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Richard Stallman Talks On Copyright Vs. the People
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Jul 20, 2007 02:32 AM
from the it-takes-a-village dept.
from the it-takes-a-village dept.
holden writes "Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved over time from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them. In keeping with his wishes to use open formats, the talk and QA are available in ogg theora only."
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oh boy (Score:2)
Whoa! SPEED! (Score:3)
One thing I don't get... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Informative)
Because you haven't typed one. And neither has anyone else.
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Partial poor quality transcript (Score:5, Informative)
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Complete Transcript [Draft] (Score:3, Informative)
[41:55]
[Stallman drinks]
So, that's whats going on in the area of movies and video. But we can see attempts to restrict us in music, as well. For many years, some apparent compact disks aren't real compact disks, they're corrupt disks. Because they're designed not to be standard, not to be proprly readable with your computer. Sony got in a lot of trouble, although not as much as it should have, for its scheme to produce corrupt disks, because Son
choice of license (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:choice of license (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
He probably don't want his detractors to have fun cutting something together from the clip that gives people the impression that he said things he didn't say. For recorded speeches, this is a very reasonable demand.
Re:choice of license (Score:4, Insightful)
In the talk, he separates works into three categories: Functional works, artistic works, and position statements (like this lecture, where he gives his personal opinion on a topic). For position statements, he thinks it's reasonable for authors to be able to restrict modification - since modifications would mostly just allow people to mis-represent the opinions of others.
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I attended (Score:5, Informative)
Am happy to say: I was there! :)
It was a good lecture, Stallman has some interesting ideas on what should be done. In particular he talks about how society and copyright never clashed before as the public never had the ability to create commercial grade copies of content (before the advent of the PC). He then goes on to explain a way that copyright can be reformed, including some possible categories for works (based upon their usefulness and application within society). Bit of a spoiler: the works that are instructional (cook books, car manuals, GNU+Linux howtos etc.) should be totally Free, but art for arts sake should have a 5-10 year copyright. There are many more details that you should watch the video to find out about (plus my memory of the event is a little vague and the video hasn't downloaded yet).
The talk drifted at the start and in the middle, with blather about GNU+Linux and the evils of Vista; although some of the Vista evils are on-topic, Stallman did lose his way a bit on the subject. Otherwise it was damn good, well worth going to and/or watching on your OGG player!
Re: (Score:2)
What does that mean? The public certainly had the opportunity to make commercial-grade copies of content before the advent of the PC, as American publishers routinely mass-produced books which proved popular in England. Even in ancient Rome there was the production of commercial-grade copies, when the recitals of popular
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Publishing used to be much cheaper than it is now. Tsvetaeva and Whitman, just to name two poets of yore, had the first printings of their poetry done at their own expense, since the price was low. If the common man say a profit in reproducing something, he could easily undertake it.
Re:I attended (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument RMS puts forward is that Copyright was a good deal for the public when the only people it affected was a small percentage of the population.. when it was seen as a restriction on trade. Now, with the PC, we all copy, all the time and Copyright is just in the way. It's no longer just a restriction on trade.. it's a restriction on private acts and requires intrusive policing to enforce.
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Re: (Score:3)
Maybe they didn't change the trend, but they certainly made it orders of magnitude easier to 'manufacture' (cp or right-click Copy) works.
That's the point though: not everyone owned their own printing press. While publishing may have been ch
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There was a Pope who was greatly loved by all of his followers, a man
who led with gentleness, faith and wisdom. His passing was grieved by the
entire world, Catholic or not.
As the Pope approached the gates of heaven, it was Saint Peter who greeted
him in a firm embrace.
"Welcome your holiness, your dedication and unselfishness in serving your
fellow man during you life has earned you great stature in heaven. You
may pass through t
Re:I attended (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more a matter of being fair (and practical). Copyright doesn't loose value like material property. With copyright people can still make money off of work they have long since done. It's bizarre. Laws are easy to create, and the non-power brokers like me have no defacto say. Five years is plenty fair IMHO for getting paid for (in some cases a few hours worth of work), over and over again for the rest of one's life.
