen that of the Chinese
-government.
+<span class="removed"><del><strong>government.
</p>
<p>If Apple had not designed the iMonsters to let Apple censor
applications,
<a href="/proprietary/proprietary-jails.html">
Apple would not have had the power to stop users from installing
-VPNs</a>.</p>
-</li></em></ins></span>
+VPNs</a>.</p></strong></del></span>
+<span class="inserted"><ins><em>government.</p></em></ins></span>
+</li>
<li><p>
Apple used its censorship system to enforce Russian
@@ -205,13 +207,25 @@
<h3 id="sabotage">Apple Sabotage</h3>
-<p>The wrongs in this section are not precisely malware, since they do
-not involve making the program that runs in a way that hurts the user.
-But they are a lot like malware, since they are technical Apple
-actions that harm to the users of specific Apple software.</p>
+<span class="removed"><del><strong><p>The wrongs in this
section</strong></del></span>
+
+<span class="inserted"><ins><em><p>These</em></ins></span> are <span
class="removed"><del><strong>not precisely malware, since they do
+not involve making the program that runs</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>situations</em></ins></span> in <span
class="removed"><del><strong>a way that hurts the user.
+But they are a lot like malware, since they are
technical</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>which</em></ins></span> Apple
+<span class="removed"><del><strong>actions</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>employs its power over users
+to directly intervene in ways</em></ins></span> that harm <span
class="removed"><del><strong>to</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>them or block their work.</p>
<ul>
<li>
+ <p>MacOS High Sierra forcibly reformats SSD boot drives, and <a
+
href="https://www.macworld.com/article/3230498/storage/apple-file-system-apfs-faq.html">
+ changes</em></ins></span> the <span
class="removed"><del><strong>users</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>file system from HFS+ to APFS</a>, which cannot
be accessed
+ from GNU/Linux, Windows or even older versions</em></ins></span> of <span
class="removed"><del><strong>specific Apple software.</p>
+
+<ul></strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>MacOS.</p>
+ </li></em></ins></span>
+
+ <li>
<p>Apple will stop <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/iphone-ipad-apps-games-apple-5-5c-obsolete">fixing
bugs for older
model iThings</a>.</p>
@@ -378,13 +392,56 @@
</li>
</ul>
-<h3 id="drm">Apple DRM</h3>
+
+<h3 <span class="inserted"><ins><em>id="incompatibility">Apple
Incompatibility</h3>
+
+<p>In this section, we list characteristics of Apple programs that block
or
+hinder users from switching to any alternative program—and, in
+particular, from switching to free software which can liberate the device
+the software runs on.</p>
+
<ul>
- <span class="inserted"><ins><em><li><p>The DMCA and the EU
Copyright Directive make it <a
+<li>
+<p>Apple devices lock users in <a
+href="https://gizmodo.com/homepod-is-the-ultimate-apple-product-in-a-bad-way-1822883347">
+solely to Apple services</a> by being designed to be incompatible with
all
+other options, ethical or unethical.</p>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<p>iWork (office software that runs on MacOS, iOS and iCloud) uses secret
+formats and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWork">provides no
means
+of converting them to or from Open Document Formats</a>. iWork formats
+have changed several times since they were first introduced. This may have
+had the effect of thwarting <a
+href="https://github.com/obriensp/iWorkFileFormat">reverse engineering
+efforts</a>, thus preventing free software from fully supporting
them.</p>
+
+<p>iWork formats are considered <a
+href="https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/download/attachments/204385883/Format%20profile%20-%20Apple%20iWork%20Pages%20v04.docx?version=1&modificationDate=1459873751000&api=v2">
+unfit for document preservation</a>.</p>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<p>In MacOS and iOS, the procedure for <a
+href="https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/export-photos-videos-and-slideshows-pht6e157c5f/mac">
+converting images from the Photos format</a> to a free format is so
tedious
+and time-consuming that users just give up if they have a lot of
them.</p>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+<h3</em></ins></span> id="drm">Apple DRM</h3>
+<ul>
+ <span class="inserted"><ins><em><li><p>iTunes videos have DRM,
which allows Apple to <a
+ href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay">dictate where its customers
can
+ watch the videos they purchased</a>.</p>
+ </li></em></ins></span>
+
+ <li><p>The DMCA and the EU Copyright Directive make it <a
href="https://boingboing.net/2017/11/25/la-la-la-cant-hear-you.html">
illegal to study how iOS cr...apps spy on users</a>, because this
would require circumventing the iOS DRM.</p>
- </li></em></ins></span>
+ </li>
<li><p><a
href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/switzerland-wants-a-single-universal-phone-charger-by-2017">
@@ -424,7 +481,7 @@
code signing</a> that the iThings use to jail the user.</p>
<p>Curiously, Apple is beginning to allow limited passage through the
- walls of the the iThing jail: users can now install apps built from
+ walls of the <span class="removed"><del><strong>the</strong></del></span>
iThing jail: users can now install apps built from
source code, provided the source code is written in Swift. Users
cannot do this freely because they are required to identify themselves.
<a href="https://developer.apple.com/xcode/">Here are
details.</a></p>
@@ -513,7 +570,7 @@
There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
-<p>Copyright © 2015, 2016, 2017 Free Software Foundation,
Inc.</p>
+<p>Copyright © 2015, 2016, <span
class="removed"><del><strong>2017</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>2017, 2018</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
@@ -523,7 +580,7 @@
<p class="unprintable">Updated:
<!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2017/11/28 16:00:10 $
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
<!-- timestamp end -->
</p>
</div>
Index: proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html,v
retrieving revision 1.5
retrieving revision 1.6
diff -u -b -r1.5 -r1.6
--- proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html 30 Dec 2017 13:29:19
-0000 1.5
+++ proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.it-diff.html 23 Mar 2018 19:28:49
-0000 1.6
@@ -11,13 +11,13 @@
</style></head>
<body><pre>
<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
-<!-- Parent-Version: <span
class="removed"><del><strong>1.79</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>1.84</em></ins></span> -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
<title>Proprietary Jails - GNU Project - Free Software
Foundation</title>
<!--#include virtual="/proprietary/po/proprietary-jails.translist" -->
<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
<h2>Proprietary Jails</h2>
-<p><a <span
class="removed"><del><strong>href="/philosophy/proprietary.html">Other</strong></del></span>
<span
class="inserted"><ins><em>href="/proprietary/proprietary.html">Other</em></ins></span>
examples of proprietary malware</a></p>
+<p><a href="/proprietary/proprietary.html">Other examples of
proprietary malware</a></p>
<p>Nonfree (proprietary) software is very often malware (designed to
mistreat the user). Nonfree software is controlled by its developers,
@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
<ul>
<li>
-<span class="inserted"><ins><em><p>Apple <a
+<p>Apple <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/technology/china-apple-censorhip.html">
deleted several VPNs from its app store for China</a>,
thus using its own censorship power to strengthen that of the Chinese
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@
whatever kind of apps.</p>
</li>
- <li></em></ins></span>
+ <li>
<p>Windows 10 S ought to be called Windows 10 J, for
“Jail”:
<a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/03/windows-10-s-microsoft-faster-pc-comparison">only
programs from the Windows Store can be
downloaded and executed</a>.</p>
@@ -164,7 +164,7 @@
signing</a> that the iThings use to lock up the user.</p>
<p>Curiously, Apple is beginning to allow limited passage through the
-walls of the the iThing jail: users can now install apps built from
+walls of the <span class="removed"><del><strong>the</strong></del></span>
iThing jail: users can now install apps built from
source code, provided the source code is written in Swift. Users
cannot do this freely because they are required to identify themselves.
<a href="https://developer.apple.com/xcode/">Here are
details.</a></p>
@@ -257,7 +257,7 @@
There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
-<p>Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 Free Software Foundation,
Inc.</p>
+<p>Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2016, <span
class="removed"><del><strong>2017</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>2017, 2018</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
@@ -267,7 +267,7 @@
<p class="unprintable">Updated:
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+<title>Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks -
+GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.translist"
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+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer
Networks</h2>
+
+<p>
+<i>The following is an edited transcript from a speech given
+at <abbr title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr>
in
+the Communications Forum on Thursday, April 19, 2001 from 5:00pm -
+7:00pm</i></p>
+
+<p>
+<b>DAVID THORBURN, moderator</b>: Our speaker today, Richard
Stallman,
+is a legendary figure in the computing world, and my experience in
+trying to find a respondent to share the podium with him was
+instructive. One distinguished <abbr>MIT</abbr> professor told me
+that Stallman needs to be understood as a charismatic figure in a
+biblical parable — a kind of Old Testament anecdote-lesson.
+“Imagine,” he said, “a Moses or a Jeremiah —
+better a Jeremiah.” And I said, “Well, that's very
+admirable.”</p>
+<p>
+That sounds wonderful. It confirms my sense of the kind of
+contribution he has made to the world. Then why are you reluctant to
+share the podium with him?” His answer: “Like Jeremiah or
+Moses, he would simply overwhelm me. I won't appear on the same panel
+him, but if you asked me to name five people alive in the world who
+have truly helped us all, Richard Stallman would be one of
+them.”</p>
+<p>
+<b>RICHARD STALLMAN</b>: I should [begin by explaining why I have
+refused to allow this Forum to be web cast], in case it wasn't clear
+fully what the issue is: The software they use for web broadcasting
+requires the user to download certain software in order to receive the
+broadcast. That software is not free software. It's available at zero
+price but only as an executable, which is a mysterious bunch of
numbers.</p>
+<p>
+What it does is secret. You can't study it; you can't change it; and
+you certainly can't publish it in your own modified version. And
+those are among the freedoms that are essential in the definition of
+“free software.”</p>
+<p>
+So if I am to be an honest advocate for free software, I can hardly go
+around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree
+software. I'd be undermining my own cause. And if I don't show that
+I take my principles seriously, I can't expect anybody else to take
+them seriously.</p>
+<p>
+However, this speech is not about free software. After I'd been
+working on the free software movement for several years and people
+started using some of the pieces of the GNU operating system, I began
+getting invited to give speeches [at which] … people started
+asking me: “Well, how do the ideas about freedom for software
+users generalize to other kinds of things?”</p>
+<p>
+And, of course, people asked silly questions like, “Well, should
+hardware be free?” “Should this microphone be
+free?”</p>
+<p>
+Well, what does that mean? Should you be free to copy it and change
+it? Well, as for changing it, if you buy the microphone, nobody is
+going to stop you from changing it. And as for copying it, nobody has
+a microphone copier. Outside of “Star Trek,” those things
+don't exist. Maybe some day there'll be nanotechnological analyzers
+and assemblers, and it really will be possible to copy a physical
+object, and then these issues of whether you're free to do that will
+start being really important. We'll see agribusiness companies trying
+to stop people from copying food, and that will become a major
+political issue, if that technological capability will ever exist. I
+don't know if it will; it's just speculation at this point.</p>
+<p>
+But for other kinds of information, you can raise the issue because
+any kind of information that can be stored on a computer, conceivably,
+can be copied and modified. So the ethical issues of free software,
+the issues of a user's right to copy and modify software, are the same
+as such questions for other kinds of published information. Now I'm
+not talking about private information, say, personal information,
+which is never meant to be available to the public at all. I'm
+talking about the rights you should have if you get copies of
+published things where there's no attempt to keep them secret.</p>
+<p>
+In order to explain my ideas on the subject, I'd like to review the
+history of the distribution of information and of copyright. In the
+ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and anybody who
+knew how to read and write could copy a book about as efficiently as
+anybody else. Now somebody who did it all day would probably learn to
+be somewhat better at it, but there was not a tremendous difference.
+And because the copies were made one at a time, there was no great
+economy of scale. Making ten copies took ten times as long as making
+one copy. There was also nothing forcing centralization; a book could
+be copied anywhere.</p>
+<p>
+Now because of this technology, because it didn't force copies to be
+identical, there wasn't in the ancient world the same total divide
+between copying a book and writing a book. There are things in
+between that made sense. They did understand the idea of an author.
+They knew, say, that this play was written by Sophocles but in between
+writing a book and copying a book, there were other useful things you
+could do. For instance, you could copy a part of a book, then write
+some new words, copy some more and write some new words and on and on.
+This was called “writing a commentary” — that was a
+common thing to do — and these commentaries were
+appreciated.</p>
+<p>
+You could also copy a passage out of one book, then write some other
+words, and copy a passage from another book and write some more and so
+on, and this was making a compendium. Compendia were also very
+useful. There are works that are lost but parts of them survived when
+they were quoted into other books that got to be more popular than the
+original. Maybe they copied the most interesting parts, and so people
+made a lot of copies of these, but they didn't bother copying the
+original because it wasn't interesting enough.</p>
+<p>
+Now as far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the
+ancient world. Anyone who wanted to copy a book could copy the book.
+Later on, the printing press was developed and books started to be
+copied on the printing press. Now the printing press was not just a
+quantitative improvement in the ease of copying. It affected
+different kinds of copying unevenly because it introduced an inherent
+economy of scale. It was a lot of work to set the type and much less
+work to make many identical copies of the page. So the result was
+that copying books tended to become a centralized, mass-production
+activity. Copies of any given book would probably be made in only a
+few places.</p>
+<p>
+It also meant that ordinary readers couldn't copy books efficiently.
+Only if you had a printing press could you do that. So it was an
+industrial activity.</p>
+<p>
+Now for the first few centuries of printing, printed books did not
+totally replace hand-copying. Hand-copied books were still made,
+sometimes by rich people and sometimes by poor people. The rich
+people did this to get an especially beautiful copy that would show
+how rich they were, and poor people did it because maybe they didn't
+have enough money to buy a printed copy but they had the time to copy
+a book by hand. As the song says, “Time ain't money when all
+you got is time.”</p>
+<p>
+So hand-copying was still done to some extent. I think it was in the
+1800s that printing actually got to be cheap enough that even poor
+people could afford printed books if they were literate.</p>
+<p>
+Now copyright was developed along with the use of the printing press
+and given the technology of the printing press, it had the effect of
+an industrial regulation. It didn't restrict what readers could do;
+it restricted what publishers and authors could do. Copyright in
+England was initially a form of censorship. You had to get government
+permission to publish the book. But the idea has changed. By the
+time of the U.S. Constitution, people came to a different idea of the
+purpose of copyright, and I think that that idea was accepted in
+England as well.</p>
+<p>
+For the U.S. Constitution it was proposed that authors should be
+entitled to a copyright, a monopoly on copying their books. This
+proposal was rejected. Instead, a crucially different proposal was
+adopted which is that, for the sake of promoting progress, Congress
+could optionally establish a copyright system that would create these
+monopolies. So the monopolies, according to the U.S. Constitution, do
+not exist for the sake of those who own them; they exist for the sake
+of promoting the progress of science. The monopolies are handed out
+to authors as a way of modifying their behavior to get them to do
+something that serves the public.</p>
+<p>
+So the goal is more written and published books which other people can
+then read. And this is believed to contribute to increased literary
+activity, increased writing about science and other fields, and
+society then learns through this. That's the purpose to be served.
