Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong? (slashdot.org) 170
Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...)
This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...
"I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice."
Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong....
"Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty."
And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
"Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."
This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...
"I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice."
Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong....
"Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty."
And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
"Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."
One problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
He advocates for ignoring copyright law, which is fine, but on the other hand, copyright law is the basis of how the GPL actually has meaning.
If he advocated for everything always being public domain, that's a consistent stance. However, it's a bit weird to say that people shouldn't respect copyright, unless it's respecting the copyright as it pertains to GPL software.
Re:One problem... (Score:5, Informative)
He advocates for ignoring copyright law,
Based on the summary he didn't advocate ignoring copyright law. In the link in the summary, he advocated changing copyright law. I didn't watch the video in the summary, but it's summarized in the summary.
Where are you quoting him that he advocated ignoring copyright law?
Re: (Score:3)
Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it."
"The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
So he doesn't like pirating closed source software, not because of the copyright but because no source is provided and in that scenario he demands source code.
Re:One problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
He advocates for ignoring copyright law, which is fine, but on the other hand, copyright law is the basis of how the GPL actually has meaning.
Would we need the GPL if copyright law didn't exist?
Re:One problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting question. GPL forces people to share their modifications, and disallows tivoization (using technical means to prevent running modified software). It's a contract, but I'm not sure you could force people to enter into it without copyright.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Arguably yes; Without it you'd see everything locked up behind various DRM, signed code only, and other schemes.
You'd have the source but it would be nearly useless because no manufacturer would make any contemporary hardware that can run code that has not been blessed. Good luck getting TSMC to fab your FOSS hardware on a useful process.
Re: (Score:2)
For non-copyright scenario, that would be public domain, and we have that option already. Anyone can take any code they find and do whatever they want. Make a totally closed source solution that did come from linux, but refuse to acknowledge Linux had anything to do with it? Without copyright law, that's fine.
GPL wants to protect the original creative intent, to make sure that someone doesn't just close up your code and make something out of it without sharing your principles or throwing away credit for it
Re: (Score:3)
You seem to misunderstand the GPL. There is little, if anything, to it about "protect the original creative intent", nor about "throwing away credit", nor about "preserve credit for contributors."
In fact, preserving credit is one of the things that made the old 4-clause BSD license incompatible with the GPL, due to the "advertising clause" (Ref. 4 clause BSD license: https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-... [spdx.org]).
The GPL is about your personal freedoms. It attempts to ensure that you are free to use and modify whatever
Re: (Score:3)
The original intent being that source should be available. Public domain doesn't assure that, and so a lack of copyright wouldn't preserve that either.
The advertising clause goes above and beyond, but in the GPL:
"keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code"
Section 7 even includes:
"Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices display
Re: (Score:3)
"To prevent free code from being proprietarized in this manner in the future, Stallman invented the GPL"
It says point blank in there that it was about keeping source code available. It's right there in the 'Open Source" movement name. I don't know how you read that and concluded that they didn't care about source code being kept open and available...
Re: (Score:3)
Do better.
"prevent free code from being proprietarized" != "keeping source code available"
(Should go without saying, but FYI, "!=" means "is not equal to")
Here is a whole wikipedia page about "source-available software" to help you distinguish the difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
Source available is not sufficient, but it is absolutely a part of the intent.
"Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things."
Stallman absolutely always wanted the source to be available. He wanted *more* than that as well, but t
Re:One problem... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bingo!
The GPL uses copyright law to preserve the right to share and prevent people from locking up free software behind paywalls.
If there was no copyright law, the GPL wouldn't be necessary.
Re: (Score:3)
It further wants to preserve end users the ability to reasonably modify and see how the software works. It's not just about locking things up in commercial software.
In fact, the paid software is explicitly given a pass, so long as the customer is able to turn around and redistribute it at their discretion with all source code intact for the next person.
Without copyright law, that provision to preserve the tinkering rights goes away.
Re: (Score:3)
Without copyright law , everybody can tinker with any software.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He advocates sharing, and the GPL allows sharing.
He says to ignore laws that block sharing. That means ignoring some parts of copyright law. Some other parts of copyright law are fine. There's no contradiction.