I'm sure, all-things-being-equal, RMS wouldn't mind having an "artificial limit" placed on the GPL, but that would be assuming a fair and equal playing field.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good question. I know it's not me. In the US it's members of congress who get lobbied by the copyright holders (which usually aren't even the creators of the work, but just the marketers). Yes "five years is plenty fair" is a bit flippant, but think of it more as an example of something that is MORE fair than, say, fifty or 70 years after an authors death. 10 years maybe, or even 20? ... I'm just aiming at something a little more realistic and intuitive than what th
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think he/she was definitely talking about future "to be created" work as opposed to existing stuff. Maybe the intent was to suggest that the set of instructional works on a particular topic would be of less quality overall. There would certainly be smaller body of material available. I'd sort of consider that "lower quality", even though the quality of an individual work might be ~ the same.
"The value of a manual (to the company
For all you Windows users (Score:5, Informative)
If someone did an ogg vorbis (just the sound) that would be good for us to listen to on the go, the main video file is 686.3 MB which would mean I would have to ditch a lot of stuff to get it on my rockbox.
nothing new under the Sun (Score:4, Interesting)
UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone who saw the lecture agreed with the contents. A counterpoint can be found here. [slashdot.org]
I didn't write that counterpoint, but there's one thing the author and I agree on: Richard Stallman is a lot more crazy in person. One guy in the audience asked how he was supposed to pay for his university education by releasing free software. Stallman didn't really give him an answer, he just told the student that he didn't have to go to school, and he had no right to release closed source software in an attempt to earn money. Stallman has compared closed source software to "a crime against humanity", yes?
I talked to Stallman after the lecture. I asked him how he paid the mortgage after leaving MIT in 1984. He said that that he's never had a mortgage and "he lives cheaply". I later heard that he basically squatted on the MIT campus.
See, here's the problem with Stallman's philosophies: they're highly incompatible with the status quo, and there's no clear path for change. If you want people to do $Y instead of $X, $Y has to be relatively pin-compatible with $X. Telling people to write free software is well and good, but your paradigm isn't going to have much success if it also requires programmers to buy a house, get married, and otherwise have a normal life.
On a related note, I also asked Stallman what he thought of the wedding photography industry. For those of you who don't know, typical wedding photographers cost over a thousand dollars, show up at your wedding to take pictures, and then make you pay through the nose for prints. They don't even give you the copyright, if you want more prints you have to go back to the photographer! One must shop around to find a photographer who'll actually give you the digital originals. Anyway, I asked Stallman if he thought this was analogous to what was happening in the software world, and he said no. He thought closed source software was a greater imposition on freedom than holding wedding memories hostage.
The man is too close to his particular pet cause.
D'oh! Wrong link! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I was at the lecture at U of Waterloo and he explicitly said the opposite. He said that he is fine with software-for-money (which in any case does not preclude its being free-as-in-speech), and in fact is even fine with custom or in-house software -- which he argued is the vast majority of paid software -- not being made publicly available.
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Do I have to make a stupid analogy or do you get why?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You've been modded as funny, but somehow I don't think you're joking.
Sadly, the only analogies I could think of involve the Catholic Church, but I'm not sure they'd support your point.
So yeah, you're probably going to have to come up with an analogy.
Anyway, sure, Stallman can call whatever he wants amoral. My point is, if he wants a wide audience to actual
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're a whaler and people tell you to stop whaling your response is most likely going to be "but how will I feed my family?" And the response will likely be "look, I know you've been a whaler all your life, and I know your whole family were whalers for generations and generations, but whales are becoming extinct and to continue whaling them into extinction is just wrong!" To which the whaler may reply "you didn't answer my question!"
It's irrelevant. It's his problem. Go become a fisherman.. or drive an oil tanker, err, cruise ship, or something.
Parent
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you didn't want to come up with an analogy in the first place, I know you wouldn't appreciate it if I picked holes in it. So I won't.