+The creation of private monopolies was a means to an end only, and the
+end is a public end.</p>
+<p>
+Now copyright in the age of the printing press was fairly painless
+because it was an industrial regulation. It restricted only the
+activities of publishers and authors. Well, in some strict sense, the
+poor people who copied books by hand may have been infringing
+copyright, too. But nobody ever tried to enforce copyright against
+them because it was understood as an industrial regulation.</p>
+<p>
+Copyright in the age of the printing press was also easy to enforce
+because it had to be enforced only where there was a publisher, and
+publishers, by their nature, make themselves known. If you're trying
+to sell books, you've got to tell people where to come to buy them.
+You don't have to go into everybody's house to enforce copyright.</p>
+<p>
+And, finally, copyright may have been a beneficial system in that
+context. Copyright in the U.S. is considered by legal scholars as a
+trade, a bargain between the public and authors. The public trades
+away some of its natural rights to make copies, and in exchange gets
+the benefit of more books' being written and published.</p>
+<p>
+Now, is this an advantageous trade? Well, when the general public
+can't make copies because they can only be efficiently made on
+printing presses — and most people don't own printing presses
+— the result is that the general public is trading away a
+freedom it is unable to exercise, a freedom that is of no practical
+value. So if you have something that is a byproduct of your life and
+it's useless and you have the opportunity to exchange it for something
+else of any value, you're gaining. So that's why copyright may have
+been an advantageous trade for the public in that time.</p>
+<p>
+But the context is changing, and that has to change our ethical
+evaluation of copyright. Now the basic principles of ethics are not
+changed by advances in technology; they're too fundamental to be
+touched by such contingencies. But our decision about any specific
+question is a matter of the consequences of the alternatives
+available, and the consequences of a given choice may change when the
+context changes. That is what is happening in the area of copyright
+law because the age of the printing press is coming to an end, giving
+way gradually to the age of the computer networks.</p>
+<p>
+Computer networks and digital information technology are bringing us
+back to a world more like the ancient world where anyone who can read
+and use the information can also copy it and can make copies about as
+easily as anyone else could make them. They are perfect copies and
+they're just as good as the copies anyone else could make. So the
+centralization and economy of scale introduced by the printing press
+and similar technologies is going away.</p>
+<p>
+And this changing context changes the way copyright law works. You
+see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is
+now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a
+restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical
+purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.
+Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial. It didn't
+restrict the general public. Now that's not true. If you have a
+computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest
+priority. Copyright was easy to enforce because it was a restriction
+only on publishers who were easy to find and what they published was
+easy to see. Now the copyright is a restriction on each and everyone
+of you. To enforce it requires surveillance — an intrusion
+— and harsh punishments, and we are seeing these being enacted
+into law in the U.S. and other countries.</p>
+<p>
+And copyright used to be, arguably, an advantageous trade for the
+public to make because the public was trading away freedoms it
+couldn't exercise. Well, now it can exercise these freedoms. What do
+you do if you have been producing a byproduct which was of no use to
+you and you were in the habit of trading it away and then, all of a
+sudden, you discover a use for it? You can actually consume it, use
+it. What do you do? You don't trade at all; you keep some. And
+that's what the public would naturally want to do.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>That's what the
+public does whenever it's given a chance to voice its preference; it
+keeps some of this freedom and exercises it. Napster is a big example
+of that, the public deciding to exercise the freedom to copy instead
+of giving it up. So the natural thing for us to do to make copyright
+law fit today's circumstances is to reduce the amount of copyright
+power that copyright owners get, to reduce the amount of restriction
+that they place on the public and to increase the freedom that the
+public retains.</p>
+<p>
+But this is not what the publishers want to do. What they want to do
+is exactly the opposite. They wish to increase copyright powers to
+the point where they can remain firmly in control of all use of
+information. This has led to laws that have given an unprecedented
+increase in the powers of copyright. Freedoms that the public used to
+have in the age of the printing press are being taken away.</p>
+<p>
+For instance, let's look at e-books. There's a tremendous amount of
+hype about e-books; you can hardly avoid it. I took a flight in
+Brazil and in the in-flight magazine, there was an article saying that
+maybe it would take 10 or 20 years before we all switched to e-books.
+Clearly, this kind of campaign comes from somebody paying for it. Now
+why are they doing that? I think I know. The reason is that e-books
+are the opportunity to take away some of the residual freedoms that
+readers of printed books have always had and still have — the
+freedom, for instance, to lend a book to your friend or borrow it from
+the public library or sell a copy to a used bookstore or buy a copy
+anonymously, without putting a record in the database of who bought
+that particular book. And maybe even the right to read it twice.</p>
+<p>
+These are freedoms that the publishers would like to take away, but
+they can't do this for printed books because that would be too obvious
+a power-grab and would raise an outcry. So they have found an indirect
+strategy: First, they obtain the legislation to take away these
+freedoms for e-books when there are no e-books; so there's no
+controversy. There are no pre-existing users of e-books who are
+accustomed to their freedoms and will defend them. That they obtained
+with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Then they
+introduce e-books and gradually get everybody to switch from printed
+books to e-books and eventually the result is, readers have lost these
+freedoms without ever having an instant when those freedoms were being
+taken away and when they might have fought back to retain them.</p>
+<p>
+We see at the same time efforts to take away people's freedom in using
+other kinds of published works. For instance, movies that are on DVDs
+are published in an encrypted format that used to be secret — it
+was meant to be secret — and the only way the movie companies
+would tell you the format, so that you could make a DVD player, was if
+you signed a contract to build certain restrictions into the player,
+with the result that the public would be stopped even from fully
+exercising their legal rights. Then a few clever programmers in
+Europe figured out the format of DVDs and they wrote a free software
+package that would read a DVD. This made it possible to use free
+software on top of the GNU+Linux operating system to watch the DVD
+that you had bought, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. You
+ought to be able to do that with free software.</p>
+<p>
+But the movie companies objected and they went to court. You see, the
+movie companies used to make a lot of films where there was a mad
+scientist and somebody was saying, “But, Doctor, there are some
+things Man was not meant to know.” They must have watched their
+own films too much because they came to believe that the format of
+DVDs is something that Man was not meant to know. And they obtained a
+ruling for total censorship of the software for playing DVDs. Even
+making a link to a site where this information is legally available
+outside the U.S. has been prohibited. An appeal has been made against
+this ruling. I signed a friend-of-the-court brief in that appeal, I'm
+proud to say, although I'm playing a fairly small role in that
+particular battle.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. government intervened directly on the other side. This is
+not surprising when you consider why the Digital Millennium Copyright
+Act was passed in the first place. The reason is the campaign finance
+system that we have in the U.S., which is essentially legalized
+bribery where the candidates are bought by business before they even
+get elected. And, of course, they know who their master is —
+they know whom they're working for — and they pass the laws to
+give business more power.</p>
+<p>
+What will happen with that particular battle, we don't know. But
+meanwhile Australia has passed a similar law and Europe is almost
+finished adopting one; so the plan is to leave no place on earth where
+this information can be made available to people. But the U.S.
+remains the world leader in trying to stop the public from
+distributing information that's been published.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. though is not the first country to make a priority of this.
+The Soviet Union treated it as very important. There this
+unauthorized copying and redistribution was known as Samizdat and to
+stamp it out, they developed a series of methods: First, guards
+watching every piece of copying equipment to check what people were
+copying to prevent forbidden copying. Second, harsh punishments for
+anyone caught doing forbidden copying. You could be sent to Siberia.
+Third, soliciting informers, asking everyone to rat on their neighbors
+and co-workers to the information police. Fourth, collective
+responsibility — You! You're going to watch that group! If I
+catch any of them doing forbidden copying, you are going to prison.
+So watch them hard. And, fifth, propaganda, starting in childhood to
+convince everyone that only a horrible enemy of the people would ever
+do this forbidden copying.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. is using all of these measures now. First, guards watching
+copying equipment. Well, in copy stores, they have human guards to
+check what you copy. But human guards to watch what you copy in your
+computer would be too expensive; human labor is too expensive. So
+they have robot guards. That's the purpose of the Digital Millennium
+Copyright Act. This software goes in your computer; it's the only way
+you can access certain data and it stops you from copying.</p>
+<p>
+There's a plan now to introduce this software into every hard disk, so
+that there could be files on your hard disk that you can't even access
+except by getting permission from some network server to access the
+file. And to bypass this software or even tell other people how to
+bypass it is a crime.</p>
+<p>
+Second, harsh punishments. A few years ago, if you made copies of
+something and handed them out to your friends just to be helpful, this
+was not a crime; it had never been a crime in the U.S. Then they made
+it a felony, so you could be put in prisons for years for sharing with
+your neighbor.</p>
+<p>
+Third, informers. Well, you may have seen the ads on TV, the ads in
+the Boston subways asking people to rat on their co-workers to the
+information police, which officially is called the Software Publishers
+Association.</p>
+<p>
+And fourth, collective responsibility. In the U.S., this has been
+done by conscripting Internet service providers, making them legally
+responsible for everything their customers post. The only way they
+can avoid always being held responsible is if they have an invariable
+procedure to disconnect or remove the information within two weeks
+after a complaint. Just a few days ago, I heard that a clever protest
+site criticizing City Bank for some of its nasty policies was
+disconnected in this way. Nowadays, you don't even get your day in
+court; your site just gets unplugged.</p>
+<p>
+And, finally, propaganda, starting in childhood. That's what the word
+“pirate” is used for. If you'll think back a few years,
+the term “pirate” was formerly applied to publishers that
+didn't pay the author. But now it's been turned completely around.
+It's now applied to members of the public who escape from the control
+of the publisher. It's being used to convince people that only a
+nasty enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying. It
+says that “sharing with your neighbor is the moral equivalent of
+attacking a ship.” I hope that you don't agree with that and if
+you don't, I hope you will refuse to use the word in that way.</p>
+<p>
+So the publishers are purchasing laws to give themselves more power.
+In addition, they're also extending the length of time the copyright
+lasts. The U.S. Constitution says that copyright must last for a
+limited time, but the publishers want copyright to last forever.
+However, getting a constitutional amendment would be rather difficult,
+so they found an easier way that achieves the same result. Every 20
+years they retroactively extend copyright by 20 years. So the result
+is, at any given time, copyright nominally lasts for a certain period
+and any given copyright will nominally expire some day. But that
+expiration will never be reached because every copyright will be
+extended by 20 years every 20 years; thus no work will ever go into
+the public domain again. This has been called “perpetual
+copyright on the installment plan.”</p>
+<p>
+The law in 1998 that extended copyright by 20 years is known as the
+“Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act” because one of the
+main sponsors of this law was Disney. Disney realized that the
+copyright on Mickey Mouse was going to expire, and they don't want
+that to ever happen because they make a lot of money from that
+copyright.</p>
+<p>
+Now the original title of this talk was supposed to be
+“Copyright and Globalization.” If you look at
+globalization, what you see is that it's carried out by a number of
+policies which are done in the name of economic efficiency or
+so-called free-trade treaties, which really are designed to give
+business power over laws and policies. They're not really about free
+trade. They're about a transfer of power: removing the power to
+decide laws from the citizens of any country who might conceivably
+consider their own interests and giving that power to businesses who
+will not consider the interests of those citizens.</p>
+<p>
+Democracy is the problem in their view, and these treaties are
+designed to put an end to the problem. For instance,
+<abbr title="North American Free Trade Agreement">NAFTA</abbr>
+actually contains provisions, I believe, allowing companies to sue
+another government to get rid of a law that they believe is
+interfering with their profits in the other country. So foreign
+companies have more power than citizens of the country.</p>
+<p>
+There are attempts being made to extend this
+beyond <abbr>NAFTA</abbr>. For instance, this is one of the goals
of
+the so-called free trade area of the Americas, to extend this
+principle to all the countries in South America and the Caribbean as
+well, and the multilateral agreement on investment was intended to
+spread it to the whole world.</p>
+<p>
+One thing we've seen in the '90s is that these treaties begin to
+impose copyright throughout the world, and in more powerful and
+restrictive ways. These treaties are not free-trade treaties.
+They're actually corporate-controlled trade treaties being used to
+give corporations control over world trade, in order to eliminate free
+trade.</p>
+<p>
+When the U.S. was a developing country in the 1800s, the U.S. did not
+recognize foreign copyrights. This was a decision made carefully, and
+it was an intelligent decision. It was acknowledged that for the U.S.
+to recognize foreign copyrights would just be disadvantageous, that it
+would suck money out and wouldn't do much good.</p>
+<p>
+The same logic would apply today to developing countries but the U.S.
+has sufficient power to force them to go against their interests.
+Actually, it's a mistake to speak of the interests of countries in
+this context. In fact, I'm sure that most of you have heard about the
+fallacy of trying to judge the public interest by adding up
+everybody's wealth. If working Americans lost $1 billion and Bill
+Gates gained $2 billion, would Americans generally be better off?