(And if someone has a follow up question about sharing everything, no, he doesn't advocate for sharing everything. Some stuff is personal, for example. He's in favour of sharing generally useful technical information, such as the source code of software that has been given to you.)
Re: (Score:2)
When you have software that has been released for free, of course the attitude SHOULD be that you share the stuff that is available for free. The problem is when it costs MONEY to develop software. Yep, the big commercial software costs money to make and maintain it, so why should it be free to copy?
There's a big difference between "I have so much money, everything I make I can give away for free!", and "put money in to the development process, put money into sales/marketing, put money into SUPPORT, now
Re: (Score:2)
If you can't put terms that could interfere with sharing, then it's hard to imagine enforcing a copyleft mindset. You make a private modification and you want to share your privately modified edition as you see fit, then you opt not to share source code. If you can force them to only share if they also share their modification, then that's a restriction on sharing.
That's pretty much all copyright does, it lets the creator dictate the terms of when it may/may not be shared.
I suppose you could say something
His stance is perfectly consistent (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We've been reverse engineering Windows for decades (which is already legal) and while it is quite impressive, it is far from complete.
Decompilation of games from the 90s has been a topic of interest, and only a few have been successfully done.
A lack of copyright law would by far not result in everything being 'copyleft' by default.
Re: His stance is perfectly consistent (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That assumes you have a leak, and in that scenario, you have a Windows XP that misses everything done since then (which some may cheer as a good thing, but it's still missing content).
You also have a lot of communities that already ignore copyright law and *still* have hard times decompiling 30 year old titles... Decompiling is hardly a trivially useful technique.
Re: (Score:2)
It would make software security, updates, maintenance, support, catering to your users, etc... those would be the central focus and the things that drive adoption and purchases. We just need to look at RedHat and SUSE in their hay day to see what that could look like.
It's also worth noting that the full source for Windows has leaked before numerous times. Where's the company/group/person that's reselling binaries compiled from those leaks? The risk of legal issues alone is certainly not enough to keep it fr
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But that's incorrect. If copyright law went away, everything would be public domain, and so the 'no copyright law' choice would be to release to public domain, not to GPL.
GPL uses copyright to ensure:
- Contributors preserve credit for their work
- Any redistribution reciprocates the source code availability.
Absent copyright laws, people could take GPL software closed source and refuse to credit the actual authors.
Re: (Score:2)
But that's incorrect. If copyright law went away, everything would be public domain, ...
You do not know that, and that is NOT an inevitable conclusion.
Maybe you're viewing this as if you asked a genie to blink copyright away from existence? But that's not how real things happen.
Or are you attempting to theorize as to what things would be like if copyright had never existed? That's altering the timeline, and we can't do that, and we wouldn't know if it had happened anyway.
If copyright were to be abolished, let's be real - it wouldn't simply vanish over night, and there would be numerous new law
Re: (Score:2)
Then that's not saying 'if copyright went away' that is saying 'if copyright were reformed or replaced with something else'. Simply 'going away' is just treating everything as public domain.
Re: (Score:2)
There absolutely would be such a thing as closed source. People can *try* to reverse engineer/decompile, to some limited success, but you cannot reasonably guarantee that there would be a reasonably feasible approach to get 'source code' given the binary output.
There are plenty of groups that already disregard copyright that try to decompile things and still only meet with partial success with great effort, even with situations where the publisher didn't even deliberately apply any obfuscation tricks.
Re: (Score:2)
Then GPL has nothing to do for you, public domain would suffice.
The point was that Stallman very specifically wanted people to be able to force descendants to preserve right to modify, and that requires something like copyright.
For your perspective, that is consistent with no copyright law, but is not consistent with Stallman's views.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
His views on this are well known, if one has read the dozens of essays he has written on the subject on gnu dot org. In one of them, he explained how Copyleft was invented to use Copyright laws against it i.e. to prevent something from being used in a Copyright. Of course, end result of that is the GPL license being incompatible w/ most other licenses, and is a part of the reason basic GNU utilities are getting re-written in Rust. So that they can be re-licensed under MIT or other more permissive license
Re: (Score:2)
The views are well known, but inconsistent. Copyright and software ownership is evil, but I want the software *I* create to be handled the specific way I want, and I want some legal authority to enforce my rights over my software.
If he said "everything should be public domain", then it is consistent, but having his own set of restrictions that he thinks are correct is inconsistent with the view that restrictions on redistribution are bad.
