Transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech 357
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw has a transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech + Q&A up. Good Stuff. During the Q&A he made a good point to think about: 'We stand for free speech. We're the free speech movement of the moment. And that we have to insist upon, all the time, uncompromisingly. My dear friend, Mr. Stallman, has caused a certain amount of resistance in life by going around saying, "It's free software, it's not open source". He has a reason. This is the reason. We need to keep reminding people that what's at stake here is free speech. We need to keep reminding people that what we're doing is trying to keep the freedom of ideas in the 21st century, in a world where there are guys with little paste-it labels with price tags on it who would stick it on every idea on earth if it would make value for the shareholders. And what we have to do is to continue to reinforce the recognition that free speech in a technological society means technological free speech. I think we can do that. I think that's a deliverable message.'"
Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way you put it, we should tell who is speaking so people can assess if it's worth listening.
But I'd expect this is the purpose of the quote.
Two alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
2) If you read both posts you'll see that neither actually requires reading the article, one just says "But who is this guy", the other says "He's FSF Lawyer"
Differences (Score:0, Insightful)
Good message (Score:5, Insightful)
And I know that money talks and bullshit walks. Unless we get some thick-walleted lobbyists on our side, the souless corporations will continue to turn innovation and invention into commodities - and Open Source and Free Software will remain terms that no one but the choir ever hears.
Re:Good message (Score:2, Insightful)
Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Confusing the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:See the video version (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
It is in danger if you are not allowed to not talk about how bad the BigMac sucks or are sued when you talk about the ingredients. Or, if McDonalds sue Burger King because the whopper is similar. Or the 6 year old is sued for taking apart a whopper.
Re:The Flip Side (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it, now, right this moment? I really don't know for certain.
Could it be in the future? You bet.
Keeping the source open pretty well ensures that the software I use only serves my purposes, not anyone elses.
Soko
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Copyrights must die because FS must live (Score:3, Insightful)
Right to not remain silent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The code at the bottom of this post is illegal under the DMCA. Its very illegality violates my right to free speech, because it's only legal so long as it's closed source. That's why this is about free speech, and that's why we must protect it.
It's not closed software that's the threat to free speech, it's the attacks that are being made upon open software. You have the right to remain silent, but please leave me my right to speak.
efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net>
Thanks to Phil Carmody <fatphil@asdf.org> for additional tweaks.
Length: 434 bytes (excluding unnecessary newlines)
Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob
#define m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])<<
unsigned char x[5],y,s[2048];main(n){for(read(0,x,5);read(0,s,n
*2-k
[j],k="7Wo~'G_\216
*6^c+~y;}}
Re:Free Software? Nah. (Score:3, Insightful)
Try actually reading/listening to the speech. Moglen says precisely this. You are incredibly confused if you think any Free Software advocate considers copyright law their "enemy". The GPL fundamentally *depends* on the sanctity of copyrights.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Any philosophy would appear like a religion if you don't agree with it. That's just like saying "all you people are wrong, and why don't you just shut up with your new philosophy".
Is Free Speech in danger when McDonald's doesn't publish the recipes of their menu or when KFC keeps the 13 spices and herbs secret?
How about my favorite Italian restaurants meatballs?
Almost all chefs that I've met keep their receipes secret. This is a tradition amongst chefs, and helps them distinguish themselves, much like an artist has a certain style.
As for those 13 herbs and spices... consider the following transcript from this article...
So let me tell you what I think the owners of culture were doing in the 20th century. It took them two generations from Edison to figure out what their business was, and it wasn't music and it wasn't movies. It was celebrity. They created very large artificial people, you know, with navels eight feet high. And then we had these fantasy personal relationships with the artificial big people. And those personal relationships were manipulated to sell us lots and lots of stuff -- music and movies and T-shirts and toys and, you know, sexual gratification, and heavens knows what else. All of that on the basis of the underlying real economy of culture, which is that we pay for that which we have relations with. We are human beings, social animals.
In there small way KFC is threatening freedom of speech. They've created a secret formula, and made it a celebrity. They own a piece of our culture, like George Lucus owns Star Wars, and that's how they make all that money.