+Would this be good for America? Or if you look only at the total, it
+looks like it's good. However, this example really shows that the
+total is the wrong way to judge because Bill Gates really doesn't need
+another $2 billion, but the loss of the $1 billion by other people who
+don't have as much to start with might be painful.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Well, in a
+discussion about any of these trade treaties, when you hear people
+talk about the interests of this country or that country, what they're
+doing, within each country, is adding up everybody's income. The rich
+people and the poor people are being added up. So it's actually an
+excuse to apply that same fallacy to get you to ignore the effect on
+the distribution of wealth within the country and whether the treaty
+is going to make that more uneven, as it has done in the U.S.</p>
+<p>
+So it's really not the U.S. interest that is being served by enforcing
+copyright around the world. It's the interests of certain business
+owners, many of whom are in the U.S. and some of whom are in other
+countries. It doesn't, in any sense, serve the public interest.</p>
+<p>
+But what would make sense to do? If we believe in the goal of
+copyright stated, for instance in the U.S. Constitution, the goal of
+promoting progress, what would be intelligent policies to use in the
+age of the computer network? Clearly, instead of increasing copyright
+powers, we have to pull them back so as to give the general public a
+certain domain of freedom where they can make use of the benefits of
+digital technology, make use of their computer networks. But how far
+should that go? That's an interesting question because I don't think
+we should necessarily abolish copyright totally.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>The idea of trading
+some freedoms for more progress might still be an advantageous trade
+at a certain level, even if traditional copyright gives up too much
+freedom. But in order to think about this intelligently, the first
+thing we have to recognize is, there's no reason to make it totally
+uniform. There's no reason to insist on making the same deal for all
+kinds of work.</p>
+<p>
+In fact, that already isn't the case because there are a lot of
+exceptions for music. Music is treated very differently under
+copyright law. But the arbitrary insistence on uniformity is used by
+the publishers in a certain clever way. They pick some peculiar
+special case and they make an argument that, in that special case, it
+would be advantageous to have this much copyright. And then they say
+that for uniformity's sake, there has to be this much copyright for
+everything. So, of course, they pick the special case where they can
+make the strongest argument, even if it's a rather rare special case
+and not really very important overall.</p>
+<p>
+But maybe we should have that much copyright for that particular
+special case. We don't have to pay the same price for everything we
+buy. A thousand dollars for a new car might be a very good deal. A
+thousand dollars for a container of milk is a horrible deal. You
+wouldn't pay the special price for everything you buy in other areas
+of life. Why do it here?</p>
+<p>
+So we need to look at different kinds of works, and I'd like to
+propose a way of doing this.</p>
+<p>
+This includes recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks,
+reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias. For all these
+functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as
+they are for software and the same conclusions apply. People should
+have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very
+useful to modify functional works. People's needs are not all the
+same. If I wrote this work to do the job I think needs doing, your
+idea as a job you want to do may be somewhat different. So you want
+to modify this work to do what's good for you.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>At that point, there
+may be other people who have similar needs to yours, and your modified
+version might be good for them. Everybody who cooks knows this and
+has known this for hundreds of years. It's normal to make copies of
+recipes and hand them out to other people, and it's also normal to
+change a recipe. If you change the recipe and cook it for your
+friends and they like eating it, they might ask you, “Could I
+have the recipe?” Then maybe you'll write down your version and
+give them copies. That is exactly the same thing that we much later
+started doing in the free-software community.</p>
+<p><a name="opinions"></a>
+So that's one class of work. The second class of work is works whose
+purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those
+people is their purpose. This includes, say, memoirs, essays of
+opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of
+goods for sale. The whole point of those works is that they tell you
+what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes.
+To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these
+works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is
+the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.</p>
+<p>
+The next question is: Should people have the right to do commercial
+verbatim copying? Or is non-commercial enough? You see, these are
+two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider
+the questions separately — the right to do non-commercial
+verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying.
+Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover
+commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do
+non-commercial verbatim copying. This way, the copyright on the
+commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions
+— only the author could approve a modified version — would
+still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the
+writing of these works, to whatever extent it does.</p>
+<p>
+By allowing the non-commercial verbatim copying, it means the
+copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody's home. It becomes
+an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no
+longer requiring draconian punishments and informers for the sake of
+its enforcement. So we get most of the benefit — and avoid most
+of the horror — of the current system.</p>
+<p>
+The third category of works is aesthetic or entertaining works, where
+the most important thing is just the sensation of looking at the
+work. Now for these works, the issue of modification is a very
+difficult one because on the one hand, there is the idea that these
+works reflect the vision of an artist and to change them is to mess up
+that vision. On the other hand, you have the fact that there is the
+folk process, where a sequence of people modifying a work can
+sometimes produce a result that is extremely rich. Even when you have
+artists' producing the works, borrowing from previous works is often
+very useful. Some of Shakespeare's plays used a story that was taken
+from some other play. If today's copyright laws had been in effect
+back then, those plays would have been illegal.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>So it's a hard
+question what we should do about publishing modified versions of an
+aesthetic or an artistic work, and we might have to look for further
+subdivisions of the category in order to solve this problem. For
+example, maybe computer game scenarios should be treated one way;
+maybe everybody should be free to publish modified versions of them.
+But perhaps a novel should be treated differently; perhaps for that,
+commercial publication should require an arrangement with the original
+author.</p>
+<p>
+Now if commercial publication of these aesthetic works is covered by
+copyright, that will give most of the revenue stream that exists today
+to support the authors and musicians, to the limited extent that the
+present system supports them, because it does a very bad job. So that
+might be a reasonable compromise, just as in the case of the works
+which represent certain people.</p>
+<p>
+If we look ahead to the time when the age of the computer networks
+will have fully begun, when we're past this transitional stage, we can
+envision another way for the authors to get money for their work.
+Imagine that we have a digital cash system that enables you to get
+money for your work.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Imagine that we have a digital
cash system that
+enables you to send somebody else money through the Internet; this can
+be done in various ways using encryption, for instance. And imagine
+that verbatim copying of all these aesthetic works is permitted. But
+they're written in such a way that when you are playing one or reading
+one or watching one, a box appears on the side of your screen that
+says, “Click here to send a dollar to the author,” or the
+musician or whatever. And it just sits there; it doesn't get in your
+way; it's on the side. It doesn't interfere with you, but it's there,
+reminding you that it's a good thing to support the writers and the
+musicians.</p>
+<p>
+So if you love the work that you're reading or listening to,
+eventually you're going to say, “Why shouldn't I give these
+people a dollar? It's only a dollar. What's that? I won't even miss
+it.” And people will start sending a dollar. The good thing
+about this is that it makes copying the ally of the authors and
+musicians. When somebody e-mails a friend a copy, that friend might
+send a dollar, too. If you really love it, you might send a dollar
+more than once and that dollar is more than they're going to get today
+if you buy the book or buy the CD because they get a tiny fraction of
+the sale. The same publishers that are demanding total power over the
+public in the name of the authors and musicians are giving those
+authors and musicians the shaft all the time.</p>
+<p>
+I recommend you read Courtney Love's article in “Salon”
+magazine, an article about pirates that plan to use musicians' work
+without paying them. These pirates are the record companies that pay
+musicians 4% of the sales figures, on the average. Of course, the
+very successful musicians have more clout. They get more than 4% of
+their large sales figures, which means that the great run of musicians
+who have a record contract get less than 4% of their small sales
+figures.</p>
+<p>
+Here's the way it works: The record company spends money on publicity
+and they consider this expenditure as an advance to the musicians,
+although the musicians never see it. So nominally when you buy a CD,
+a certain fraction of that money is going to the musicians, but really
+it isn't. Really, it's going to pay back the publicity expenses, and
+only if the musicians are very successful do they ever see any of that
+money.</p>
+<p>
+The musicians, of course, sign their record contracts because they
+hope they're going to be one of those few who strike it rich. So
+essentially a rolling lottery is being offered to the musicians to
+tempt them. Although they're good at music, they may not be good at
+careful, logical reasoning to see through this trap. So they sign and
+then probably all they get is publicity. Well, why don't we give them
+publicity in a different way, not through a system that's based on
+restricting the public and a system of the industrial complex that
+saddles us with lousy music that's easy to sell. Instead, why not
+make the listener's natural impulse to share the music they love the
+ally of the musicians? If we have this box that appears in the player
+as a way to send a dollar to the musicians, then the computer networks
+could be the mechanism for giving the musicians this publicity, the
+same publicity which is all they get from record contracts now.</p>
+<p>
+We have to recognize that the existing copyright system does a lousy
+job of supporting musicians, just as lousy as world trade does of
+raising living standards in the Philippines and China. You have these
+enterprise zones where everyone works in a sweatshop and all of the
+products are made in sweatshops. I knew that globalization was a very
+inefficient way of raising living standards of people overseas. Say,
+an American is getting paid $20 an hour to make something and you give
+that job to a Mexican who is getting paid maybe six dollars a day,
+what has happened here is that you've taken a large amount of money
+away from an American worker, given a tiny fraction, like a few
+percents, to a Mexican worker and given back the rest to the
+company. So if your goal is to raise the living standards of Mexican
+workers, this is a lousy way to do it.</p>
+<p>
+It's interesting to see how the same phenomenon is going on in the
+copyright industry, the same general idea. In the name of these
+workers who certainly deserve something, you propose measures that
+give them a tiny bit and really mainly prop up the power of
+corporations to control our lives.</p>
+<p>
+If you're trying to replace a very good system, you have to work very
+hard to come up with a better alternative. If you know that the
+present system is lousy, it's not so hard to find a better
+alternative; the standard of comparison today is very low. We must
+always remember that when we consider issues of copyright policy.</p>
+<p>
+So I think I've said most of what I want to say. I'd like to mention
+that tomorrow is Phone-In Sick Day in Canada. Tomorrow is the
+beginning of a summit to finish negotiating the free trade area of the
+Americas to try to extend corporate power throughout additional
+countries, and a big protest is being planned for Quebec. We've seen
+extreme methods being used to smash this protest. A lot of Americans
+are being blocked from entering Canada through the border that they're
+supposed to be allowed to enter through at any time. <span
class="gnun-split"></span>On the flimsiest
+of excuses, a wall has been built around the center of Quebec to be
+used as a fortress to keep protesters out. We've seen a large number
+of different dirty tricks used against public protest against these
+treaties. So whatever democracy remains to us after government powers
+have been taken away from democratically elected governors and given
+to businesses and to unelected international bodies, whatever is left
+after that may not survive the suppression of public protest against
+it.</p>
+<p>
+I've dedicated 17 years of my life to working on free software and
+allied issues. I didn't do this because I think it's the most
+important political issue in the world. I did it because it was the
+area where I saw I had to use my skills to do a lot of good. But
+what's happened is that the general issues of politics have evolved,
+and the biggest political issue in the world today is resisting the
+tendency to give business power over the public and governments. I
+see free software and the allied questions for other kinds of
+information that I've been discussing today as one part of that major
+issue. So I've indirectly found myself working on that issue. I hope
+I contribute something to the effort.</p>
+<p>
+<b>RESPONSE</b>:</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: We'll turn to the audience for questions and
comments in a
+moment. But let me offer a brief general response. It seems to me
+that the strongest and most important practical guidance that Stallman
+offers us has two key elements. One is the recognition that old
+assumptions about copyright, old usages of copyright are
+inappropriate; they are challenged or undermined by the advent of the
+computer and computer networks. That may be obvious, but it is
+essential.</p>
+<p>
+Second is the recognition that the digital era requires us to
+reconsider how we distinguish and weigh forms of intellectual and
+creative labor. Stallman is surely right that certain kinds of
+intellectual enterprises justify more copyright protection than
+others. Trying to identify systematically these different kinds or
+levels of copyright protection seems to me a valuable way to engage
+with the problems for intellectual work posed by the advent of the
+computer.</p>
+<p>
+But I think I detect another theme that lies beneath what Stallman has
+been saying and that isn't really directly about computers at all, but
+more broadly about questions of democratic authority and the power
+that government and corporations increasingly exercise over our lives.
+This populist and anti-corporate side to Stallman's discourse is
+nourishing but also reductive, potentially simplifying. And it is
+also perhaps overly idealistic. For example, how would a novelist or
+a poet or a songwriter or a musician or the author of an academic
+textbook survive in this brave new world where people are encouraged
+but not required to pay authors. In other words, it seems to me, the
+gap between existing practice and the visionary possibilities Stallman
+speculates about is still immensely wide.</p>
+<p>
+So I'll conclude by asking if Stallman would like to expand a bit on
+certain aspects of his talk and, specifically, whether he has further
+thoughts about the way in which what we'll call “traditional
+creators” would be protected under his copyright system.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: First of all, I have to point out that we
shouldn't
+use the term “protection” to describe what copyright does.
+Copyright restricts people. The term “protection” is a
+propaganda term of the copyright-owning businesses. The term
+“protection“ means stopping something from being somehow
+destroyed. Well, I don't think a song is destroyed if there are more
+copies of it being played more. I don't think that a novel is
+destroyed if more people are reading copies of it, either. So I won't
+use that word. I think it leads people to identify with the wrong
+party.</p>
+<p>
+Also, it's a very bad idea to think about intellectual property for
+two reasons: First, it prejudges the most fundamental question in the
+area which is: How should these things be treated and should they be
+treated as a kind of property? To use the term “intellectual
+property” to describe the area is to presuppose the answer is
+“yes,” that that's the way to treat things, not some other
+way.</p>
+<p>
+Second, it encourages over-generalization. Intellectual property is a
+catch-all for several different legal systems with independent origins
+such as, copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and some other
+things as well. They are almost completely different; they have
+nothing in common. But people who hear the term “intellectual
+property” are led to a false picture where they imagine that
+there's a general principle of intellectual property that was applied
+to specific areas, so they assume that these various areas of the law
+are similar. This leads not only to confused thinking about what is
+right to do, it leads people to fail to understand what the law
+actually says because they suppose that the copyright law and patent
+law and trademark law are similar, when, in fact, they are totally
+different.</p>
+<p>
+So if you want to encourage careful thinking and clear understanding
+of what the law says, avoid the term “intellectual
+property.” Talk about copyrights. Or talk about patents. Or
+talk about trademarks or whichever subject you want to talk about.
+But don't talk about intellectual property. Opinion about
+intellectual property almost has to be a foolish one. I don't have an
+opinion about intellectual property. I have opinions about copyrights
+and patents and trademarks, and they're different. I came to them
+through different thought processes because those systems of law are
+totally different.</p>
+<p>
+Anyway, I made that digression, but it's terribly important.</p>
+<p>
+So let me now get to the point. Of course, we can't see now how well
+it would work, whether it would work to ask people to pay money
+voluntarily to the authors and musicians they love. One thing that's
+obvious is that how well such a system would work is proportional to
+the number of people who are participating in the network, and that
+number, we know, is going to increase by an order of magnitude over a
+number of years. If we tried it today, it might fail, and that
+wouldn't prove anything because with ten times as many people
+participating, it might work.</p>
+<p>
+The other thing is, we do not have this digital cash payment system;
+so we can't really try it today. You could try to do something a
+little bit like it. There are services you can sign up for where you
+can pay money to someone — things like PayPal. But before you
+can pay anyone through PayPal, you have to go through a lot of
+rigmarole and give them personal information about you, and they
+collect records of whom you pay. Can you trust them not to misuse
+that?</p>
+<p>
+So the dollar might not discourage you, but the trouble it takes to
+pay might discourage you. The whole idea of this is that it should be
+as easy as falling off a log to pay when you get the urge, so that
+there's nothing to discourage you except the actual amount of money.