Re: (Score:2)
The intention of the GPL is to be a judo trick to subvert copyright law and use it against itself until it can be dismantled. The philosophy is as long as you have to live under this unjust system, let's use the legal tools it gives us to forward our cause as best we can.
Same way anarchist groups will have legal defense funds. Just because you don't believe in the system and want to dismantle it doesn't mean you get to entirely ignore it.
Re: (Score:2)
But they don't want to ignore it, they actively want to use it. They don't merely defend, they go on the offensive against companies that violate the copyright of GPLed software.
If tomorrow the governments magically said 'ok, fine no more copyright, free for all for all intellectual property', then FSF would be unhappy because they'd have no mechanism to enforce their copyleft principles.
They do not want it dismantled, because if that's what they wanted they would just say to everyone 'public domain your so
Re: (Score:2)
If copyright went away tomorrow, FSF would probably disband because they would have won. (Or they would de-emphasize their social/legal mission to focus purely on software).
Their position is that copyright is wrong, and the GPL is a work-around that leverages that system to force companies to share in a world where they otherwise would not. FSF pursues GPL violators because companies use copyright law to punish people who reverse engineer or share software. Put down your gun and I'll put down mine.
Absent
Re: (Score:2)
So in that hypothetical, you think they would be just totally happy if Microsoft took that situation to make a proprietary Linux without source code and crowded out the open ecosystem over time with incompatible 'extensions'?
No, it would not be a forgone conclusion that source code would be trivial to derive from finished product, and that any such effort would naturally result in the source code being divulged one way or another *anyway*.
They don't like corporations restricting code that is released as Fre
Re: (Score:2)
You reasoning is flawed. Copyright is why the GPL is NEEDED. If there was no copyright, other mechanisms would be used for a similar effect.
Re: (Score:2)
How would you force a company that used your code to release the modifications they made to your code? How would you force the company to allow the user to recompile and use their own copy instead of requiring a signature locked to the bootloader (GPL-3)? How would you make them honor "preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it"?
Public domain is the same as a 'no copyright' situation, but G
Re: (Score:2)
How would you force a company that used your code to release the modifications they made to your code?
What does that have to do with the GPL? I know what you're implying, but you're wrong. A company can obtain GPL'd code, make modifications, run it themselves, not release the changes, and be in compliance with the GPL (disclaimer: IANAL). If said company then shares that code with others, that's when the GPL really kicks in; Baring copyright, the new recipient will already be permitted to use and modify the source. Where's the problem?
Re: (Score:2)
I figured the redistribution facet was self-evident and didn't need to be explicitly said, but fine:
How would you force a company that used your code to release the modifications they made to your code when they modify and resell it as they see fit?
The new recipient would never receive the source code modifications the intermediary made. They could *maybe* find your project and get the original source, but then again, the intermediary could also obfuscate it so folks don't even see that it is a derivative
Re: (Score:2)
Re: One problem... (Score:2)
That's not the only problem with RMS's philosophy. He makes statements that are opinions, such as what is or isn't unjust, stating them as if they were fact. He then makes leaps to a related point based on those opinions. He's an interesting character, and a talented if unfocused developer, but beyond entertaining I don't find anything he has to say to be useful.
Re: (Score:2)
Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Nah, it's not the realisation about the cost at all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the cost.
It's about convenience. If $15 a month saves me hours searching for and downloading pirated films, it's money well spent.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that logic is that any given $15 a month streaming service in 2026 only has about 1/4 of the content that you want to watch.
In order to be able to watch all of the shows that I like to watch, I'd need:
Apple TV+
Disney+ and Hulu
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Paramount+
Peacock
and HBO Max (or whatever it called now)
So, that's 7 different premium streaming services, all charging around $15 a month each if you want to watch them without ads.
Suddenly, piracy looks like the easier option. One site, ALL of the content. And it's "free", minus the cost of a VPN service that doesn't suck.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
I've only had one video subscription for the past 12 months. It's more than enough on a regular basis. I've got shit to do, TV is just a filler, a background noise machine.
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, it's not the realisation about the cost at all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the cost.
It's about convenience. If $15 a month saves me hours searching for and downloading pirated films, it's money well spent.
The convenience is because piracy is illegal.