As for freedom of speech, people will publish receipes, (and make movies), and others will take those receipes and improve upon them (there is no requirement to republish), and over the centuries we developed wonderful and complex delicacies and great diversity. KFC gives us a few types of food and they sustain their IP with marketing. Why is this restricted model somehow better for society just because it creates shareholder value in the pockets of a few?
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a load of astonishingly ill-informed nonsense. The basis of intellectual property is the promotion of the creation of works that benefit society. To accomplish this, the government grants creators certain limited rights to control certain aspects of how their creations are used. You can read all about this (and nothing about your "absolute" "moral" claptrap) in the foundation of my civilized society, the U.S. Consitution.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't that be Burger King suing McDonalds because the Big Xtra [topsecretrecipes.com] is really a Whopper [burgerking.com] in disguise? I guess it wouldn't matter...McDonalds could probably sue over the Big King [topsecretrecipes.com] anyways.
But the big boys know they can fight in the courts for years with each other. Fighting against it's own consumers to prevent bad reviews or "top secret recipes" from getting out would be handle very quickly since no one could really put up a fight. But unlike some businesses, I don't think they are stupid enough to do that. Mostly because there are still too many disadvantages to suing your consumers. But, as consumers, we should be fighting to keep those disadvantages stable, which includes fighting for free speech to say all those things they don't like...
Re:How patronizing "guys with little paste-it labe (Score:5, Insightful)
It is patronizing if you are one of the guys who wants to put a paste-it label with a price tag on every idea on earth, but I doubt he means you.
The Flatlander
Re:Mirror of the webcast? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How patronizing "guys with little paste-it labe (Score:3, Insightful)
What a patronizing way to refer to people (like me) who are trying to make a living selling their own work.
No, he is refering to people who are trying to make a living selling other peoples work (and keeping the profits for themselves).
Patronizing... (Score:1, Insightful)
"What a patronizing way to refer to people who are making a living selling/appropriating the work of others."
Sheesh, get some perspective. It's not about getting everyone to give shovels away for free, it's about preventing people from claiming that they have an inalienable right of ownership over the very idea of a shovel.
In short, if you are a programmer (or such), you're probably not a person like that. If you are in fact a patent attorney fighting on the side of software patents for megacorporations, you should look around at your "colleagues" on
Re:Good message (Score:5, Insightful)
With IRV you could vote for an independent without being concerned that you might 'spoil' an election, or 'throw your vote away'.
More importantly, you could vote for different independent, if the previous independent turned out to not represent your views, or the values he advocated at election.
Imagine being able to support Perot without risking Clinton, or voting Nader without risking Bush.
Imagine being able to vote McCain 2k4 because Bush isn't nearly as conservative as you'd like.
Or being able to say 'screw Kerry, I'll support Kucinich even if he doesn't get the nomination' - and not having to worry about your vote giving power to Bush.
(indeed party nominations only exist to tone down the chances of 2 similar candidates spoiling the race and handing it to a 3rd party.)
Get IRV and lobbying won't work because a single vote will be enough to keep you from re-election - and lobbyists can't buy everyone.
Re:Good message (Score:5, Insightful)
And the other souless corporations will continue to use the most cost effective solution, which is increasingly becoming open source.
This is what I love about the GPL. I think everyone can agree, given that a peice of software has been created, it is better for society if everyone to has access to it. The only issue at question is whether by limiting access to the software, we can provide necisarry means and motivation for more software to be written. I look at the GPL as an experiment - if copyright really does provide necissarry means and incentive to produce software then GPL'd software will never be as good as proprietary software, and will reamain on the sidelines. However if GPL'ed software does surpass and surplant proprietary software, then it is proof that there is enough means and motivation to produce software without the burden of copyright. This is increasingly showing itself to be the case.
The FSF focuses on the first issue, and think that the negative societal aspects of proprietary software are so bad that it doesn't matter whether copyright adds incentive or not, proprietary software is still intolerable.