+And if that's small enough, why should it discourage you. We know,
+though, that fans can really love musicians, and we know that
+encouraging fans to copy and redistribute the music has been done by
+some bands that were, and are, quite successful like the
+“Grateful Dead.” They didn't have any trouble making a
+living from their music because they encouraged fans to tape it and
+copy the tapes. They didn't even lose their record sales.</p>
+<p>
+We are gradually moving from the age of the printing press to the age
+of the computer network, but it's not happening in a day. People are
+still buying lots of records, and that will probably continue for many
+years — maybe forever. As long as that continues, simply having
+copyrights that still apply to commercial sales of records ought to do
+about as good a job of supporting musicians as it does today. Of
+course, that's not very good, but, at least, it won't get any
+worse.</p>
+<p>
+<b>DISCUSSION</b>:</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: [A comment and question about free downloading
and
+about Stephen King's attempt to market one of his novels serially over
+the web.]</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Yes, it's interesting to know what he did and what
+happened. When I first heard about that, I was elated. I thought,
+maybe he was taking a step towards a world that is not based on trying
+to maintain an iron grip on the public. Then I saw that he had
+actually written to ask people to pay. To explain what he did, he was
+publishing a novel as a serial, by installments, and he said,
+“If I get enough money, I'll release more.” But the
+request he wrote was hardly a request. It brow-beat the reader. It
+said, “If you don't pay, then you're evil. And if there are too
+many of you who are evil, then I'm just going to stop writing
+this.”</p>
+<p>
+Well, clearly, that's not the way to make the public feel like sending
+you money. You've got to make them love you, not fear you.</p>
+<p>
+<b>SPEAKER</b>: The details were that he required a certain
percentage
+— I don't know the exact percentage, around 90% sounds correct
+— of people to send a certain amount of money, which, I believe,
+was a dollar or two dollars, or somewhere in that order of magnitude.
+You had to type in your name and your e-mail address and some other
+information to get to download it and if that percentage of people was
+not reached after the first chapter, he said that he would not release
+another chapter. It was very antagonistic to the public downloading
+it.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Isn't the scheme where there's no copyright but
people are
+asked to make voluntary donations open to abuse by people
+plagiarizing?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No. That's not what I proposed. Remember, I'm
proposing
+that there should be copyright covering commercial distribution and
+permitting only verbatim redistribution non-commercially. So anyone
+who modified it to put in a pointer to his website, instead of a
+pointer to the real author's website, would still be infringing the
+copyright and could be sued exactly as he could be sued today.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: I see. So you're still imagining a world in
which there is
+copyright?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Yes. As I've said, for those kinds of works.
I'm not
+saying that everything should be permitted. I'm proposing to reduce
+copyright powers, not abolish them.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: I guess one question that occurred to me while you
+were speaking, Richard, and, again, now when you're responding here to
+this question is why you don't consider the ways in which the
+computer, itself, eliminates the middle men completely — in the
+way that Stephen King refused to do — and might establish a
+personal relationship.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, they can and, in fact, this voluntary
donation
+is one.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: You think of that as not involving going through
a
+publisher at all?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely not. I hope it won't, you see, because
+the publishers exploit the authors terribly. When you ask the
+publishers' representatives about this, they say, “Well, yes, if
+an author or if a band doesn't want to go through us, they shouldn't
+be legally required to go through us.” But, in fact, they're
+doing their utmost to set it up so that will not be feasible. For
+instance, they're proposing restricted copying media formats and in
+order to publish in these formats, you'll have to go through the big
+publishers because they won't tell anyone else how to do it. So
+they're hoping for a world where the players will play these formats,
+and in order to get anything that you can play on those players, it'll
+have to come through the publishers.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>So, in fact, while there's no
+law against an author or a musician publishing directly, it won't be
+feasible. There's also the lure of maybe hitting it rich. They say,
+“We'll publicize you and maybe you'll hit it as rich as the
+Beatles.” Take your pick of some very successful group and, of
+course, only a tiny fraction of musicians are going to have that
+happen. But they may be drawn by that into signing contracts that
+will lock them down forever.</p>
+<p>
+Publishers tend to be very bad at respecting their contracts with
+authors. For instance, book contracts typically have said that if a
+book goes out of print, the rights revert to the author, and
+publishers have generally not been very good about living up to that
+clause. They often have to be forced. Well, what they're starting to
+do now is use electronic publication as an excuse to say that it's
+never going out of print; so they never have to give the rights back.
+Their idea is, when the author has no clout, get him to sign up and
+from then on, he has no power; it's only the publisher that has the
+power.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Would it be good to have free licenses for
various kinds of
+works that protect for every user the freedom to copy them in whatever
+is the appropriate way for that kind of work?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, people are working on this. But for
non-functional
+works, one thing doesn't substitute for another. Let's look at a
+functional kind of work, say, a word processor. Well, if somebody
+makes a free word processor, you can use that; you don't need the
+nonfree word processors. But I wouldn't say that one free song
+substitutes for all the nonfree songs or that a one free novel
+substitutes for all the nonfree novels. For those kinds of works,
+it's different. So what I think we simply have to do is to recognize
+that these laws do not deserve to be respected. It's not wrong to
+share with your neighbor, and if anyone tries to tell you that you
+cannot share with your neighbor, you should not listen to him.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: With regard to the functional works, how do you,
in your
+own thinking, balance out the need for abolishing the copyright with
+the need for economic incentives in order to have these functional
+works developed?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, what we see is, first of all, that this
+economic incentive is a lot less necessary than people have been
+supposing. Look at the free software movement where we have over
+100,000 part-time volunteers developing free software. We also see
+that there are other ways to raise money for this which are not based
+on stopping the public from copying and modifying these works.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>That's
+the interesting lesson of the free software movement. Aside from the
+fact that it gives you a way you can use a computer and keep your
+freedom to share and cooperate with other people, it also shows us
+that this negative assumption that people would never do these things
+unless they are given special powers to force people to pay them is
+simply wrong. A lot of people will do these things. Then if you look
+at, say, the writing of monographs which serve as textbooks in many
+fields of science except for the ones that are very basic, the authors
+are not making money out of that.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>We now have a free encyclopedia
+project which is, in fact, a commercial-free encyclopedia project, and
+it's making progress. We had a project for a GNU encyclopedia but we
+merged it into the commercial project when they adopted our license.
+In January, they switched to the GNU Free Documentation License for
+all the articles in their encyclopedia. So we said, “Well,
+let's join forces with them and urge people to contribute to
+them.” It's called “Nupedia,” and you can find a
+link to it, if you look at http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia. So here
+we've extended the community development of a free base of useful
+knowledge from software to encyclopedia. I'm pretty confident now
+that in all these areas of functional work, we don't need that
+economic incentive to the point where we have to mess up the use of
+these works.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: Well, what about the other two
categories?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: For the other two classes of work, I don't know.
I
+don't know whether people will write some day novels without worrying
+about whether they make money from it. In a post-scarcity society, I
+guess they would. Maybe what we need to do in order to reach the
+post-scarcity society is to get rid of the corporate control over the
+economy and the laws. So, in effect, it's a chicken-or-the-egg
+problem, you know. Which do we do first? How do we get the world
+where people don't have to desperately get money except by removing
+the control by business? And how can we remove the control by
+business except — Anyway, I don't know, but that's why I'm
+trying to propose first a compromise copyright system and, second, the
+voluntary payment supported by a compromise copyright system as a way
+to provide a revenue stream to the people who write those works.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: How would you really expect to implement this
compromise
+copyright system under the chokehold of corporate interests on
+American politicians due to their campaign-finance system?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: It beats me. I wish I knew. It's a terribly
hard
+problem. If I knew how to solve that problem, I would solve it and
+nothing in the world could make me prouder.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>:. How do you fight the corporate control?
Because when you
+look at these sums of money going into corporate lobbying in the court
+case, it is tremendous. I think the DECS case that you're talking
+about is costing something like a million-and-a-half dollars on the
+defense side. Lord knows what it's costing on the corporate side. Do
+you have any idea how to deal with these huge sums of money?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I have a suggestion. If I were to suggest
totally
+boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion. They
+might consider it too radical. So I would like to make a slightly
+different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end,
+and that is, don't go to a movie unless you have some substantial
+reason to think it's good. Now this will lead in practice to almost
+the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies. In extension,
+it's almost the same but, in intention, it's very different. Now I've
+noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to
+do with whether they think the movies are good. So if you change
+that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason
+to think it's good, you'll take away a lot of their money.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: One way to understand all of this discourse
today, I
+think, is to recognize that whenever radical, potentially transforming
+technologies appear in society, there's a struggle over who controls
+them. We today are repeating what has happened in the past. So from
+this angle, there may not be a reason for despair, or even pessimism,
+about what may occur in the longer run. But, in the shorter term,
+struggles over the control of text and images, over all forms of
+information are likely to be painful and extensive.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>For example, as a
+teacher of media, my access to images has been restricted in recent
+years in a way that had never been in place before. If I write an
+essay in which I want to use still images, even from films, they are
+much harder to get permission to use, and the prices charged to use
+those still images are much higher — even when I make arguments
+about intellectual inquiry and the <span
class="removed"><del><strong>the</strong></del></span> legal category of
“fair
+use.” So I think, in this moment of extended transformation, the
+longer-term prospects may, in fact, not be as disturbing as what's
+happening in the shorter term. But in any case, we need to understand
+the whole of our contemporary experience as a renewed version of a
+struggle over the control of technological resources that is a
+recurring principle of Western society.</p>
+<p>
+It's also essential to understand that the history of older
+technologies is itself a complicated matter. The impact of the
+printing press in Spain, for example, is radically different from its
+impact in England or in France.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: One of the things that bothers me when I hear
+discussions of copyright is that often they start off with, “We
+want a 180-degree change. We want to do away with any sorts of
+control.” It seems to me that part of what lay under the three
+categories that were suggested is an acknowledgement that there is
+some wisdom to copyright. Some of the critics of the way copyright is
+going now believe that, in fact, it ought to be backed up and function
+much more like patent and trademarks in terms of its duration. I
+wonder if our speaker would comment on that as a strategy.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I agree that shortening the time span of
copyright is a
+good idea. There is absolutely no need in terms of encouraging
+publication for a possibility of copyrights' lasting as much as 150
+years, which, in some cases, it can under present law. Now the
+companies were saying that a 75-year copyright on a work made for hire
+was not long enough to make possible the production of their works.
+I'd like to challenge those companies to present projected balance
+sheets for 75 years from now to back up that contention. What they
+really wanted was just to be able to extend the copyrights on the old
+works, so that they can continue restricting the use of them. But how
+you can encourage greater production of works in the 1920s by
+extending copyright today escapes me, unless they have a time machine
+somewhere. Of course, in one of their movies, they had a time
+machine. So maybe that's what affected their thinking.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Have you given thought to extending the concept of
+“fair use,” and are there any nuances there that you might
+care to lay out for us?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, the idea of giving everyone permission for
+non-commercial verbatim copying of two kinds of works, certainly, may
+be thought of as extending what fair use is. It's bigger than what's
+fair use currently. If your idea is that the public trades away
+certain freedoms to get more progress, then you can draw the line at
+various, different places. Which freedoms does the public trade away
+and which freedoms does the public keep?</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: To extend the conversation for just a moment, in
certain
+entertainment fields, we have the concept of a public presentation.
+So, for example, copyright does not prevent us from singing Christmas
+carols seasonally but it prevents the public performance. And I'm
+wondering if it might be useful to think about instead of expanding
+fair use to unlimited, non-commercial, verbatim copying, to something
+less than that but more than the present concept of fair use.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I used to think that that might be enough, and
then Napster
+convinced me otherwise because Napster is used by its users for
+non-commercial, verbatim redistribution. The Napster server, itself,
+is a commercial activity but the people who are actually putting
+things up are doing so non-commercially, and they could have done so
+on their websites just as easily. The tremendous excitement about,
+interest in, and use of Napster shows that that's very useful. So I'm
+convinced now that people should have the right to publicly
+non-commercially, redistributed, verbatim copies of everything.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: One analogy that was recently suggested to me for
the
+whole Napster question was the analogy of the public library. I
+suppose some of you who have heard the Napster arguments have heard
+this analogy. I'm wondering if you would comment on it. The
+defenders of people who say Napster should continue and there
+shouldn't be restrictions on it sometimes say something like this:
+“When folks go into the public library and borrow a book,
+they're not paying for it, and it can be borrowed dozens of times,
+hundreds of times, without any additional payment. Why is Napster any
+different?”</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, it's not exactly the same. But it should
be pointed
+out that the publishers want to transform public libraries into
+pay-per-use, retail outlets. So they're against public libraries.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Can these ideas about copyright suggest any
ideas for
+certain issues about patent law such as making cheap, generic drugs
+for use in Africa?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No, there's absolutely no similarity. The issues
of
+patents are totally different from the issues of copyrights. The idea
+that they have something to do with each other is one of the
+unfortunate consequences of using the term “intellectual
+property” and encouraging people to try to lump these issues
+together because, as you've heard, I've been talking about issues in
+which the price of a copy is not the crucial thing. But what's the
+crucial issue about making AIDS drugs for Africa? It's the price,
+nothing but the price.</p>
+<p>
+Now the issue I've been talking about arises because digital
+information technology gives every user the ability to make copies.
+Well, there's nothing giving us all the ability to make copies of
+medicines. I don't have the ability to copy some medicine that I've
+got. In fact, nobody does; that's not how they're made. Those
+medicines can only be made in expensive factories and they are made in
+expensive centralized factories, whether they're generic drugs or
+imported from the U.S. Either way, they're going to be made in a
+small number of factories, and the issues are simply how much do they
+cost and are they available at a price that people in Africa can
+afford.</p>
+<p>
+So that's a tremendously important issue, but it's a totally different
+issue. There's just one area where an issue arises with patents that
+is actually similar to these issues of freedom to copy, and that is in
+the area of agriculture. Because there are certain patented things
+that can be copies, more or less — namely, living things. They
+copy themselves when they reproduce. It's not necessarily exact
+copying; they re-shuffle the genes. But the fact is, farmers for
+millennia have been making use of this capacity of the living things
+they grow to copy themselves. Farming is, basically, copying the
+things that you grew and you keep copying them every year. When plant
+and animal varieties get patented, when genes are patented and used in
+them, the result is that farmers are being prohibited from doing
+this.</p>
+<p>
+There is a farmer in Canada who had a patented variety growing on his
+field and he said, “I didn't do that deliberately. The pollen
+blew, and the wind in those genes got into my stock of plants.”