Problem #1: There are some things generally considered amoral by the population. Murder. Rape. Hunting a species to extinction" Sure, we can get behind that, throw that on the list. "Closed source software" isn't something that leaps into people's heads, and even if it did I doubt most people would put it in the top fifty. "That guy who drives past all the waiting cars and then cuts into the turning lane" would likely rank higher than "closed source software".
Richard Stallman is not the pope of PCs. His saying closed source is immoral doesn't mean anything. You may agree with him, and I agree that closed source isn't preferable. But while most people mind murder and rape and extinction of cute animals most people don't give a damn about software. For them it's a means to an end, and nothing more. Hence our current situation.
Problem #2: I'm pro free software, but think Stallman is going about promoting it in the wrong way. He's literally giving talks to the programmers of tomorrow and saying, "Don't release closed source. It's immoral." Does he offer alternatives? Somewhat - he did say that one can program for open source on commission, but can one earn a good living at it? He's hardly a proof of principle himself. I know there are examples and whole business models, but he didn't talk about them.
We're talking about two different things. You're assuming that average people, when faced with two options, will pick the difficult one with no benefit to themselves, magically listening to an inconvenient person telling them that the easy option is "amoral". I'm more concerned with how Stallman will get people to actually listen to him. At this rate, he's bound to have as much success as the anti-whalers. [newscientist.com]
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Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Informative)
Are we not confusing IMmoral with Amoral? One being opposite to those values we consider moral, and the other being unconcerned with morality altogether?
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Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, most people don't like thinking of themselves as being someone who ignores their beliefs and lives an immoral life. So it's easy to convince yourself that you don't really believe in any of the RMS crap anyway. Especially if there's no negative repercussions.
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Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
I was sat directly behind the guy who asked that question and don't remember it like that at all. To me it seemed like a case of: 'ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.' It's stupid because he was mixing up Free (as in Freedom) with free (as in beer). It's a common misconception.
Personally when Stallman was answering I really wanted to shout out: 'I get paid for developing Free software!' Which I do, now seeing this weird post on /. makes me wish I had shouted out. Also it was a lecture about copyright in general, not Free software in particular.
So please stop spreading FUD and mis-conceptions about Free software. If that chap in the audience can't make Free software pay then why the heck are Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell et al. still in business?! Just because Stallman's a dirty hippy, doesn't mean everyone in the business is. Maybe, just maybe money isn't important to him? Why are you judging him to be a failure just because he hasn't made millions from his ideas?
It was a stupid question, that's why Stallman had a problem answering it, I also don't remember him answering in the way you've described, but will check later.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually that is just a cop out from Stallman. If you read his texts he is often a proponent of "free beer" software and attacks people who sell software, but when you take him to task the cops out and says "you don't understand I was talking about Free as in Freedom". Bollocks! No he wasn't. In fact most of his fights with Linus are precisely about. Linux is free as in Freedom and this irks Stallm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, the GPL is what its creator says it is. Why should anyone care about your arbitrary characterization--particular without any justification whatsoever? Consider the definition of "letter" and "spirit" and note my emphasis:
The letter of the law versus the spirit of the law is an idiomatic antithesis. When one obeys the letter of the law but not the spirit, he is obeying the literal interpretation of the words (the "lette
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, I stated a whole counterargument, with one piece of advice mixed in: "Please use your brain."
I am sorry if that hurts your feelings. However, my counterargument otherwise remains unchallenged by your appeal to pity, just like the other challenges you have received.
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's more important: something that matters a little to a lot of people, or matters a lot to a few people?
Your argument is flawed, and here's why: according to your logic, closed source software is more of a crime than the murder of one of your family. I mean, who's going to miss your wife
"In keeping with his wishes" (Score:3, Funny)
But RMS, information wants to be free, and this is just another form for it to freely take!
Change the relationship (Score:5, Insightful)
Not being able to force artists into loan sharking arrangements with the labels would mean, however that all the labels as they exist now are effectively and instantly bankrupt. Yay. Without this leverage, The artist writes contracts with agents, and grants his or her managers a piece of his copyright for say, five years. So, the more tracks of mine they sell, the more they make. The more concerts I give to the bigger audiences, the more money they make. But the artist is in control. He has the copyright. I might spare them 10% of revenues, or 50% if I'm a newbie. But it will revert to me.