If it was legal then you could easily combine everything in a single easy to search service that would be cheaper and more convenient than any individual service.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
A few problems with that:
1. You've got to spend extra time setting it all up.
2. Then your setup may break at any point when they introduce more anti-piracy measures.
3. You can't just sit down after a hard day, press one button and make it work immediately.
4. Limited content.
5. Quality issues.
6. Unnecessary faff.
7. One day you may end up in legal trouble.
8. Probably many more other problems which I can't even be bothered thinking about.
At some point you wake up to a realisation that sure - you can make it wo
Re: (Score:3)
To each his own. I want to have a movie and music collection, whether on hard drives or on physical media. If I can buy it, I do (maybe not all the time though), but I am not going to continuously pay for the same thing.
Re: (Score:2)
It's been working for many, many years now. I find it low maintenance.
As for limited content, there is more than is on streaming. Quality is the same or better.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Friends tell me that there is the occasional setup and configuration overhead. But once done, itâ(TM)s as easy as one or two clicks to be watching. The biggest problem exists on any platform-what is actually worth watching?
Not totally but mostly wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was young or a young adult, both the young and the old were copying music and videos (reel-to-reel or cassette tapes, VHS cassettes) for personal use among friends and the wider family all day long. Actually, in many jurisdictions, like the one where I grew up right in the middle of capitalist Europe, it was perfectly legal, too. And what do you know – movies and music records and concerts kept coming in nonetheless. Because, by tendency, many of those who were the biggest sharers were also the biggest buyers. There also were sensible flat surcharges on tapes and cassettes and recording equipment which were distributed among artists.
Anyway, I also seriously question today's movie industry. Can any movie be worth hundreds of millions of dollars? Are hundreds of millions of dollars, the least of which, by the way, find their way to the ground personnel in such productions, well spent in making a movie, of all things? I, for one, don't think so.
You're conflating (Score:2)
1) Doing something you know is wrong
2) Doing something wrong but you believe its right
We've all done 1 wrt copying media but most of us also do pay for some stuff too because we know musicians etc have to eat.
Stallman OTOH fits in category 2. He doesn't seem to believe anyone should financially benefit from their intellectual property unless others voluntarily decide to donate to it. I'm afraid the world and human nature simply doesn't work like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Stallman OTOH fits in category 2. He doesn't seem to believe anyone should financially benefit from their intellectual property unless others voluntarily decide to donate to it.
One thing that I think most people would agree with is that Stallman doesn't reserve his opinions or couch his answers. You need not guess (and incorrectly) what he would seem to believe. FYI, the GPL explicitly allows for financial benefit from ones work.
BTW, if you're doing something you know is wrong, you'd damned well better believe it's actually right. If you're admitting that you do things you know are wrong, and you believe they should be wrong (even in whatever situation you are in), you're just bla
Re: (Score:2)
The copying music thing is something I've seen argued in the past as well. Even back in that day, when one copied a song that one had already bought - be it on a gramophone record or a cassette, the question is - did that person buy the songs, or the media? Given the price difference b/w blank cassettes and cassettes of various albums, obviously the former. Once one bought the former, was s/he at liberty to copy it to a media that was more convenient?
Remember, in those days, we didn't have MP3s, editab
Re: (Score:2)
It definitely not only used to be legal in parts of Western Europe, it even still is. According to Section 15 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), for example, in general, only the author of a work has the right to reproduce their work, but private copies are literally excepted according to Section 53 UrhG. And private use specifically includes distributing private copies to friends or family members. This is even still valid for digital copies, but has been restricted insofar as circumventing digital copy p
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
What you describe makes perfect sense if costs represented effort and everybody got paid what they deserve. That's not the case for a lot of things, especially movies, so I don't think your example is great.
Re: (Score:2)
Just don't do that then.
Re: (Score:2)
but when piracy works better then shit DRM? (Score:2)
but when piracy works better then shit DRM?
Re: (Score:2)
The problem inst copyright it is the cartel pricing and nearly forever terms around a lot of classes of works.
Why should I still have to pay 3.99 more if I want it in HD for a movie made in 1969? None of that long tail revenue was figured into the cost / revenue analysis when the picture was made. Many, maybe most of the people involved directly are 6 feet under.