+And he was told that that doesn't matter; he has to destroy them
+anyway. It was an extreme example of how much government can side
+with a monopolist.</p>
+<p>
+So I believe that, following the same principles that I apply to
+copying things on your computer, farmers should have an unquestioned
+right to save their seeds and breed their livestock. Maybe you could
+have patents covering seed companies, but they shouldn't cover
+farmers.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: There's more to making a model successful than
just the
+licensing. Can you speak to that?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely. Well, you know, I don't know the
+answers. But part of what I believe is crucial for developing free,
+functional information is idealism. People have to recognize that
+it's important for this information to be free, that when the
+information is free, you can make full use of it. When it's
+restricted, you can't. You have to recognize that the nonfree
+information is an attempt to divide them and keep them helpless and
+keep them down. Then they can get the idea, “Let's work
+together to produce the information we want to use, so that it's not
+under the control of some powerful person who can dictate to us what
+we can do.”</p>
+<p>
+This tremendously boosts it. But I don't know how much it will work
+in various different areas, but I think that in the area of education,
+when you're looking for textbooks, I think I see a way it can be done.
+There are a lot of teachers in the world, teachers who are not at
+prestigious universities — maybe they're in high-school; maybe
+they're in college — where they don't write and publish a lot of
+things and there's not a tremendous demand for them. But a lot of
+them are smart. A lot of them know their subjects well and they could
+write textbooks about lots of subjects and share them with the world
+and receive a tremendous amount of appreciation from the people who
+will have learned from them.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: That's what I proposed. But the funny thing is,
I do
+know the history of education. That's what I do — educational,
+electronic media projects. I couldn't find an example. Do you know
+of one?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No, I don't. I started proposing this free
encyclopedia
+and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would
+probably take a decade to get things rolling. Now we already have an
+encyclopedia that is rolling. So things are going faster than I
+hoped. I think what's needed is for a few people to start writing
+some free textbooks. Write one about whatever is your favorite
+subject or write a fraction of one. Write a few chapters of one and
+challenge other people to write the rest.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Actually what I was looking for is something
even more than
+that. What's important in your kind of structure is somebody that
+creates an infrastructure to which everybody else can contribute.
+There isn't a K through 12 infrastructure out there in any place for a
+contribution for materials.</p>
+<p>
+I can get information from lots of places but it's not released under
+free licenses, so I can't use it to make a free textbook.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Actually, copyright doesn't cover the facts. It
only
+covers the way it's written. So you can learn a field from anywhere
+and then write a textbook, and you can make that textbook free, if you
+want.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: But I can't write by myself all the textbooks
that a
+student needs going through school.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, it's true. And I didn't write a whole, free
+operating system, either. I wrote some pieces and invited other
+people to join me by writing other pieces. So I set an example. I
+said, “I'm going in this direction. Join me and we'll get
+there.” And enough people joined in that we got there. So if
+you think in terms of, how am I going to get this whole gigantic job
+done, it can be daunting. So the point is, don't look at it that way.
+Think in terms of taking a step and realizing that after you've taken
+a step, other people will take more steps and, together, it will get
+the job done eventually.</p>
+<p>
+Assuming that humanity doesn't wipe itself out, the work we do today
+to produce the free educational infrastructure, the free learning
+resource for the world, that will be useful for as long as humanity
+exists. If it takes 20 years to get it done, so what? So don't think
+in terms of the size of the whole job. Think in terms of the piece
+that you're going to do. That will show people it can be done, and so
+others will do other pieces.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<blockquote id="fsfs"><p class="big">This speech is published
+in <a
href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
+Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
+M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></blockquote>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.
+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>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
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+ <address@hidden></a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
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+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND <span class="removed"><del><strong>3.0
US.</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>4.0.</em></ins></span> Please do NOT change or
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+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
+ Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
+ years, as long as each year in the range is in fact a copyrightable
+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ 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, 2008, 2012, <span
class="removed"><del><strong>2014</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>2014, 2018</em></ins></span> Free Software
Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+<span
class="removed"><del><strong>href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/">Creative</strong></del></span>
+<span
class="inserted"><ins><em>href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative</em></ins></span>
+Commons <span class="removed"><del><strong>Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United
States</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0
International</em></ins></span> License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+</pre></body></html>
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
+<title>Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks -
+GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/copyright-and-globalization.translist"
-->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer
Networks</h2>
+
+<p>
+<i>The following is an edited transcript from a speech given
+at <abbr title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr>
in
+the Communications Forum on Thursday, April 19, 2001 from 5:00pm -
+7:00pm</i></p>
+
+<p>
+<b>DAVID THORBURN, moderator</b>: Our speaker today, Richard
Stallman,
+is a legendary figure in the computing world, and my experience in
+trying to find a respondent to share the podium with him was
+instructive. One distinguished <abbr>MIT</abbr> professor told me
+that Stallman needs to be understood as a charismatic figure in a
+biblical parable — a kind of Old Testament anecdote-lesson.
+“Imagine,” he said, “a Moses or a Jeremiah —
+better a Jeremiah.” And I said, “Well, that's very
+admirable.”</p>
+<p>
+That sounds wonderful. It confirms my sense of the kind of
+contribution he has made to the world. Then why are you reluctant to
+share the podium with him?” His answer: “Like Jeremiah or
+Moses, he would simply overwhelm me. I won't appear on the same panel
+him, but if you asked me to name five people alive in the world who
+have truly helped us all, Richard Stallman would be one of
+them.”</p>
+<p>
+<b>RICHARD STALLMAN</b>: I should [begin by explaining why I have
+refused to allow this Forum to be web cast], in case it wasn't clear
+fully what the issue is: The software they use for web broadcasting
+requires the user to download certain software in order to receive the
+broadcast. That software is not free software. It's available at zero
+price but only as an executable, which is a mysterious bunch of
numbers.</p>
+<p>
+What it does is secret. You can't study it; you can't change it; and
+you certainly can't publish it in your own modified version. And
+those are among the freedoms that are essential in the definition of
+“free software.”</p>
+<p>
+So if I am to be an honest advocate for free software, I can hardly go
+around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree
+software. I'd be undermining my own cause. And if I don't show that
+I take my principles seriously, I can't expect anybody else to take
+them seriously.</p>
+<p>
+However, this speech is not about free software. After I'd been
+working on the free software movement for several years and people
+started using some of the pieces of the GNU operating system, I began
+getting invited to give speeches [at which] … people started
+asking me: “Well, how do the ideas about freedom for software
+users generalize to other kinds of things?”</p>
+<p>
+And, of course, people asked silly questions like, “Well, should
+hardware be free?” “Should this microphone be
+free?”</p>
+<p>
+Well, what does that mean? Should you be free to copy it and change
+it? Well, as for changing it, if you buy the microphone, nobody is
+going to stop you from changing it. And as for copying it, nobody has
+a microphone copier. Outside of “Star Trek,” those things
+don't exist. Maybe some day there'll be nanotechnological analyzers
+and assemblers, and it really will be possible to copy a physical
+object, and then these issues of whether you're free to do that will
+start being really important. We'll see agribusiness companies trying
+to stop people from copying food, and that will become a major
+political issue, if that technological capability will ever exist. I
+don't know if it will; it's just speculation at this point.</p>
+<p>
+But for other kinds of information, you can raise the issue because
+any kind of information that can be stored on a computer, conceivably,
+can be copied and modified. So the ethical issues of free software,
+the issues of a user's right to copy and modify software, are the same
+as such questions for other kinds of published information. Now I'm
+not talking about private information, say, personal information,
+which is never meant to be available to the public at all. I'm
+talking about the rights you should have if you get copies of
+published things where there's no attempt to keep them secret.</p>
+<p>
+In order to explain my ideas on the subject, I'd like to review the
+history of the distribution of information and of copyright. In the
+ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and anybody who
+knew how to read and write could copy a book about as efficiently as
+anybody else. Now somebody who did it all day would probably learn to
+be somewhat better at it, but there was not a tremendous difference.
+And because the copies were made one at a time, there was no great
+economy of scale. Making ten copies took ten times as long as making
+one copy. There was also nothing forcing centralization; a book could
+be copied anywhere.</p>
+<p>
+Now because of this technology, because it didn't force copies to be
+identical, there wasn't in the ancient world the same total divide
+between copying a book and writing a book. There are things in
+between that made sense. They did understand the idea of an author.
+They knew, say, that this play was written by Sophocles but in between
+writing a book and copying a book, there were other useful things you
+could do. For instance, you could copy a part of a book, then write
+some new words, copy some more and write some new words and on and on.
+This was called “writing a commentary” — that was a
+common thing to do — and these commentaries were
+appreciated.</p>
+<p>
+You could also copy a passage out of one book, then write some other
+words, and copy a passage from another book and write some more and so
+on, and this was making a compendium. Compendia were also very
+useful. There are works that are lost but parts of them survived when
+they were quoted into other books that got to be more popular than the
+original. Maybe they copied the most interesting parts, and so people
+made a lot of copies of these, but they didn't bother copying the
+original because it wasn't interesting enough.</p>
+<p>
+Now as far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the
+ancient world. Anyone who wanted to copy a book could copy the book.
+Later on, the printing press was developed and books started to be
+copied on the printing press. Now the printing press was not just a
+quantitative improvement in the ease of copying. It affected
+different kinds of copying unevenly because it introduced an inherent
+economy of scale. It was a lot of work to set the type and much less
+work to make many identical copies of the page. So the result was
+that copying books tended to become a centralized, mass-production
+activity. Copies of any given book would probably be made in only a
+few places.</p>
+<p>
+It also meant that ordinary readers couldn't copy books efficiently.
+Only if you had a printing press could you do that. So it was an
+industrial activity.</p>
+<p>
+Now for the first few centuries of printing, printed books did not
+totally replace hand-copying. Hand-copied books were still made,
+sometimes by rich people and sometimes by poor people. The rich
+people did this to get an especially beautiful copy that would show
+how rich they were, and poor people did it because maybe they didn't
+have enough money to buy a printed copy but they had the time to copy
+a book by hand. As the song says, “Time ain't money when all
+you got is time.”</p>
+<p>
+So hand-copying was still done to some extent. I think it was in the
+1800s that printing actually got to be cheap enough that even poor
+people could afford printed books if they were literate.</p>
+<p>
+Now copyright was developed along with the use of the printing press
+and given the technology of the printing press, it had the effect of
+an industrial regulation. It didn't restrict what readers could do;
+it restricted what publishers and authors could do. Copyright in
+England was initially a form of censorship. You had to get government
+permission to publish the book. But the idea has changed. By the
+time of the U.S. Constitution, people came to a different idea of the
+purpose of copyright, and I think that that idea was accepted in
+England as well.</p>
+<p>
+For the U.S. Constitution it was proposed that authors should be
+entitled to a copyright, a monopoly on copying their books. This
+proposal was rejected. Instead, a crucially different proposal was
+adopted which is that, for the sake of promoting progress, Congress
+could optionally establish a copyright system that would create these
+monopolies. So the monopolies, according to the U.S. Constitution, do
+not exist for the sake of those who own them; they exist for the sake
+of promoting the progress of science. The monopolies are handed out
+to authors as a way of modifying their behavior to get them to do
+something that serves the public.</p>
+<p>
+So the goal is more written and published books which other people can
+then read. And this is believed to contribute to increased literary
+activity, increased writing about science and other fields, and
+society then learns through this. That's the purpose to be served.
+The creation of private monopolies was a means to an end only, and the
+end is a public end.</p>
+<p>
+Now copyright in the age of the printing press was fairly painless
+because it was an industrial regulation. It restricted only the
+activities of publishers and authors. Well, in some strict sense, the
+poor people who copied books by hand may have been infringing
+copyright, too. But nobody ever tried to enforce copyright against
+them because it was understood as an industrial regulation.</p>
+<p>
+Copyright in the age of the printing press was also easy to enforce
+because it had to be enforced only where there was a publisher, and
+publishers, by their nature, make themselves known. If you're trying
+to sell books, you've got to tell people where to come to buy them.
+You don't have to go into everybody's house to enforce copyright.</p>
+<p>
+And, finally, copyright may have been a beneficial system in that
+context. Copyright in the U.S. is considered by legal scholars as a
+trade, a bargain between the public and authors. The public trades
+away some of its natural rights to make copies, and in exchange gets
+the benefit of more books' being written and published.</p>
+<p>
+Now, is this an advantageous trade? Well, when the general public
+can't make copies because they can only be efficiently made on
+printing presses — and most people don't own printing presses
+— the result is that the general public is trading away a
+freedom it is unable to exercise, a freedom that is of no practical
+value. So if you have something that is a byproduct of your life and
+it's useless and you have the opportunity to exchange it for something
+else of any value, you're gaining. So that's why copyright may have
+been an advantageous trade for the public in that time.</p>
+<p>
+But the context is changing, and that has to change our ethical
+evaluation of copyright. Now the basic principles of ethics are not
+changed by advances in technology; they're too fundamental to be
+touched by such contingencies. But our decision about any specific
+question is a matter of the consequences of the alternatives
+available, and the consequences of a given choice may change when the
+context changes. That is what is happening in the area of copyright
+law because the age of the printing press is coming to an end, giving
+way gradually to the age of the computer networks.</p>
+<p>
+Computer networks and digital information technology are bringing us
+back to a world more like the ancient world where anyone who can read
+and use the information can also copy it and can make copies about as
+easily as anyone else could make them. They are perfect copies and
+they're just as good as the copies anyone else could make. So the
+centralization and economy of scale introduced by the printing press
+and similar technologies is going away.</p>
+<p>
+And this changing context changes the way copyright law works. You
+see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is
+now a Draconian restriction on a general public. It used to be a
+restriction on publishers for the sake of authors. Now, for practical
+purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.
+Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial. It didn't
+restrict the general public. Now that's not true. If you have a
+computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest
+priority. Copyright was easy to enforce because it was a restriction
+only on publishers who were easy to find and what they published was
+easy to see. Now the copyright is a restriction on each and everyone
+of you. To enforce it requires surveillance — an intrusion
+— and harsh punishments, and we are seeing these being enacted
+into law in the U.S. and other countries.</p>
+<p>
+And copyright used to be, arguably, an advantageous trade for the
+public to make because the public was trading away freedoms it
+couldn't exercise. Well, now it can exercise these freedoms. What do
+you do if you have been producing a byproduct which was of no use to
+you and you were in the habit of trading it away and then, all of a
+sudden, you discover a use for it? You can actually consume it, use
+it. What do you do? You don't trade at all; you keep some. And
+that's what the public would naturally want to do.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>That's what the
+public does whenever it's given a chance to voice its preference; it
+keeps some of this freedom and exercises it. Napster is a big example
+of that, the public deciding to exercise the freedom to copy instead
+of giving it up. So the natural thing for us to do to make copyright
+law fit today's circumstances is to reduce the amount of copyright
+power that copyright owners get, to reduce the amount of restriction
+that they place on the public and to increase the freedom that the
+public retains.</p>
+<p>
+But this is not what the publishers want to do. What they want to do
+is exactly the opposite. They wish to increase copyright powers to
+the point where they can remain firmly in control of all use of
+information. This has led to laws that have given an unprecedented
+increase in the powers of copyright. Freedoms that the public used to
+have in the age of the printing press are being taken away.</p>
+<p>
+For instance, let's look at e-books. There's a tremendous amount of
+hype about e-books; you can hardly avoid it. I took a flight in
+Brazil and in the in-flight magazine, there was an article saying that
+maybe it would take 10 or 20 years before we all switched to e-books.