The OSI focuses on the second issue, and think that the only important thing about free software is that it is better than proprietary software, and have provided usefull theories which help explain why this is the case.
But the real clincher is that both issues are true - that not only is software copyright harmfull, it is also unecissarry. It is for this reason that I agree with the FSF in treating it as an ethical situation, because while I am willing to put up with some "necissary evil", there is no reason to put up with proprietary software in the long run.
Re:Nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How patronizing "guys with little paste-it labe (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, then, isn't that what the Grey Album was? A DJ took other peoples work and created a new commercial work.
The logic always flips this way and that way to suit the politics.
A newbie's view of the Free Software movement (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PocketPC developers take note (Score:5, Insightful)
And you wonder why you're having trouble finding GPL programmers for it? :)
You might have better luck trying to sell the same idea to the Palm community. Not only do you already have a bunch of "anything-but-Microsoft" folks, but even the new development tools [palmos.com] are based on the Eclipse open-source IDE [eclipse.org]. There are FAR more apps and developers out for Palm, many of them free [freewarepalm.com].
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's an idea that is 100% moose hockey.
Unlike the natural properties (things which are capable of being owned), ideas are not capable of being owned. "Intellectual property" is a creature of law, designed solely to encourage the fixture of ideas (not, crucially, the creation of ideas... the purpose of copyright and patent is solely to have people WRITE STUFF DOWN so that others can access it and use it). It's since gone badly off the rails, but that's the animating purpose behind all such laws.
You can't own an idea, any more than you can own the word "dental". You can keep an idea private, but that's different from owning it.
The fact is, that "moral rights" never even appeared on the radar screen of intellectual property until well after the current model of permanent ownership of the products of all human ideas came into being.
There is no theft in the "theft" of an idea, for the simple fact that my appropriation of "your" idea does not alter or harm your own idea one iota. My taking the "idea" under my control does not, in any way, affect the control you have over the idea. As a result, ideas are simply not capable of being owned, since the only purpose of ownership is the taking under human control of those things that can be controlled.
Sorry for the heavy Hegelian slant of this (I'm hauling my concept of ownership, incidentally, out of Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_). But in a nutshell, ideas are not things, and treating them as things is stupid.
And captured things rot (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure there's immediate pain and loss when things are imprisoned. But what happends when wild horses are imprisoned? They lose their freshness. Put flowers in a vase? They wither and need replacement.
Let Disney have their mouse. Popular culture has deserted it. Let Disney waste their resources becoming more and more irrelevant to popular culture. Disney made the choice to hang on to the mouse and let go of Pixar, and it is Disney who will rot from staleness and lack of exercise, not Pixar.
Playing devil's advocate here (Score:3, Insightful)
eg. Lets say bicycle is an idea. The state outlaws private ownership of bicycles, because ideas belong to the masses, they are not one man's private property. So nobody can own a bicycle.
But the state places free bicycles at the corner of every street and every avenue.
So you walk to a corner, pick up a bicycle & pedal to wherever you want & leave it at the other corner. No tolls, no insurance, no gasoline, no ownership, no maintainence, no hassle.
Malthus read this and told Marx he was an ostrich.
That's the problem right there. You can't pretend man is an ostrich, so lets be benign & do away with the notion of private property & share & take just what we need & so on. This socialist utopia is ideal, but unfortunately we don't live there.
Capitalism says man is not benign - man is malign. He will want ownership. In that sense of the principle, you can own intangible ideas just as much as you own actual tangible objects - no difference. That's just the reality we live in.
Deal with it.
Re:If you want to give away your stuff .. fine... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just so you know, however, the large numbers of programmers available to open source projects, and the many, many eyes taht can review open source projects will probably render your proprietary code worthless in short order. That's not a problem for you, is it?
You intentionally misinterpret the Professors argument. It ain't free as in beer. It's free as in speech. When the code is available, when the algorithm can be examined, fixed, improved upon, everyone benefits.
Red Hat, HP, and IBM seem to be doing okay with software that's "free." How do they do that? Because the *service* ain't free - it's only the code that you can get free.