Because, after all, what function do the huge conglomerated labels have? They used to provide money for manufacture and distribution. They no longer have any significant burden, since once the final track is laid down, all they have to do is sell copies for more than it costs to download. And they were loan sharks. Game over. Finita la commedia.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:anime industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Fansubbing is illegal the way it's most often done. They pirate TV programs with added text and then give them to hundreds or thousands of people. Now the companies could start being assholes and try to shut these groups down, but instead they have a gentleman's contract. Subbers stop subbing when a series is licenced and a blind eye is turned to the subbers.
In this way companies learn what is popular and get free market research, fans get what they want when they want it and then in an ideal world the fans buy the official releases to support the original companies and the ones who licenced the anime.
So basically, it's a good way to show copyright isn't always the answer. If you allow people leeway they will repay you back at a later date by supporting you. One could argue fansubs work as the perfect advertisement for merchandise to people outside of Japan and if copyright was put down on it, it would hurt the industry more than if they ignore it.
So anime is a good example of copyright done correctly in a lot of people's opinion.
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That's how I bought fraps. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly how I bought fraps. When it first came out I was a poor student and couldn't afford the proggy. But I've tried it and it just kicks ass.
Years later, when I become a poor designer, I shelled out the $40, and send the author a mail giving props. If I had never tried fraps I bet I would just pirate it to "see" how good it is and ended up not paying. But to revisit the site after all these years and see this
Re:That's how I bought fraps. (Score:4, Interesting)
What we ended up doing is something rather unique: we sell the content we create, levels, voice acting, so on and so forth, and the game engine (including the editor we used to make the game) is free. Because DROD is a niche game that doesn't appeal to everybody, this works out well: players can play and create user-made levels to their heart's content, and most will enjoy the game enough to want to see 'everything', and to support the creators, so they'll pay for the stuff we create. It also helps build a community around the game. (We also let people get full versions of the game for other operating systems for free for the same reason - they've paid for the content, not the code they play it on.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So you get several approaches from it, the engine continues to be maintained (see FuhQuake and QuakeForge) for people still playing the original game and it's mods, but commercial games can still be created using the engine as a pre-developed platform allowing developers
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And actually on some of them, the fan subbing is a hell of a lot better than the actual subtitles on the DVD. I mean, common, if the characters say a name (in English even), then should the subtitle not reflect what was said? Or they could at least be consistent in the same conversation and keep the same name on what they are talking about.
Well, guess we can not expect a company
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
if the characters say a name (in English even), then should the subtitle not reflect what was said?
There are several reasons a name might be mentioned in the Japanese dialog and not be used in the English translation. For one, Japanese speakers tend to go out of their way to avoid using second-person pronouns like "anata", so they will often speak in the third person about the person they are talking to. In English this would sound bizarre, and we would just use a word like "you". Also, the level of f
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about fansubing per se, but on the realm of scanlations (scanning of mangas with fan translations) I do have strong evidence. In the letters section of a recent volume of the Brazilian edition of Karekano, published by the local branch of Panini, Elza Keiko, editor of the whole manga department, replied to a reader's lett
Re:Fizzy Pop? (Score:4, Funny)
This is how he can have a totally polar draconian view of commercial software. He doesn't have to rely on selling it to make a living. And since he doesn't have to win over customers ever, he doesn't have to act tactfully in public. I mean, I rarely dress up, but I at least shave, bathe, comb my friggin hair and act polite when guests/customers are around. It isn't selling out to have proper manners and hygiene...
That said, copyright is hardly as big a problem as people make it out to be. The DMCA [and similar laws] are, but they're not required for copyright to exist and be useful. And at anyrate I'd worry more about patents [especially on math and software] then copyrights.
Tom
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullshit.
Companies MAY be successful as you say, but it's certainly not as categorical as you state.
Indeed, your description of how things work may be valid only in your Platonic Form World; down here on Terra, companies are ruled by the spiritual grandchilden of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Hearst. In this ins