+Clearly, this kind of campaign comes from somebody paying for it. Now
+why are they doing that? I think I know. The reason is that e-books
+are the opportunity to take away some of the residual freedoms that
+readers of printed books have always had and still have — the
+freedom, for instance, to lend a book to your friend or borrow it from
+the public library or sell a copy to a used bookstore or buy a copy
+anonymously, without putting a record in the database of who bought
+that particular book. And maybe even the right to read it twice.</p>
+<p>
+These are freedoms that the publishers would like to take away, but
+they can't do this for printed books because that would be too obvious
+a power-grab and would raise an outcry. So they have found an indirect
+strategy: First, they obtain the legislation to take away these
+freedoms for e-books when there are no e-books; so there's no
+controversy. There are no pre-existing users of e-books who are
+accustomed to their freedoms and will defend them. That they obtained
+with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Then they
+introduce e-books and gradually get everybody to switch from printed
+books to e-books and eventually the result is, readers have lost these
+freedoms without ever having an instant when those freedoms were being
+taken away and when they might have fought back to retain them.</p>
+<p>
+We see at the same time efforts to take away people's freedom in using
+other kinds of published works. For instance, movies that are on DVDs
+are published in an encrypted format that used to be secret — it
+was meant to be secret — and the only way the movie companies
+would tell you the format, so that you could make a DVD player, was if
+you signed a contract to build certain restrictions into the player,
+with the result that the public would be stopped even from fully
+exercising their legal rights. Then a few clever programmers in
+Europe figured out the format of DVDs and they wrote a free software
+package that would read a DVD. This made it possible to use free
+software on top of the GNU+Linux operating system to watch the DVD
+that you had bought, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. You
+ought to be able to do that with free software.</p>
+<p>
+But the movie companies objected and they went to court. You see, the
+movie companies used to make a lot of films where there was a mad
+scientist and somebody was saying, “But, Doctor, there are some
+things Man was not meant to know.” They must have watched their
+own films too much because they came to believe that the format of
+DVDs is something that Man was not meant to know. And they obtained a
+ruling for total censorship of the software for playing DVDs. Even
+making a link to a site where this information is legally available
+outside the U.S. has been prohibited. An appeal has been made against
+this ruling. I signed a friend-of-the-court brief in that appeal, I'm
+proud to say, although I'm playing a fairly small role in that
+particular battle.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. government intervened directly on the other side. This is
+not surprising when you consider why the Digital Millennium Copyright
+Act was passed in the first place. The reason is the campaign finance
+system that we have in the U.S., which is essentially legalized
+bribery where the candidates are bought by business before they even
+get elected. And, of course, they know who their master is —
+they know whom they're working for — and they pass the laws to
+give business more power.</p>
+<p>
+What will happen with that particular battle, we don't know. But
+meanwhile Australia has passed a similar law and Europe is almost
+finished adopting one; so the plan is to leave no place on earth where
+this information can be made available to people. But the U.S.
+remains the world leader in trying to stop the public from
+distributing information that's been published.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. though is not the first country to make a priority of this.
+The Soviet Union treated it as very important. There this
+unauthorized copying and redistribution was known as Samizdat and to
+stamp it out, they developed a series of methods: First, guards
+watching every piece of copying equipment to check what people were
+copying to prevent forbidden copying. Second, harsh punishments for
+anyone caught doing forbidden copying. You could be sent to Siberia.
+Third, soliciting informers, asking everyone to rat on their neighbors
+and co-workers to the information police. Fourth, collective
+responsibility — You! You're going to watch that group! If I
+catch any of them doing forbidden copying, you are going to prison.
+So watch them hard. And, fifth, propaganda, starting in childhood to
+convince everyone that only a horrible enemy of the people would ever
+do this forbidden copying.</p>
+<p>
+The U.S. is using all of these measures now. First, guards watching
+copying equipment. Well, in copy stores, they have human guards to
+check what you copy. But human guards to watch what you copy in your
+computer would be too expensive; human labor is too expensive. So
+they have robot guards. That's the purpose of the Digital Millennium
+Copyright Act. This software goes in your computer; it's the only way
+you can access certain data and it stops you from copying.</p>
+<p>
+There's a plan now to introduce this software into every hard disk, so
+that there could be files on your hard disk that you can't even access
+except by getting permission from some network server to access the
+file. And to bypass this software or even tell other people how to
+bypass it is a crime.</p>
+<p>
+Second, harsh punishments. A few years ago, if you made copies of
+something and handed them out to your friends just to be helpful, this
+was not a crime; it had never been a crime in the U.S. Then they made
+it a felony, so you could be put in prisons for years for sharing with
+your neighbor.</p>
+<p>
+Third, informers. Well, you may have seen the ads on TV, the ads in
+the Boston subways asking people to rat on their co-workers to the
+information police, which officially is called the Software Publishers
+Association.</p>
+<p>
+And fourth, collective responsibility. In the U.S., this has been
+done by conscripting Internet service providers, making them legally
+responsible for everything their customers post. The only way they
+can avoid always being held responsible is if they have an invariable
+procedure to disconnect or remove the information within two weeks
+after a complaint. Just a few days ago, I heard that a clever protest
+site criticizing City Bank for some of its nasty policies was
+disconnected in this way. Nowadays, you don't even get your day in
+court; your site just gets unplugged.</p>
+<p>
+And, finally, propaganda, starting in childhood. That's what the word
+“pirate” is used for. If you'll think back a few years,
+the term “pirate” was formerly applied to publishers that
+didn't pay the author. But now it's been turned completely around.
+It's now applied to members of the public who escape from the control
+of the publisher. It's being used to convince people that only a
+nasty enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying. It
+says that “sharing with your neighbor is the moral equivalent of
+attacking a ship.” I hope that you don't agree with that and if
+you don't, I hope you will refuse to use the word in that way.</p>
+<p>
+So the publishers are purchasing laws to give themselves more power.
+In addition, they're also extending the length of time the copyright
+lasts. The U.S. Constitution says that copyright must last for a
+limited time, but the publishers want copyright to last forever.
+However, getting a constitutional amendment would be rather difficult,
+so they found an easier way that achieves the same result. Every 20
+years they retroactively extend copyright by 20 years. So the result
+is, at any given time, copyright nominally lasts for a certain period
+and any given copyright will nominally expire some day. But that
+expiration will never be reached because every copyright will be
+extended by 20 years every 20 years; thus no work will ever go into
+the public domain again. This has been called “perpetual
+copyright on the installment plan.”</p>
+<p>
+The law in 1998 that extended copyright by 20 years is known as the
+“Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act” because one of the
+main sponsors of this law was Disney. Disney realized that the
+copyright on Mickey Mouse was going to expire, and they don't want
+that to ever happen because they make a lot of money from that
+copyright.</p>
+<p>
+Now the original title of this talk was supposed to be
+“Copyright and Globalization.” If you look at
+globalization, what you see is that it's carried out by a number of
+policies which are done in the name of economic efficiency or
+so-called free-trade treaties, which really are designed to give
+business power over laws and policies. They're not really about free
+trade. They're about a transfer of power: removing the power to
+decide laws from the citizens of any country who might conceivably
+consider their own interests and giving that power to businesses who
+will not consider the interests of those citizens.</p>
+<p>
+Democracy is the problem in their view, and these treaties are
+designed to put an end to the problem. For instance,
+<abbr title="North American Free Trade Agreement">NAFTA</abbr>
+actually contains provisions, I believe, allowing companies to sue
+another government to get rid of a law that they believe is
+interfering with their profits in the other country. So foreign
+companies have more power than citizens of the country.</p>
+<p>
+There are attempts being made to extend this
+beyond <abbr>NAFTA</abbr>. For instance, this is one of the goals
of
+the so-called free trade area of the Americas, to extend this
+principle to all the countries in South America and the Caribbean as
+well, and the multilateral agreement on investment was intended to
+spread it to the whole world.</p>
+<p>
+One thing we've seen in the '90s is that these treaties begin to
+impose copyright throughout the world, and in more powerful and
+restrictive ways. These treaties are not free-trade treaties.
+They're actually corporate-controlled trade treaties being used to
+give corporations control over world trade, in order to eliminate free
+trade.</p>
+<p>
+When the U.S. was a developing country in the 1800s, the U.S. did not
+recognize foreign copyrights. This was a decision made carefully, and
+it was an intelligent decision. It was acknowledged that for the U.S.
+to recognize foreign copyrights would just be disadvantageous, that it
+would suck money out and wouldn't do much good.</p>
+<p>
+The same logic would apply today to developing countries but the U.S.
+has sufficient power to force them to go against their interests.
+Actually, it's a mistake to speak of the interests of countries in
+this context. In fact, I'm sure that most of you have heard about the
+fallacy of trying to judge the public interest by adding up
+everybody's wealth. If working Americans lost $1 billion and Bill
+Gates gained $2 billion, would Americans generally be better off?
+Would this be good for America? Or if you look only at the total, it
+looks like it's good. However, this example really shows that the
+total is the wrong way to judge because Bill Gates really doesn't need
+another $2 billion, but the loss of the $1 billion by other people who
+don't have as much to start with might be painful.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Well, in a
+discussion about any of these trade treaties, when you hear people
+talk about the interests of this country or that country, what they're
+doing, within each country, is adding up everybody's income. The rich
+people and the poor people are being added up. So it's actually an
+excuse to apply that same fallacy to get you to ignore the effect on
+the distribution of wealth within the country and whether the treaty
+is going to make that more uneven, as it has done in the U.S.</p>
+<p>
+So it's really not the U.S. interest that is being served by enforcing
+copyright around the world. It's the interests of certain business
+owners, many of whom are in the U.S. and some of whom are in other
+countries. It doesn't, in any sense, serve the public interest.</p>
+<p>
+But what would make sense to do? If we believe in the goal of
+copyright stated, for instance in the U.S. Constitution, the goal of
+promoting progress, what would be intelligent policies to use in the
+age of the computer network? Clearly, instead of increasing copyright
+powers, we have to pull them back so as to give the general public a
+certain domain of freedom where they can make use of the benefits of
+digital technology, make use of their computer networks. But how far
+should that go? That's an interesting question because I don't think
+we should necessarily abolish copyright totally.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>The idea of trading
+some freedoms for more progress might still be an advantageous trade
+at a certain level, even if traditional copyright gives up too much
+freedom. But in order to think about this intelligently, the first
+thing we have to recognize is, there's no reason to make it totally
+uniform. There's no reason to insist on making the same deal for all
+kinds of work.</p>
+<p>
+In fact, that already isn't the case because there are a lot of
+exceptions for music. Music is treated very differently under
+copyright law. But the arbitrary insistence on uniformity is used by
+the publishers in a certain clever way. They pick some peculiar
+special case and they make an argument that, in that special case, it
+would be advantageous to have this much copyright. And then they say
+that for uniformity's sake, there has to be this much copyright for
+everything. So, of course, they pick the special case where they can
+make the strongest argument, even if it's a rather rare special case
+and not really very important overall.</p>
+<p>
+But maybe we should have that much copyright for that particular
+special case. We don't have to pay the same price for everything we
+buy. A thousand dollars for a new car might be a very good deal. A
+thousand dollars for a container of milk is a horrible deal. You
+wouldn't pay the special price for everything you buy in other areas
+of life. Why do it here?</p>
+<p>
+So we need to look at different kinds of works, and I'd like to
+propose a way of doing this.</p>
+<p>
+This includes recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks,
+reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias. For all these
+functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as
+they are for software and the same conclusions apply. People should
+have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very
+useful to modify functional works. People's needs are not all the
+same. If I wrote this work to do the job I think needs doing, your
+idea as a job you want to do may be somewhat different. So you want
+to modify this work to do what's good for you.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>At that point, there
+may be other people who have similar needs to yours, and your modified
+version might be good for them. Everybody who cooks knows this and
+has known this for hundreds of years. It's normal to make copies of
+recipes and hand them out to other people, and it's also normal to
+change a recipe. If you change the recipe and cook it for your
+friends and they like eating it, they might ask you, “Could I
+have the recipe?” Then maybe you'll write down your version and
+give them copies. That is exactly the same thing that we much later
+started doing in the free-software community.</p>
+<p><a name="opinions"></a>
+So that's one class of work. The second class of work is works whose
+purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those
+people is their purpose. This includes, say, memoirs, essays of
+opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of
+goods for sale. The whole point of those works is that they tell you
+what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes.
+To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these
+works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is
+the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.</p>
+<p>
+The next question is: Should people have the right to do commercial
+verbatim copying? Or is non-commercial enough? You see, these are
+two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider
+the questions separately — the right to do non-commercial
+verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying.
+Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover
+commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do
+non-commercial verbatim copying. This way, the copyright on the
+commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions
+— only the author could approve a modified version — would
+still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the
+writing of these works, to whatever extent it does.</p>
+<p>
+By allowing the non-commercial verbatim copying, it means the
+copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody's home. It becomes
+an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no
+longer requiring draconian punishments and informers for the sake of
+its enforcement. So we get most of the benefit — and avoid most
+of the horror — of the current system.</p>
+<p>
+The third category of works is aesthetic or entertaining works, where
+the most important thing is just the sensation of looking at the
+work. Now for these works, the issue of modification is a very
+difficult one because on the one hand, there is the idea that these
+works reflect the vision of an artist and to change them is to mess up
+that vision. On the other hand, you have the fact that there is the
+folk process, where a sequence of people modifying a work can
+sometimes produce a result that is extremely rich. Even when you have
+artists' producing the works, borrowing from previous works is often
+very useful. Some of Shakespeare's plays used a story that was taken
+from some other play. If today's copyright laws had been in effect
+back then, those plays would have been illegal.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>So it's a hard
+question what we should do about publishing modified versions of an
+aesthetic or an artistic work, and we might have to look for further
+subdivisions of the category in order to solve this problem. For
+example, maybe computer game scenarios should be treated one way;
+maybe everybody should be free to publish modified versions of them.
+But perhaps a novel should be treated differently; perhaps for that,
+commercial publication should require an arrangement with the original
+author.</p>
+<p>
+Now if commercial publication of these aesthetic works is covered by
+copyright, that will give most of the revenue stream that exists today
+to support the authors and musicians, to the limited extent that the
+present system supports them, because it does a very bad job. So that
+might be a reasonable compromise, just as in the case of the works
+which represent certain people.</p>
+<p>
+If we look ahead to the time when the age of the computer networks
+will have fully begun, when we're past this transitional stage, we can
+envision another way for the authors to get money for their work.