The Flatlander
Re:Playing devil's advocate here (Score:1, Insightful)
Stallman is reviled only in the USA (Score:5, Insightful)
In almost any other country, a man who has sacrificed his earning potential to pursue a larger cause is revered. In the USA, that is considered the sign of a loser or a crank. This is the root cause of the differences in perceptions.
Magnus
Re:We so desperately need a spokesman like this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do too, and I bet it will come to pass. But (from someone who attended the speech) there's something we should realize: Moglen and RMS are championing almost exactly the same principles and agenda. The differences are in how they serve the agenda: Stallman by writing code (in the beginning) and playing the visionary, Moglen by plotting legal strategy and fighting the legal ground war; and in their particular communication styles.
So while I agree that RMS's personality may be getting worn and he is somewhat tainted by politics, it is important that we see Moglen not as a less orthodox RMS, but as a new, and perhaps more effective, conveyor of the same fundamental message. It may help to note Moglen's pointed expressions of respect and admiration for RMS during the speech.
That said, Moglen did put the free software movement in a wider legal and intellectual context better than RMS usually does. Moglen can play the visionary very well if he wishes! Perhaps if we are inspired by Moglen, we can reconsider RMS with renewed appreciation.
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably right in a sense. Stallman is somehwat of a visionary. He forethought many things now happening in the software world, and with his analysis, he is IMHO fairly correct.
Now Marx, surely a visionary, forethought many of the problems inherent in unrestrained capitalism.
Both of them searched (or are still searching) for solutions to the problems they discovered. From the purely scientifc analysis they got to the merely political task of proposing solutions. Their solutions are radical.
Most people (me included) furtunately disagree about their radical solutions for more or less obvious reasons. But the problems are still not solved.
So instead of abandoning both the solution *and* the analysis, one should IMHO still think about the analysis and criticize it. But the need is still there to invent other, better, moderate ways of coping with the problems.
Philosophy warning, deep water ahead (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand there's the idea that "property is theft". You see this most often in anarchist writings. Here the argument is that for one person to own something, that person has to take it away from everyone else. Then a whole coercive apparatus has to be built up to keep everyone else from taking it away from the owner.
Scarcity, according to Aristotle, is the fundamental principle of economics. If there's a limited supply of something and unlimited demand, then there needs to be some kind of rationing. Property laws provide that function.
A matter duplicator would force us to rethink our ideas about physical property because it would remove the scarcity issue. The Internet is forcing us to rethink our ideas about intellectual property for the same reason.
>whether the *creator* (or creators) of a piece of IP have the moral right to designate its usage
Well put. From a human-rights point of view, "designate the usage" means giving orders to the other six billion people on the planet about what they can do with a piece of "IP". From a utilitarian point of view ("greatest good of the greatest number") useful intellectual work should get spread as widely as possible. The compromise of copyright law was an attempt to ensure the greatest good given 18th-century distribution methods.
If I understand the rms position, it's not so much that it's bad to make money from software, but rather that it's bad to imprison the software and make money by charging for access to it.
Honest and thoughtful people can come to different ethical conclusions on these questions. I just wish more bright people would give those questions the depth of thought they deserve.
The Power of Free (Score:5, Insightful)
When we were feeling sad about the state of copyright law, feeling that nothing would never enter public domain and become humanity's propery, there comes all these people sharing because they want to. Everything is automagically copyrighted? Fine. I'll explicitly license it to everybody. What are you evil people going to do, tell me I can't license what is mine?
Give them (or us, as I write a little free software here and there) twenty years more; the body of freely licensed knowledge will be so huge there won't be any benefit in anything proprietary. There will be so many musicians and artists licensing their cool stuff that we won't need to infringe on anyone's copyright to listen to good music. Those that try to say "Hey, come here and buy the right to hear this song" will face the question "Why? There's so many free stuff to hear I actually haven't got the time".
The last time I bought a CD was more than two years ago, because they're expensive. But I gladly buy very expensive beer and pay the artist's fee at this jazz cafe I go almost every week. The music is just too good.
