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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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Richard Stallman Talks On Copyright Vs. the People
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anime industry (Score:1)
Re:anime industry (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday September 19 2004, @10:03PM)
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.
Re:That's how I bought fraps. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.floodcontrol.net/)
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.)
oh boy (Score:2)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
You see, there's these corporations... (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @01:01AM)
Apparently there aren't people involved. Just faceless corporations. It's so much easier to raise up some good old fashioned rabble that way, I suppose.
One thing I don't get... (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.ameyer17.com/)
Re:One thing I don't get... (Score:4, Informative)
Because you haven't typed one. And neither has anyone else.
Partial poor quality transcript (Score:5, Informative)
choice of license (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.holdenkarau.com/)
Re:choice of license (Score:5, Informative)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
Re:choice of license (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.ferrus.net/)
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.
I attended (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.apaddedcell.com/)
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:I attended (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
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.
Re:I attended (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @10:58PM)
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.
For all you Windows users (Score:5, Informative)
(http://commandline.org.uk/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 30, @05:49AM)
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)
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Funny)
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Do I have to make a stupid analogy or do you get why?
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
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.
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]
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 16 2005, @07:11AM)
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.
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?
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.apaddedcell.com/)
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.
Re:UW University students' counterpoint (Score:4, Funny)
(http://fbjon.deviantart.com/gallery/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 21 2005, @09:56AM)
"In keeping with his wishes" (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.mandible-games.com/)
But RMS, information wants to be free, and this is just another form for it to freely take!
We appreciate what you've done (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.enderandrew.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 03, @11:44PM)
Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years. (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.nicomorrison.com/)
Stallman rocks
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.
Fizzy Pop? (Score:1)
(http://www.echelon.cx/)
Re:Fizzy Pop? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://libtom.org/)
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
Assumption (Score:2, Insightful)
I would suggest that 'promoting progress for the benefit of the public' being the only legitimate purpose of copyright requires justification.
Another possible purpose is to protect the right of the creator to be the sole beneficiary of his labour.
Points to consider include dependence on earlier work and novelty and the benefits of the creation vs. the costs of protection with respect to those who have to pay.
Why not audio only? (Score:1)
Fine, but why not provide this as Ogg Vorbis as an alternative and reduce the size by 95%? There's no slides, no demonstrations, nothing but Stallman talking and sipping whatever-it-is so the video content holds no value.
Distributed software is becoming free. (Score:2)
(http://www.gridfire.com/)
The money is moving from traditional software to software delivered as a service.
Let's assume that this trend continues and that any software you can get your hands on is both free and eventually also comes with source code.
What about the new generation of software-as-service, the stuff that will be making all the big money, like Adwords/Adsense. The software has never been distributed, does RMS believe he still has a moral right to the source code? Should everyone who writes a line of code be forced to register it in a central bank, or just give it up when asked?
If ASP/Web style software is not tackled surely you end up in a worse situation than before the Free Software movement started since you won't be able to even get the binaries let alone the source.
YouTube vs useless ogg (Score:1)
(http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/)
I'd do it, but I'm just not that interested in what Stallman has to say.
When Openness isn't Open (Score:1, Troll)
(http://kiriath-arba.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 15, @06:55AM)
To make a point Stallman seems to be compromising what should be the aims of his own movement - free flow of information and open access.
software post-scarcity (Score:2)
(http://www.karastathis.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 05 2005, @07:51PM)
Lot's of people here cannot or don't want to understand what rms talks about. You have to be able to discern some abstract concepts in a philosophy before commenting on it or on its supporters. Free software is essentially a practical way to create a post-scarcity reality in the software market. It's important to understand the importance of this achievement in order to develop an appreciation of free software.
The Right Copyright Scheme (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Bring back copyright registration. A work is only protected, if it is in a government database.
2. To register a work, you must pay a $1 fee. It gives you protection for one year.
3. You can extend the copyright indefinitely. The second year costs $2, the third year costs $4, the fourth $8 and so on.
4. When a the copyright is no longer extended, the work falls in the public domain.
That way, even the poorest artist can afford to register their work: $15 buys you protection for four full years!
Even ten years is not that much: $1023. And if you really find a money-maker, a million dollars buys you a 20-year monopoly to the income stream. And Disney should be happy: if they have something really worthwhile, a billion dollars shouldn't be too much for a 30-year exclusive arrangement.
shameless blogomotion (Score:1)
The awesome UWaterloo CS club also hosted Bjarne Stroustrup this week. Good work luring the CS talent to our little village!
Left Wing and Right Wing of software copywrites (Score:1)
Copyleft without copyright? (Score:1)
(http://www.hcs64.com/)
I didn't get a satisfactory answer out of him, something along the lines of legislating terms of the GPL. Any takers?
Ripped audio stream (Score:2)
(http://www.davidsterry.com/)
RMS's four freedoms are the evolutionary basics (Score:1)
One important point that nobody has made yet is that Freedom #1 (mutation) and #3 (selection) are the basic evolutionary rules. Evolution is the most successful principle on this planet, it has made humans out of unicellular organisms. It has made Wikipedia such a success.
While looking at the history of Windows, we can see what happens if software is not free and has a monopoly: new versions are no advancements anymore but only serve to keep the monopoly.
So not only do RMS's freedoms allow us to trust software, they will also, in the long run, make sure, that software is getting better.
Re:HAIL CAESAR, for he cometh this way (then we pi (Score:1)
Excuse me good Sir!
I consider myself to be a passable student of the Classics but you seem to be using a classical allusion of which I am unfamiliar. I would be most grateful if you could elucidate.