+Imagine that we have a digital cash system that enables you to get
+money for your work.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Imagine that we have a digital
cash system that
+enables you to send somebody else money through the Internet; this can
+be done in various ways using encryption, for instance. And imagine
+that verbatim copying of all these aesthetic works is permitted. But
+they're written in such a way that when you are playing one or reading
+one or watching one, a box appears on the side of your screen that
+says, “Click here to send a dollar to the author,” or the
+musician or whatever. And it just sits there; it doesn't get in your
+way; it's on the side. It doesn't interfere with you, but it's there,
+reminding you that it's a good thing to support the writers and the
+musicians.</p>
+<p>
+So if you love the work that you're reading or listening to,
+eventually you're going to say, “Why shouldn't I give these
+people a dollar? It's only a dollar. What's that? I won't even miss
+it.” And people will start sending a dollar. The good thing
+about this is that it makes copying the ally of the authors and
+musicians. When somebody e-mails a friend a copy, that friend might
+send a dollar, too. If you really love it, you might send a dollar
+more than once and that dollar is more than they're going to get today
+if you buy the book or buy the CD because they get a tiny fraction of
+the sale. The same publishers that are demanding total power over the
+public in the name of the authors and musicians are giving those
+authors and musicians the shaft all the time.</p>
+<p>
+I recommend you read Courtney Love's article in “Salon”
+magazine, an article about pirates that plan to use musicians' work
+without paying them. These pirates are the record companies that pay
+musicians 4% of the sales figures, on the average. Of course, the
+very successful musicians have more clout. They get more than 4% of
+their large sales figures, which means that the great run of musicians
+who have a record contract get less than 4% of their small sales
+figures.</p>
+<p>
+Here's the way it works: The record company spends money on publicity
+and they consider this expenditure as an advance to the musicians,
+although the musicians never see it. So nominally when you buy a CD,
+a certain fraction of that money is going to the musicians, but really
+it isn't. Really, it's going to pay back the publicity expenses, and
+only if the musicians are very successful do they ever see any of that
+money.</p>
+<p>
+The musicians, of course, sign their record contracts because they
+hope they're going to be one of those few who strike it rich. So
+essentially a rolling lottery is being offered to the musicians to
+tempt them. Although they're good at music, they may not be good at
+careful, logical reasoning to see through this trap. So they sign and
+then probably all they get is publicity. Well, why don't we give them
+publicity in a different way, not through a system that's based on
+restricting the public and a system of the industrial complex that
+saddles us with lousy music that's easy to sell. Instead, why not
+make the listener's natural impulse to share the music they love the
+ally of the musicians? If we have this box that appears in the player
+as a way to send a dollar to the musicians, then the computer networks
+could be the mechanism for giving the musicians this publicity, the
+same publicity which is all they get from record contracts now.</p>
+<p>
+We have to recognize that the existing copyright system does a lousy
+job of supporting musicians, just as lousy as world trade does of
+raising living standards in the Philippines and China. You have these
+enterprise zones where everyone works in a sweatshop and all of the
+products are made in sweatshops. I knew that globalization was a very
+inefficient way of raising living standards of people overseas. Say,
+an American is getting paid $20 an hour to make something and you give
+that job to a Mexican who is getting paid maybe six dollars a day,
+what has happened here is that you've taken a large amount of money
+away from an American worker, given a tiny fraction, like a few
+percents, to a Mexican worker and given back the rest to the
+company. So if your goal is to raise the living standards of Mexican
+workers, this is a lousy way to do it.</p>
+<p>
+It's interesting to see how the same phenomenon is going on in the
+copyright industry, the same general idea. In the name of these
+workers who certainly deserve something, you propose measures that
+give them a tiny bit and really mainly prop up the power of
+corporations to control our lives.</p>
+<p>
+If you're trying to replace a very good system, you have to work very
+hard to come up with a better alternative. If you know that the
+present system is lousy, it's not so hard to find a better
+alternative; the standard of comparison today is very low. We must
+always remember that when we consider issues of copyright policy.</p>
+<p>
+So I think I've said most of what I want to say. I'd like to mention
+that tomorrow is Phone-In Sick Day in Canada. Tomorrow is the
+beginning of a summit to finish negotiating the free trade area of the
+Americas to try to extend corporate power throughout additional
+countries, and a big protest is being planned for Quebec. We've seen
+extreme methods being used to smash this protest. A lot of Americans
+are being blocked from entering Canada through the border that they're
+supposed to be allowed to enter through at any time. <span
class="gnun-split"></span>On the flimsiest
+of excuses, a wall has been built around the center of Quebec to be
+used as a fortress to keep protesters out. We've seen a large number
+of different dirty tricks used against public protest against these
+treaties. So whatever democracy remains to us after government powers
+have been taken away from democratically elected governors and given
+to businesses and to unelected international bodies, whatever is left
+after that may not survive the suppression of public protest against
+it.</p>
+<p>
+I've dedicated 17 years of my life to working on free software and
+allied issues. I didn't do this because I think it's the most
+important political issue in the world. I did it because it was the
+area where I saw I had to use my skills to do a lot of good. But
+what's happened is that the general issues of politics have evolved,
+and the biggest political issue in the world today is resisting the
+tendency to give business power over the public and governments. I
+see free software and the allied questions for other kinds of
+information that I've been discussing today as one part of that major
+issue. So I've indirectly found myself working on that issue. I hope
+I contribute something to the effort.</p>
+<p>
+<b>RESPONSE</b>:</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: We'll turn to the audience for questions and
comments in a
+moment. But let me offer a brief general response. It seems to me
+that the strongest and most important practical guidance that Stallman
+offers us has two key elements. One is the recognition that old
+assumptions about copyright, old usages of copyright are
+inappropriate; they are challenged or undermined by the advent of the
+computer and computer networks. That may be obvious, but it is
+essential.</p>
+<p>
+Second is the recognition that the digital era requires us to
+reconsider how we distinguish and weigh forms of intellectual and
+creative labor. Stallman is surely right that certain kinds of
+intellectual enterprises justify more copyright protection than
+others. Trying to identify systematically these different kinds or
+levels of copyright protection seems to me a valuable way to engage
+with the problems for intellectual work posed by the advent of the
+computer.</p>
+<p>
+But I think I detect another theme that lies beneath what Stallman has
+been saying and that isn't really directly about computers at all, but
+more broadly about questions of democratic authority and the power
+that government and corporations increasingly exercise over our lives.
+This populist and anti-corporate side to Stallman's discourse is
+nourishing but also reductive, potentially simplifying. And it is
+also perhaps overly idealistic. For example, how would a novelist or
+a poet or a songwriter or a musician or the author of an academic
+textbook survive in this brave new world where people are encouraged
+but not required to pay authors. In other words, it seems to me, the
+gap between existing practice and the visionary possibilities Stallman
+speculates about is still immensely wide.</p>
+<p>
+So I'll conclude by asking if Stallman would like to expand a bit on
+certain aspects of his talk and, specifically, whether he has further
+thoughts about the way in which what we'll call “traditional
+creators” would be protected under his copyright system.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: First of all, I have to point out that we
shouldn't
+use the term “protection” to describe what copyright does.
+Copyright restricts people. The term “protection” is a
+propaganda term of the copyright-owning businesses. The term
+“protection“ means stopping something from being somehow
+destroyed. Well, I don't think a song is destroyed if there are more
+copies of it being played more. I don't think that a novel is
+destroyed if more people are reading copies of it, either. So I won't
+use that word. I think it leads people to identify with the wrong
+party.</p>
+<p>
+Also, it's a very bad idea to think about intellectual property for
+two reasons: First, it prejudges the most fundamental question in the
+area which is: How should these things be treated and should they be
+treated as a kind of property? To use the term “intellectual
+property” to describe the area is to presuppose the answer is
+“yes,” that that's the way to treat things, not some other
+way.</p>
+<p>
+Second, it encourages over-generalization. Intellectual property is a
+catch-all for several different legal systems with independent origins
+such as, copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and some other
+things as well. They are almost completely different; they have
+nothing in common. But people who hear the term “intellectual
+property” are led to a false picture where they imagine that
+there's a general principle of intellectual property that was applied
+to specific areas, so they assume that these various areas of the law
+are similar. This leads not only to confused thinking about what is
+right to do, it leads people to fail to understand what the law
+actually says because they suppose that the copyright law and patent
+law and trademark law are similar, when, in fact, they are totally
+different.</p>
+<p>
+So if you want to encourage careful thinking and clear understanding
+of what the law says, avoid the term “intellectual
+property.” Talk about copyrights. Or talk about patents. Or
+talk about trademarks or whichever subject you want to talk about.
+But don't talk about intellectual property. Opinion about
+intellectual property almost has to be a foolish one. I don't have an
+opinion about intellectual property. I have opinions about copyrights
+and patents and trademarks, and they're different. I came to them
+through different thought processes because those systems of law are
+totally different.</p>
+<p>
+Anyway, I made that digression, but it's terribly important.</p>
+<p>
+So let me now get to the point. Of course, we can't see now how well
+it would work, whether it would work to ask people to pay money
+voluntarily to the authors and musicians they love. One thing that's
+obvious is that how well such a system would work is proportional to
+the number of people who are participating in the network, and that
+number, we know, is going to increase by an order of magnitude over a
+number of years. If we tried it today, it might fail, and that
+wouldn't prove anything because with ten times as many people
+participating, it might work.</p>
+<p>
+The other thing is, we do not have this digital cash payment system;
+so we can't really try it today. You could try to do something a
+little bit like it. There are services you can sign up for where you
+can pay money to someone — things like PayPal. But before you
+can pay anyone through PayPal, you have to go through a lot of
+rigmarole and give them personal information about you, and they
+collect records of whom you pay. Can you trust them not to misuse
+that?</p>
+<p>
+So the dollar might not discourage you, but the trouble it takes to
+pay might discourage you. The whole idea of this is that it should be
+as easy as falling off a log to pay when you get the urge, so that
+there's nothing to discourage you except the actual amount of money.
+And if that's small enough, why should it discourage you. We know,
+though, that fans can really love musicians, and we know that
+encouraging fans to copy and redistribute the music has been done by
+some bands that were, and are, quite successful like the
+“Grateful Dead.” They didn't have any trouble making a
+living from their music because they encouraged fans to tape it and
+copy the tapes. They didn't even lose their record sales.</p>
+<p>
+We are gradually moving from the age of the printing press to the age
+of the computer network, but it's not happening in a day. People are
+still buying lots of records, and that will probably continue for many
+years — maybe forever. As long as that continues, simply having
+copyrights that still apply to commercial sales of records ought to do
+about as good a job of supporting musicians as it does today. Of
+course, that's not very good, but, at least, it won't get any
+worse.</p>
+<p>
+<b>DISCUSSION</b>:</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: [A comment and question about free downloading
and
+about Stephen King's attempt to market one of his novels serially over
+the web.]</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Yes, it's interesting to know what he did and what
+happened. When I first heard about that, I was elated. I thought,
+maybe he was taking a step towards a world that is not based on trying
+to maintain an iron grip on the public. Then I saw that he had
+actually written to ask people to pay. To explain what he did, he was
+publishing a novel as a serial, by installments, and he said,
+“If I get enough money, I'll release more.” But the
+request he wrote was hardly a request. It brow-beat the reader. It
+said, “If you don't pay, then you're evil. And if there are too
+many of you who are evil, then I'm just going to stop writing
+this.”</p>
+<p>
+Well, clearly, that's not the way to make the public feel like sending
+you money. You've got to make them love you, not fear you.</p>
+<p>
+<b>SPEAKER</b>: The details were that he required a certain
percentage
+— I don't know the exact percentage, around 90% sounds correct
+— of people to send a certain amount of money, which, I believe,
+was a dollar or two dollars, or somewhere in that order of magnitude.
+You had to type in your name and your e-mail address and some other
+information to get to download it and if that percentage of people was
+not reached after the first chapter, he said that he would not release
+another chapter. It was very antagonistic to the public downloading
+it.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Isn't the scheme where there's no copyright but
people are
+asked to make voluntary donations open to abuse by people
+plagiarizing?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No. That's not what I proposed. Remember, I'm
proposing
+that there should be copyright covering commercial distribution and
+permitting only verbatim redistribution non-commercially. So anyone
+who modified it to put in a pointer to his website, instead of a
+pointer to the real author's website, would still be infringing the
+copyright and could be sued exactly as he could be sued today.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: I see. So you're still imagining a world in
which there is
+copyright?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Yes. As I've said, for those kinds of works.
I'm not
+saying that everything should be permitted. I'm proposing to reduce
+copyright powers, not abolish them.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: I guess one question that occurred to me while you
+were speaking, Richard, and, again, now when you're responding here to
+this question is why you don't consider the ways in which the
+computer, itself, eliminates the middle men completely — in the
+way that Stephen King refused to do — and might establish a
+personal relationship.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, they can and, in fact, this voluntary
donation
+is one.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: You think of that as not involving going through
a
+publisher at all?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely not. I hope it won't, you see, because
+the publishers exploit the authors terribly. When you ask the
+publishers' representatives about this, they say, “Well, yes, if
+an author or if a band doesn't want to go through us, they shouldn't
+be legally required to go through us.” But, in fact, they're
+doing their utmost to set it up so that will not be feasible. For
+instance, they're proposing restricted copying media formats and in
+order to publish in these formats, you'll have to go through the big
+publishers because they won't tell anyone else how to do it. So
+they're hoping for a world where the players will play these formats,
+and in order to get anything that you can play on those players, it'll
+have to come through the publishers.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>So, in fact, while there's no
+law against an author or a musician publishing directly, it won't be
+feasible. There's also the lure of maybe hitting it rich. They say,
+“We'll publicize you and maybe you'll hit it as rich as the
+Beatles.” Take your pick of some very successful group and, of
+course, only a tiny fraction of musicians are going to have that
+happen. But they may be drawn by that into signing contracts that
+will lock them down forever.</p>
+<p>
+Publishers tend to be very bad at respecting their contracts with
+authors. For instance, book contracts typically have said that if a
+book goes out of print, the rights revert to the author, and
+publishers have generally not been very good about living up to that
+clause. They often have to be forced. Well, what they're starting to
+do now is use electronic publication as an excuse to say that it's
+never going out of print; so they never have to give the rights back.