Re:Right to not remain silent. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Playing devil's advocate here (Score:2, Insightful)
In your "the state places free bicycles at the corner of every street and every avenue."
The state has to spend money and effort to do this.
The "bicycle is an idea" means that anyone can use a bike, make it, improve it, sell it make money etc.. but doesn't have to do so. (nor does the state has to).
It's not at all Marx, it's called 'free' market.
Good Source of Insight (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How patronizing "guys with little paste-it labe (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, I wish MP3.com did work -- there's nothing I like more than the idea of independent musicians replacing making it on their own. But MP3.com went very broke giving away music, and it's not a simple a recompile.
The question is how will musician have a best change to claim power, and the EFF/FSF of free everything isn't going to help musician, coders, etc. to claim more economic power.
It might benefit all the people who can consume all that work for free, but it doesn't benefit the people making it.
"For now, the lesson to the artist is don't depend on getting all of your income from a single source. Especially if that source is still experimental.'
And especially is the other sources are "give your work away, some magic will come by and compensate you."
It's not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the poster was suggesting was that the original post would have been much more informative if it had included a second sentence that read something like "Eben Moglen is the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation and spoke at the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology lecture on the 23rd on the topic of 'SCO and After SCO: The Legal Future of Free Software'."
Wouldn't that have made the topic of the article much clearer?
RMS on commercial software is often misunderstood. (Score:3, Insightful)
And your support for this statement is where, exactly? You've provided the URL to an interview that doesn't seem to back up your assertion and then not clarified precisely what statement RMS made that backs up what you claim he said.
The closest thing I could find in that interview [lwn.net] to backing up your statement is:
This does not support your statement and it looks like you don't really understand what RMS means when he refers to proprietary software. He is not against commercial software [gnu.org], he is against proprietary software [gnu.org].
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:5, Insightful)
1) You make reference to a Dr. Dobbs article, but we have no way to independently verify your reference; because it is too vague. We can't go and look at the article to determine if your paraphrase of Mr. Stallman is acurate. Certainly his recent behavior does not back up your claim (as has been pointed out by others in this thread), so your citation is merely manipulative and can't be taken as serious.
2) I have studied Kant, and I am not familiar with any so-called philosophy of anti-self. Kant's well-known contribution to philosophy was his a-priori metaphysics, which was a brilliant and thoughtful counterpoint to the empiricists. Perhaps you could recommend one of Kant's writings in which the theory of anti-self is presented and discussed?
I find your argument manipulative because of its weak backing. The references to Dr. Dobbs and Immanuel Kant do not make me comfortable as to your authority in making such assertions regarding Mr. Stallman.
Perhaps you could enlighten us with some more tangible evidence?
Re:Who? (Score:1, Insightful)
Who's "SCO"?
Re:Not another word game... (Score:4, Insightful)
The open source movement aims for better software. They claim the open source development methodology achieves this. (A claim which, by the way, I think is preposterous and nonsensical.)
The free software foundation aims for a better world, by protecting people's freedom to share and use information.
I really don't see how you can claim they mean the same thing.
Re:real history of term "open source" (Score:2, Insightful)
Possibly they were looking for something more business friendly but they definitely weren't looking for something less ambiguous and if they had been then they wouldn't have settled on "open source".
"Open source" just sounds like the source code is available. It does not sound as though you get the freedoms promoted by the Free Software Foundation and, apparently, by the Open Source Initiative at all.
If anything it is more ambiguous. At least 'free as in freedom' or 'free as in speech' rolls off the rongue a little more easily than 'open source as in free (as in speech) software'.
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop thinking about it in terms of 'compensation'! You want society to compensate you for having a brilliant idea? No. No society has ever done this, because people have always had brilliant ideas regardless of copyright/patent law. (Ask Socrates.) Patents and copyrights are both incentives to publish. And there the resemblance between them ends.
Copyright is looking less and less justified in the light of ubiquitous near-free Internet distribution. Any information is now essentially free to publish.
Patents have separate practical enforcement problems which relate to the attempt to allow patents on software. Patents on software are wrong because they constrain the publishing of information (software is information). No other kind of patent can constrain publishing. You might as well let people patent sentences of English. (Imagine the deCSS code as a sentence of English.)