Heck even to think we should refund the people who watched it 40 years ago, many of them are not even alive. They got what they paid for / agreed t
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
My favorite movie was made in 1968 - 2001, space odyssey. The latest 4K transfer made a few years ago by Christopher Nolan was a massive improvement over the previous transfers. It cost money. Many of the original analog films were significantly degraded. I saw one in 70mm in San Francisco not long ago, and it was very hard to watch due to all the damage. I'm glad that I was able to buy the 4k UHD blu ray discount. I also have DVD and HD BD disc versions, from their respective eras. Digital tech wasn't ther
Re: (Score:2)
IMO, the bigger objection is paying it to new "owners" who had nothing to do w/ the production of a movie. Like say a movie was made back in the 70s, which I'd like to watch. I'd have no issues paying to watch it, if it went to the people who originally made it and warned a living from it. But if the media house they worked for got acquired by a bigger studio, and over time, those people have retired or died, then I don't quite get why I have to pay another entity for them, when they had no involvement i
Re:Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:5, Insightful)
I too used to believe that pirating content was wrong... back when I could order almost any movie or TV show from Netflix and have the DVD of it delivered to me the next day.
Now that all of the good TV shows and movies are buried behind 7 different premium streaming services that all cost around $15 a month to subscribe to if you want to watch them without ads... well... let's just say that my feelings about pirating content and moderated somewhat.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Thereâ(TM)s a few problems with your proposition.
First is, a lionâ(TM)s share of that cost goes to layers of rent seeking, entrenched âoeproduction and distributionâ outfits that add little value.
Second, for the zillions of creative and technical credits, itâ(TM)s not like those folks entire income depends on their contribution to that particular production.
I would agree that the people who do actual work on a production deserve adequate compensation. But the current model is broken
Re: (Score:2)
Other thing about him is that in his student days at MIT, people used to share logins and not have passwords to anything, so that anything anyone created was accessible by anybody and everybody. Which was fine in a campus environment, and at a time when the only people connected to any internet were students. That was before virus authors and other malware creators were rampant
But somehow, he expects the same level of openness when the internet exploded, and started getting used by normal people, not ju
Re: (Score:2)
Setting aside the absolute purist position of Stallman, the point of the copyright law was to give protections to the creators with the understanding that the created works would enter the public domain so that they can constitute a common culture. This was initially 14 years, which was quite reasonable, that later turned into life + 70 years, that is the cause of distrust in that law.
If you polled non-teenagers, I doubt that the majority would suggest a 100 year copyright protection was a fair period. Laws
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Why not just ask Stallman for specs of his toilet, food, chair etc, and make a copy of them for yourself using your own time and resources? Then the analogy would work.
He avoided answering directly.... (Score:3)
Coming up next (Score:2)
72 year old male arrested on suspicion of piracy and wire fraud after a warrant was executed at his home. (they always throw in wire fraud as a bonus, regardless of the actual crime).
Yes - until copyright terms are fair (Score:2)
All Piracy is fair
Stallman is right about this (Score:5, Insightful)
We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.
Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. The Statute of Anne [american.edu] was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.
That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.
Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.
But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.
Re: (Score:3)
if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions?
The obvious answer is campaign contributions.
Another answer is that the nature of their activity is novel. As such it's arguable that the creation of the training corpus is fair use. The models themselves don't include the works in question and they don't reproduce them verbatim. You can train a model at home which will do it, but only by absurd overtraining, and by including basically nothing else. None of them are redistributing models like that. A derivative work has to include sufficiently recognizable
Re: (Score:3)
They had to use a huge piece of the article as the prompt, and their own examples show that it still generated text that wasn't in the articles.
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding was that they were trying to prove it was an original or derivative work because of its ability to reproduce the story. We already knew they were training on their articles.
Re: (Score:2)
It certainly wouldn't be intelligent for them to admit to anything, due to how our courts work.
Re: (Score:2)
Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
Copyright law was created to ensure that someone could actually make a living creating new works. In the past you could achieve that objective by focusing on commercial publication because distribution was so difficult (your legalization of noncommerical infringement would have ruined that).
Libraries are an edge case that were allowed to exist because whatever you think of the law they worked out for everyone.
But now with the internet publication is trivial, so laws need to adapt. I don't think end-users sh
Re: (Score:2)
And how will that impact FOSS? You have to remember copyleft depends on copyright to work.