+Their idea is, when the author has no clout, get him to sign up and
+from then on, he has no power; it's only the publisher that has the
+power.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Would it be good to have free licenses for
various kinds of
+works that protect for every user the freedom to copy them in whatever
+is the appropriate way for that kind of work?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, people are working on this. But for
non-functional
+works, one thing doesn't substitute for another. Let's look at a
+functional kind of work, say, a word processor. Well, if somebody
+makes a free word processor, you can use that; you don't need the
+nonfree word processors. But I wouldn't say that one free song
+substitutes for all the nonfree songs or that a one free novel
+substitutes for all the nonfree novels. For those kinds of works,
+it's different. So what I think we simply have to do is to recognize
+that these laws do not deserve to be respected. It's not wrong to
+share with your neighbor, and if anyone tries to tell you that you
+cannot share with your neighbor, you should not listen to him.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: With regard to the functional works, how do you,
in your
+own thinking, balance out the need for abolishing the copyright with
+the need for economic incentives in order to have these functional
+works developed?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, what we see is, first of all, that this
+economic incentive is a lot less necessary than people have been
+supposing. Look at the free software movement where we have over
+100,000 part-time volunteers developing free software. We also see
+that there are other ways to raise money for this which are not based
+on stopping the public from copying and modifying these works.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>That's
+the interesting lesson of the free software movement. Aside from the
+fact that it gives you a way you can use a computer and keep your
+freedom to share and cooperate with other people, it also shows us
+that this negative assumption that people would never do these things
+unless they are given special powers to force people to pay them is
+simply wrong. A lot of people will do these things. Then if you look
+at, say, the writing of monographs which serve as textbooks in many
+fields of science except for the ones that are very basic, the authors
+are not making money out of that.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>We now have a free encyclopedia
+project which is, in fact, a commercial-free encyclopedia project, and
+it's making progress. We had a project for a GNU encyclopedia but we
+merged it into the commercial project when they adopted our license.
+In January, they switched to the GNU Free Documentation License for
+all the articles in their encyclopedia. So we said, “Well,
+let's join forces with them and urge people to contribute to
+them.” It's called “Nupedia,” and you can find a
+link to it, if you look at http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia. So here
+we've extended the community development of a free base of useful
+knowledge from software to encyclopedia. I'm pretty confident now
+that in all these areas of functional work, we don't need that
+economic incentive to the point where we have to mess up the use of
+these works.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: Well, what about the other two
categories?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: For the other two classes of work, I don't know.
I
+don't know whether people will write some day novels without worrying
+about whether they make money from it. In a post-scarcity society, I
+guess they would. Maybe what we need to do in order to reach the
+post-scarcity society is to get rid of the corporate control over the
+economy and the laws. So, in effect, it's a chicken-or-the-egg
+problem, you know. Which do we do first? How do we get the world
+where people don't have to desperately get money except by removing
+the control by business? And how can we remove the control by
+business except — Anyway, I don't know, but that's why I'm
+trying to propose first a compromise copyright system and, second, the
+voluntary payment supported by a compromise copyright system as a way
+to provide a revenue stream to the people who write those works.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: How would you really expect to implement this
compromise
+copyright system under the chokehold of corporate interests on
+American politicians due to their campaign-finance system?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: It beats me. I wish I knew. It's a terribly
hard
+problem. If I knew how to solve that problem, I would solve it and
+nothing in the world could make me prouder.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>:. How do you fight the corporate control?
Because when you
+look at these sums of money going into corporate lobbying in the court
+case, it is tremendous. I think the DECS case that you're talking
+about is costing something like a million-and-a-half dollars on the
+defense side. Lord knows what it's costing on the corporate side. Do
+you have any idea how to deal with these huge sums of money?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I have a suggestion. If I were to suggest
totally
+boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion. They
+might consider it too radical. So I would like to make a slightly
+different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end,
+and that is, don't go to a movie unless you have some substantial
+reason to think it's good. Now this will lead in practice to almost
+the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies. In extension,
+it's almost the same but, in intention, it's very different. Now I've
+noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to
+do with whether they think the movies are good. So if you change
+that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason
+to think it's good, you'll take away a lot of their money.</p>
+<p>
+<b>THORBURN</b>: One way to understand all of this discourse
today, I
+think, is to recognize that whenever radical, potentially transforming
+technologies appear in society, there's a struggle over who controls
+them. We today are repeating what has happened in the past. So from
+this angle, there may not be a reason for despair, or even pessimism,
+about what may occur in the longer run. But, in the shorter term,
+struggles over the control of text and images, over all forms of
+information are likely to be painful and extensive.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>For example, as a
+teacher of media, my access to images has been restricted in recent
+years in a way that had never been in place before. If I write an
+essay in which I want to use still images, even from films, they are
+much harder to get permission to use, and the prices charged to use
+those still images are much higher — even when I make arguments
+about intellectual inquiry and the <span
class="removed"><del><strong>the</strong></del></span> legal category of
“fair
+use.” So I think, in this moment of extended transformation, the
+longer-term prospects may, in fact, not be as disturbing as what's
+happening in the shorter term. But in any case, we need to understand
+the whole of our contemporary experience as a renewed version of a
+struggle over the control of technological resources that is a
+recurring principle of Western society.</p>
+<p>
+It's also essential to understand that the history of older
+technologies is itself a complicated matter. The impact of the
+printing press in Spain, for example, is radically different from its
+impact in England or in France.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: One of the things that bothers me when I hear
+discussions of copyright is that often they start off with, “We
+want a 180-degree change. We want to do away with any sorts of
+control.” It seems to me that part of what lay under the three
+categories that were suggested is an acknowledgement that there is
+some wisdom to copyright. Some of the critics of the way copyright is
+going now believe that, in fact, it ought to be backed up and function
+much more like patent and trademarks in terms of its duration. I
+wonder if our speaker would comment on that as a strategy.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I agree that shortening the time span of
copyright is a
+good idea. There is absolutely no need in terms of encouraging
+publication for a possibility of copyrights' lasting as much as 150
+years, which, in some cases, it can under present law. Now the
+companies were saying that a 75-year copyright on a work made for hire
+was not long enough to make possible the production of their works.
+I'd like to challenge those companies to present projected balance
+sheets for 75 years from now to back up that contention. What they
+really wanted was just to be able to extend the copyrights on the old
+works, so that they can continue restricting the use of them. But how
+you can encourage greater production of works in the 1920s by
+extending copyright today escapes me, unless they have a time machine
+somewhere. Of course, in one of their movies, they had a time
+machine. So maybe that's what affected their thinking.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Have you given thought to extending the concept of
+“fair use,” and are there any nuances there that you might
+care to lay out for us?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, the idea of giving everyone permission for
+non-commercial verbatim copying of two kinds of works, certainly, may
+be thought of as extending what fair use is. It's bigger than what's
+fair use currently. If your idea is that the public trades away
+certain freedoms to get more progress, then you can draw the line at
+various, different places. Which freedoms does the public trade away
+and which freedoms does the public keep?</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: To extend the conversation for just a moment, in
certain
+entertainment fields, we have the concept of a public presentation.
+So, for example, copyright does not prevent us from singing Christmas
+carols seasonally but it prevents the public performance. And I'm
+wondering if it might be useful to think about instead of expanding
+fair use to unlimited, non-commercial, verbatim copying, to something
+less than that but more than the present concept of fair use.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: I used to think that that might be enough, and
then Napster
+convinced me otherwise because Napster is used by its users for
+non-commercial, verbatim redistribution. The Napster server, itself,
+is a commercial activity but the people who are actually putting
+things up are doing so non-commercially, and they could have done so
+on their websites just as easily. The tremendous excitement about,
+interest in, and use of Napster shows that that's very useful. So I'm
+convinced now that people should have the right to publicly
+non-commercially, redistributed, verbatim copies of everything.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: One analogy that was recently suggested to me for
the
+whole Napster question was the analogy of the public library. I
+suppose some of you who have heard the Napster arguments have heard
+this analogy. I'm wondering if you would comment on it. The
+defenders of people who say Napster should continue and there
+shouldn't be restrictions on it sometimes say something like this:
+“When folks go into the public library and borrow a book,
+they're not paying for it, and it can be borrowed dozens of times,
+hundreds of times, without any additional payment. Why is Napster any
+different?”</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, it's not exactly the same. But it should
be pointed
+out that the publishers want to transform public libraries into
+pay-per-use, retail outlets. So they're against public libraries.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Can these ideas about copyright suggest any
ideas for
+certain issues about patent law such as making cheap, generic drugs
+for use in Africa?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No, there's absolutely no similarity. The issues
of
+patents are totally different from the issues of copyrights. The idea
+that they have something to do with each other is one of the
+unfortunate consequences of using the term “intellectual
+property” and encouraging people to try to lump these issues
+together because, as you've heard, I've been talking about issues in
+which the price of a copy is not the crucial thing. But what's the
+crucial issue about making AIDS drugs for Africa? It's the price,
+nothing but the price.</p>
+<p>
+Now the issue I've been talking about arises because digital
+information technology gives every user the ability to make copies.
+Well, there's nothing giving us all the ability to make copies of
+medicines. I don't have the ability to copy some medicine that I've
+got. In fact, nobody does; that's not how they're made. Those
+medicines can only be made in expensive factories and they are made in
+expensive centralized factories, whether they're generic drugs or
+imported from the U.S. Either way, they're going to be made in a
+small number of factories, and the issues are simply how much do they
+cost and are they available at a price that people in Africa can
+afford.</p>
+<p>
+So that's a tremendously important issue, but it's a totally different
+issue. There's just one area where an issue arises with patents that
+is actually similar to these issues of freedom to copy, and that is in
+the area of agriculture. Because there are certain patented things
+that can be copies, more or less — namely, living things. They
+copy themselves when they reproduce. It's not necessarily exact
+copying; they re-shuffle the genes. But the fact is, farmers for
+millennia have been making use of this capacity of the living things
+they grow to copy themselves. Farming is, basically, copying the
+things that you grew and you keep copying them every year. When plant
+and animal varieties get patented, when genes are patented and used in
+them, the result is that farmers are being prohibited from doing
+this.</p>
+<p>
+There is a farmer in Canada who had a patented variety growing on his
+field and he said, “I didn't do that deliberately. The pollen
+blew, and the wind in those genes got into my stock of plants.”
+And he was told that that doesn't matter; he has to destroy them
+anyway. It was an extreme example of how much government can side
+with a monopolist.</p>
+<p>
+So I believe that, following the same principles that I apply to
+copying things on your computer, farmers should have an unquestioned
+right to save their seeds and breed their livestock. Maybe you could
+have patents covering seed companies, but they shouldn't cover
+farmers.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: There's more to making a model successful than
just the
+licensing. Can you speak to that?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely. Well, you know, I don't know the
+answers. But part of what I believe is crucial for developing free,
+functional information is idealism. People have to recognize that
+it's important for this information to be free, that when the
+information is free, you can make full use of it. When it's
+restricted, you can't. You have to recognize that the nonfree
+information is an attempt to divide them and keep them helpless and
+keep them down. Then they can get the idea, “Let's work
+together to produce the information we want to use, so that it's not
+under the control of some powerful person who can dictate to us what
+we can do.”</p>
+<p>
+This tremendously boosts it. But I don't know how much it will work
+in various different areas, but I think that in the area of education,
+when you're looking for textbooks, I think I see a way it can be done.
+There are a lot of teachers in the world, teachers who are not at
+prestigious universities — maybe they're in high-school; maybe
+they're in college — where they don't write and publish a lot of
+things and there's not a tremendous demand for them. But a lot of
+them are smart. A lot of them know their subjects well and they could
+write textbooks about lots of subjects and share them with the world
+and receive a tremendous amount of appreciation from the people who
+will have learned from them.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: That's what I proposed. But the funny thing is,
I do
+know the history of education. That's what I do — educational,
+electronic media projects. I couldn't find an example. Do you know
+of one?</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: No, I don't. I started proposing this free
encyclopedia
+and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would
+probably take a decade to get things rolling. Now we already have an
+encyclopedia that is rolling. So things are going faster than I
+hoped. I think what's needed is for a few people to start writing
+some free textbooks. Write one about whatever is your favorite
+subject or write a fraction of one. Write a few chapters of one and
+challenge other people to write the rest.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: Actually what I was looking for is something
even more than
+that. What's important in your kind of structure is somebody that
+creates an infrastructure to which everybody else can contribute.
+There isn't a K through 12 infrastructure out there in any place for a
+contribution for materials.</p>
+<p>
+I can get information from lots of places but it's not released under
+free licenses, so I can't use it to make a free textbook.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Actually, copyright doesn't cover the facts. It
only
+covers the way it's written. So you can learn a field from anywhere
+and then write a textbook, and you can make that textbook free, if you
+want.</p>
+<p>
+<b>QUESTION</b>: But I can't write by myself all the textbooks
that a
+student needs going through school.</p>
+<p>
+<b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, it's true. And I didn't write a whole, free
+operating system, either. I wrote some pieces and invited other
+people to join me by writing other pieces. So I set an example. I
+said, “I'm going in this direction. Join me and we'll get
+there.” And enough people joined in that we got there. So if
+you think in terms of, how am I going to get this whole gigantic job
+done, it can be daunting. So the point is, don't look at it that way.
+Think in terms of taking a step and realizing that after you've taken
+a step, other people will take more steps and, together, it will get
+the job done eventually.</p>
+<p>
+Assuming that humanity doesn't wipe itself out, the work we do today
+to produce the free educational infrastructure, the free learning
+resource for the world, that will be useful for as long as humanity
+exists. If it takes 20 years to get it done, so what? So don't think
+in terms of the size of the whole job. Think in terms of the piece
+that you're going to do. That will show people it can be done, and so
+others will do other pieces.</p>
+
+
+<hr />
+<blockquote id="fsfs"><p class="big">This speech is published
+in <a
href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
+Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
+M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></blockquote>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:address@hidden"><address@hidden></a>.
+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>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:address@hidden">
+ <address@hidden></a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
+ our web pages, see <a
+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a>. -->
+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND <span class="removed"><del><strong>3.0
US.</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>4.0.</em></ins></span> Please do NOT change or
remove this
+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
+ Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
+ years, as long as each year in the range is in fact a copyrightable
+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ 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, 2008, 2012, <span
class="removed"><del><strong>2014</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>2014, 2018</em></ins></span> Free Software
Foundation, Inc.</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+<span
class="removed"><del><strong>href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/">Creative</strong></del></span>
+<span
class="inserted"><ins><em>href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative</em></ins></span>
+Commons <span class="removed"><del><strong>Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United
States</strong></del></span> <span
class="inserted"><ins><em>Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0
International</em></ins></span> License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2018/03/23 19:28:49 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+</pre></body></html>
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