To repeat: a patent on a drug could (say) stop poor people getting the drug. But it would not stop them knowing how to make the drug, and so after the patent expires they could make it. But a patent on a piece of computer code stops people from even knowing how the code works, because no free source implementation of it is legal to publish.
Re:Free Software? Nah. (Score:3, Insightful)
SCENARIO A
Copyright exists. The GPL exists. People who break the terms of the GPL are guilty of copyright infringement and can be sued for big bucks. Proprietary software makers play the same game with their EULAs. (Hint: this is the actual world.)
SCENARIO B
Copyright does not exist. The proprietary software people play the same game, but using lots of DRM in the mix instead of copyright law. Free software is all essentially BSD'd. Why? Because once anyone has the source, they can do whatever they like with it including copying, changing, compiling, and distributing binaries for money.
How is scenario B good for FSF types? No-one would need to share source because there would be no threat of copyright violation damages. There would be constant forking and very little would get done.
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:3, Insightful)
If you think about these questions, you might come to the conclusion that if the main object of patents was to compensate for people's ideas, they're completely pigheadedly set up.
Re:Another great quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
The ultimate goal of the FSF is to eliminate copyright on software. They seek a world in which all software is public domain software.
No, they don't. They specifically do *not* want all software to be public domain, because public domain software can be hijacked. What they want is to ensure that software can always be modified by its users and that cannot be achieved with public domain software, because public domain software can be published in binary-only format.
Freedom is not absolute; all freedoms aren't equal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stallman is reviled only in the USA (Score:3, Insightful)
I won't claim that this doesn't get perverted into rabid anti-capitalism, just as happens with virtually every ideology, but that doesn't mean there's no sound reason behind it all, no historical basis, or that a majority of people in such places share that fanatical belief. And honestly, what is there to be gained by calling people names and getting all bitter about what other people think? Aren't we all better served by a rational, thoughtful, informed approach to our world, rather than relying on fear and anger? I know I don't even hold myself up to that standard all the time, but I know that I should (and I do try).
Some practical outcome of these differences. (Score:3, Insightful)
Free software proponents, on the other hand, are more likely to seek a replacement for that non-free program with a "free software" replacement because they see non-free programs as unethical. Free software proponents will reject the non-free software out of hand regardless of its function because of its inability to be shared and/or modified.
Also, the difference between the two movements exposes a built-in philosophical weakness of the open source movement that the free software movement doesn't have: if all you value is practical function (runs faster, costs less, is more stable, etc.) the open source movement will sometimes have no way to convince you to use an "open source" equivalent to a proprietary program. You'll either be directed to use the proprietary equivalent or have no reason to reject the proprietary program.
If, instead, you learn to value software freedom (as the free software movement advocates) you value something software proprietors can never offer. Therefore, the free software movement is never put in a position where they are compelled to advocate non-free software. They appreciate the need to meet practical ends, so they advocate either writing a free replacement yourself, hiring someone to write the free software for you, and/or finding a way to do without that functionality until a free replacement is obtained.
Thus, it is the free software movement's philosophy that is the real threat to software proprietors.
Re:Right to not remain silent. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm from Europe, and where I come from we do not enjoy "Free Speech" as such, but a more carefully worded "Freedom of expressing ones opinion". This freedom is essential to our democracy. If you disagree with your leaders, or think you have a better way of running the country, you can express these thoughts without the fear of being imprisoned for these ideas. (The fact that in actuality this freedom is non-existent in Europe if you want to express Nazi sympathies is very saddening in my opinion. Voltaire would surely agree with me here). This freedom is central to what we call our democracy, and it only takes a quick look to what happens in a totalitarian regime to see how valuable it is.
If I read arguments involving "code is speech", I think people are talking about something completely different essentially. They are talking about ownership of code and/or inventions, but I do not think this has anything to do with the freedom of expressing ones opinion. This latter freedom is central to our freedom of being individual human beings that are allowed to think for their own, the former is a dispute about ownership. Even though this dispute is very important, and I think the FSF is on the right track with their stance, it is trivial in comparison with the freedom of expressing ones opinion.
