What is the university? Does it exist apart from the people giving it being? The "university" is nothing but shorthand for a group of people

I don't think that's under dispute. The objection seems to be to the needless anthropomorphizing of such organisations. Much the same way that Dijkstra objected to people anthropomorphizing computers, and for much the same reasons - it leads to sloppy patterns of thinking. Some people on this board have the same reaction to "Information wants to be free" as well.

The actual composition of the organisation, computer or data in question is not the point in any of those cases,

Pedantic troll is overly pedantic.

It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's a valid one. Certainly I didn't get the impression it was raised for purposes of trolling or of pedantry.

Nobody is going to ditch Windows for Steam OS and then only play games on it

Well, the folks who only play games on Windows might. Or they might dual boot, and use Steam on Linux. And a lot of people cite the absence of Triple-A games on Linux as being the big thing stopping them from migrating.

Certainly, it isn't going to hurt anything :)

unless Steam somehow starts being the "app store" as well, and cloud-saving extended to it.

Seems to me that Steam is already an "app store". Distributing non game software through it shouldn't be a problem, really.

I guess I'm dealing with a first-class pedant here.

I strive to be clear. Perhaps if you did the same, you would find me less pendantic.

Vaccine research is a vital part of that effort, so to destroy lab samples before the job is done is akin to shooting oneself in the foot.

And at the risk of being pedantic, you didn't say anything about destroying the lab samples before eradication. Although even if you had made that stipulation, it still wouldn't indicate hypocrisy. A foolish extremeism, maybe, but then we're disucssing your words rather than mine at this point.

Yes, eschewing copyright gives us certain abilities, but that serves little purpose. To make decompilation more difficult, cautious vendors will turn to obfuscation, encryption, and compression techniques.

Hmmm, ok. Explain to me how that is different from what commercial software houses already do. And why it would be more effective post-GPL than it is at the moment. If you can do that I may have to concede the point.

The main aspect of RMS's open-source religion is that freedom is a choice.

Sure. Which means that you're free to choose the freedom of a small subset of software over the freedom of all creative works in the whole of our culture. Does that really sound like a good deal to you? Really?

Forcing short copyright (though not necessarily shorter) terms on an author is no more free than forcing long terms on the rest of us.

Are you really saying that continuing under the current restrictions on creative output is "freedom" while abolishing those restrictions constitutes "force"? Does that not seem more than a little Orwellian? "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" and all that.

There must be a balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the individual, and the ability to choose a license gives us the ability to pick where on that scale we wish to be.

It's a question of what you value most. From what you've written so far I'm not at all sure I share your priorities in this matter. I'm not sure many people would.

Just out of curiosity, does the term "goal displacement" mean anything to you?

A more appropriate analogy is to be a hypocrite for pushing a law requiring all known malaria to be destroyed, including the samples used for vaccine work.

That word: I do not think it means what you think it means. Merriam-Webster defines hypocrisy as follows:

the behavior of people who do things that they tell other people not to do : behavior that does not agree with what someone claims to believe or feel

According to that definition, I don't see anything hypocritical in your analogy. In fact the poisition you suggest is admirably consistent. Now if your hypothetical malaria researcher was keeping his or her own stash of the disease for purposes of later backmail and extortion, that would be hypocrisy. But unless you think I'm capable of keeping a breeding culture of legislation in a test tube somewhere, it's really, really difficult to see how your analogy is more appropriate in any way at all.

Of course, M-W also defines the word thusly:

a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion

But the only way I see that applying is if you're considering Free Software as a religion (which may be well be the case for rms, of course). But I still don't see how it applies to me, since I don't claim to subscribe to the religion in question.

Without copyright laws, anyone could compile open-source software into a closed-source product, with no restriction. Since the redistributor has default permission to do anything (thanks to the lack of copyright), the GPL never comes into play, so it can't require that the software stays open-source.

On the other hand, we gain the freedom to decompile closed source, patch it and redistribute it as we see fit, distribute abdandonware and orphan works without any legal impediment. Obviously, it requires an opposition to software patents as well, but I don't see any inconsistency in that.

And, of course, that's just considering the benefits for software.

This inextricable dependency is why it's silly to promote the GPL while arguing entirely against copyright.