If non-commercial infringement is allowed, that removes GPL from power. Because I can say make an improvement to a piece of GPL software, and as long as I don't make it commercial I can release my changed software without releasing the source code.
So I take Linux. I add my closed source driver to it, and only provide you a Linux kernel binary with my driver built in. I distribute it freely. I would not be violating the
Re: (Score:3)
Stallman has always been a nut (Score:2, Insightful)
People have always overlooked the fact Stallman is a nut because he also advocated for linux and did a pretty good job of it in the early days. But then I think he did a lot to sideline himself by appearing too extreme. When someone can see themselves in you, you can lead by example. But, people stopped seeing anything they had in common with Stallman.
The fact he always tries to coin juvenile little catch phrases doesn't help his case any: "internet of stings", "forbidden sharing", etc. Of course, the whole
Re: (Score:3)
The fact he always tries to coin juvenile little catch phrases doesn't help his case any: "internet of stings", "forbidden sharing", etc.
It's an attempt at framing. "Piracy" was coined intentionally, because it frames as evil theft, not copying. "Forbidden sharing" brings to mind those years where kids weren't allowed to trade lunches at school because a principal decided it was an allergy risk.
Could just be Stallman has less luck than Doctorow - "enshittification" seems to have caught on rather nicely.
SLANDER (Score:3)
This is just slander. There is no sexual anything connected to him.
Just another hater who doesn't deserve to benefit from the labor of his betters.
A man who does great things above that of most people is not going to be normal or average. You can't be exceptional and average. He is entitled to his opinions and respect for his work but you don't have to be a simp and slander people who don't think like you do.
Not everyone can live off appearance fees. (Score:3)
I agree with him on one thing (Score:2)
Hardly anything worth copying anymore (Score:2)
I do not understand how or why this discussion is coming up now, this is not the 90s anymore and we have seen what the riaa and mpaa cronies have done for 30+ years, so it is a dead discussion.
But nowadays, I am honestly baffled what anyone would copy or share anymore, the overwhelming majority of shows and movies have gotten so terrible I would not even waste the download on them. And the actually good shows and movies, I had eventually bought multiple copies and different formats of over the years anyway,
Licensing Science (Score:3)
The Power of Entitlement (Score:2)
I am not fan of DRM. However, I love how people who cannot afford or don’t like the terms feel entitled to access of other’s work. Does it suck, sure but yeah, leveraging/using someone else’s work w/o compensation when they require it takes real moral licensing.
i wish there was a legal bundle it all service (Score:2)
imagine kodi or whatever, but legal. it shows you all available shows and movies, and interacts with whatever streaming network it is on. has lots of plans available, including a la carte and bundle the entire catalog of multiple streaming providers. all within a single app or website.
it is not convenient having to juggle within all multiple streaming apps / sites. i would pay for this convenience
No software is free (Score:2)
It's a test, a hurdle (Score:2)
We live with technology that enables nearly free sharing of beneficial things, but we can't fully use it without working through the ownership/profit/survival/class thing.
That thing is bigger than this technology highlighting it.
Nice avoidance (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
He did answer, he disagreed with calling it 'piracy', but said sharing is fine, but he personally wouldn't even download binary software because he only wants things that let him at the source code. However, he would happily download and re-share mp4/mkvs.
But wonder if you asked if discarding copyright is fine to share the content, is it also fine to discard copyright to ignore the GPL...
Copyright is a type of capital (Score:2)
RMS basically has the right answer, but only limited to his field of work. Copyright and patents are both examples of capital, or private property, this meaning concepts of "ownership" which go beyond personal property. Personal property is the things you use as part of your everyday life, objects which are like an extension of yourself. This deserves protection. Capital, or private property, is things you own in order to exert power over other people, to restrict their life in accordance with your interest
Re: (Score:2)
"Sharing", means that there is only one copy of the resource
Bollocks. You can share knowledge and ideas.
Re: (Score:3)
But share as in "sharing an idea" is not the meaning that we are talking about HERE is it?
It kinda is. We're talking about intellectual property. You're not sharing anything tangible.
You may also wish to look up the word "equivocation".
You might want to look up the word "cockwomble" and see how it applies to you.
Re: (Score:2)