Using freedom of speech as an argument for being able to hack a dvd-encryption scheme is, in my opinion, so far off from the original intent of "free speech" that it more likely to alienate people than to win them. As far as I can tell, even in the US with its careless use of language, most people understand that "Free Speech" means "freedom of expressing ones opinion", and not crying "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, or hacking an XBox. Stating that these things are equivalent is plainly wrong.
So what to do? I think it would intellectually fairer to avoid this "free speech" alltogether when we're talking about issues of copyrights and patents, and aim for what we're really after: freedom to use ideas. Our own ideas, but, to some extent, also other peoples ideas. Ideas should not be locked up, especially when there is a fair chance that someone with a similar need will come up with a similar idea. This is the real goal, and to claim that it has in some way to do with the freedom to express your opinion is dishonest.
Re:Free software != free speech (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, it gives you one option, with specific restrictions. You are free to negotiate any other option with the copyright holder.
Re:Another great quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me give you a concrete example. "Othello" by William Shakespeare.This is in the public domain,
What's your point? Software has several major differences from literature; it's a very different animal. The fact that it's functional as well as expressive, the fact that it's constructive rather than interpretive, the fact that it can be published and yet kept secret simultaneously -- all these are fundamental differences that make analogies with literature weak at best. I wrote a fairly complete explanation of these differences and some of their obvious implications here [groklaw.net], if you're interested in more detail.
IMO, that's one of the biggest problems with current copyright law -- it treats computer software almost identically to literature, and that does not make sense. We really need a ground up analysis of what software is and how the public interest can best be served (to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences) and then we need to construct an appropriate legal framework that meets these goals.
The software-related changes to copyright law (and patent law) that have been made have not been made in this way, with an eye toward the public good. Instead, they've been made at the behest and in favor of particular special interests, who care mostly about increasing their profits. I don't begrudge anyone their profits, but the purpose of IP law is to establish a structure that ultimately promotes progress and the flow of material into the public domain (note the two parts there -- the order is important), and that is not what has happened.
I actually don't think that the GPL is the best way to do this, and Stallman and Moglen would probably agree with me. What the GPL is is an extraordinarily clever way of exploiting the mismatches between current, excessively powerful copyright law and the nature of software to produce a system that more effectively meets the original goals of copyright.
Eventually their copyright will run out.
Well, we can hope that copyright will run out; CTEA provides for regular congressional review and extension as necessary, so it may not. I don't think that affects the FSF's position at all, though; what they want to achieve is to have Free software available that accomplishes whatever people want to do now, and 100, 70, 50 or even 20 years is a very, very long time in software. Code that old is usually irrelevant except for historical interest.
However, the FSF has no desire to make copyright infinite in duration. You're arguing out of context. Here's what the context was: You said the FSF wanted all software to be public domain, I said that they didn't want that to be the case now, or ever. I did not say they never want any piece of software to fall into the public domain, I said they never want *all* software to be in the public domain, at least not as currently defined by law. The FSF wants new software to be protected, so that the author and copyright holder can guarantee its freedom, if he or she so chooses.
Re:Stallman is reviled only in the USA (Score:2, Insightful)
your views on socialism are narrow. please don't mention anything to do with things you have never even attempted to google for let alone read about. your sentence "Everyone's equal in a socialism, so long as they're all equal with the lowest common denominator." that sentence does not make any sense. how can there be a lowest common denominator if everyone is equal as you state?
an LCD [lowest common denominator] in the analogy of LCD implies spread spectrum of the thing you deem to exhibit such properties and therefore is not 'equal' at any point.
if you were indeed making a reference to how real world socialist systems have either failed their implementations or have been capitalist states with benign socialist feaatures such as sweden then you would only be a fool for condemning two separate things; one of which fails due to mans own capitalist tendencies and one of which succeeds in maintaining a lowest common denominator in standards of living for everyone DESPITE it existing inside of capitalism.
thanks.