Only if you assume that ability for force a small subset of all software writers to publish their source code is worth more than freeing the 70 years of culture from creeping privatisation. Otherwise, it seems like more than a fair trade.

As for RMS's views on copyright itself, I also recall an interview where he rightly lambasts the anti-copyright GPL-loving folks as hypocrites.

I've always thought that was a bit of an odd position. I mean, I think malaria should be eradicated. Am I therefore a hypocrite for thinking that malaria vaccine is a good thing?

Then again, I guess I'm not in the malaria vaccine business...

War criminals should use your defense at their trials. "But your honor, we get a few million dead every year from starvation and other diseases. What's the difference if I round up a million for execution by firing squad?"

I don't think he's suggesting that shooting civilians is acceptable behavior. He's just pointing out (staying with your metaphor) that withholding the specs for a new bullet won't make much difference in the annual death toll caused by gunshot wounds.

I didn't suggest any lynching

Didn't intend to suggest that you did. Shooting CEOs in the head outside of the rule of law is a bad thing. I think we can safely agree on that.

i suggest proper laws.

In all seriousness, that's always a better solution than mob violence. I just sometimes worry that mob violence is going to happen faster than proper laws.

In any case, it's kind of hard to get worked up about someone insulting someone else on the internet

I think the concern is more the deletion of the blog entry at Scientific American. It smacks unpleasantly of cronyism and makes them appear complicit in an attempt to bully writers into working for free. None of which reflects well on SciAm. Which is a shame really, since the magazine has a good reputation and well deserved so far as I can see,

Regardless of the insult, the reaction at SciAm seems like a grave error in judgement.

At least with open source DRM you know they are only doing what they say. Not a big difference, but also not a big cost.

That's not going to happen. The only thing that makes DRM schemes work at all is security-through-obscurity. If we have an open source DRM module then anyone who can read C/C++/whatever can look at the source and see not only the encryption algorithm used, but also where in memory to look for the encryption key. DRM is stupid, but it's not that stupid.

Which is probably why (if I understand the proposal correctly) the proposal is for an API rather than an implementation. In fact...

This specification does not define a content protection or Digital Rights Management system. Rather, it defines a common API that may be used to discover, select and interact with such systems as well as with simpler content encryption systems

So "it's ok, it's going to be open source" isn't terribly reassuring, either.

Me, I'm still waiting for a spanner that works just as well on screws. And which can get nails out of wood. But everytime I complain about it, someone pops up with some bullshit argument about having different tools specialised for different purposes. Crazy, right?

If not already, this kind of seamless integrations between their devices is something people will require soon

Seriously, why? I'll grant you that automounting phones on desktop systems could benefit from a bit more handholding for non-technical users, but why assume a common interface is useful, let alone desirable?

First, he means GNU/Linux, not Linux.

No, I don't believe he does. The name "Linux" is overloaded and is used to refer both to the Linux Kernel and to the desktop operating system built around that kernel.

You well may feel that the GNU userland tools are more important than the Linux Kernel and that therefore the GNU project should have first billing. As such it is your right to prefix the OS name with "GNU/" if you feel that helps anything. But that doesn't make the more widespread usage wrong, and neither you nor Richard Stallman get to tell us what we call the OS.

This has been a public information announcement. Thank you for your attention.

Didn't work with DVDs. Remember you only need one place to get an unencrypted copy. CDs made DRM on music files irrelevant.

I'm not aguing against that. DRM is fundamentally flawed as a concept. It involves giving the user the cyphertext and the encryption key together and hoping the key is well enough hidden that the user won't be able to use it except on the supplier's terms. Given a skilled and determined opponent, DRM is always going to fail. That's pretty much a given.

What I don't understand though, is why some people seem to see that as a good reason to include DRM into the W3C standard. I can see that it appeals to the techno-anarchist element on Slashdot, (which is most of us by my reckoning) but we still don't gain anything by the inclusion of DRM in the standard. So why are some people so keen to see it adopted?

It feels to me like we're being played. Like someone wondered how best to astroturf the issue in the techie forums and decided to tell us all that we were all Cyber Robin Hood and that the most fun thing ever would be to support the proposition now and rape the content once it was adopted. And to avoid any mention of the legal side of things and in particular the potential for punitive lawsuits to discourage attempts to crack the system.

TL;DNR: Yeah, DRM doesn't work. But that's not a good reason to include it in the W3C standards.