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+1. Copyright vs. Community\
+@entrybreak{}in the Age of Computer Networks {#copyright-vs.-community-entrybreakin-the-age-of-computer-networks .chapter}
+============================================
+
+> This is a transcript of the keynote speech presented by Richard
+> Stallman, on 12 October 2009, at the LIANZA conference, at the
+> Christchurch Convention Centre, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
+
+@firstcopyingnotice{{Copyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.\
+ Thank you to Bookman for the original transcript. This version of it is
+part of @fsfsthreecite}
+
+> **Brenda Chawner:** Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Today
+> I have the privilege of introducing Richard Stallman, whose keynote
+> speech is being sponsored by the School of Information Management at
+> Victoria University of Wellington.
+>
+> Richard has been working to promote software freedom for over 25
+> years. In 1983 he started the GNU Project to develop a free operating
+> system \[the GNU system\], and in 1985 he set up the Free Software
+> Foundation. Every time you read or send a message to nz-libs, you use
+> the Mailman software which is part of the GNU Project. So whether you
+> realize it or not, Richard’s work has touched all of your lives.
+>
+> I like to describe him as the most influential person most people have
+> never heard of, although he tells me that that cannot possibly be true
+> because it cannot be tested.
+>
+> **RMS:** We can’t tell.
+>
+> **BC:** I said that—I still like it. His ideas about software freedom
+> and free access to information were used by Tim Berners-Lee when he
+> created the world’s first web server, and in 1999 his musings about a
+> free online encyclopedia inspired Jimmy Wales to set up what is now
+> Wikipedia.
+>
+> Today Richard will be talking to us about copyright vs. community in
+> the age of computer networks, and their implications for libraries.
+> Richard.
+>
+> **RMS:** I’ve been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks, and in the
+> North Island it was raining most of the time. Now I know why they call
+> gumboots “Wellingtons.” And then I saw somebody who was making chairs
+> and tables out of ponga wood, and he called it fern-iture. Then we
+> took the ferry to get here, and as soon as we got off, people started
+> mocking and insulting us; but there were no hard feelings, they just
+> wanted to make us really feel Picton.
+
+The reason people usually invite me to give speeches is because of my
+work on free software. This is not a talk about free software; this talk
+answers the question whether the ideas of free software extend to other
+kinds of works. But in order for that to make sense, I’d better tell you
+briefly what free software means.
+
+Free software is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free
+speech,” not “free beer.” Free software is software that respects the
+user’s freedom, and there are four specific freedoms that the user
+deserves always to have:
+
+-   Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
+-   Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code of the program and
+    change it to make the program do what you wish.
+-   Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor—that is, the freedom
+    to redistribute copies of the program, exact copies when you wish.
+-   And freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community. That’s
+    the freedom to publish your modified versions when you wish.
+
+If the program gives you these four freedoms then it’s free software,
+which means the social system of its distribution and use is an ethical
+system, one which respects the user’s freedom and the social solidarity
+of the user’s community. But if one of these freedoms is missing or
+insufficient, then it’s proprietary software, nonfree software,
+user-subjugating software. It’s unethical. It’s not a contribution to
+society. It’s a power grab. This unethical practice should not exist;
+the goal of the free software movement is to put an end to it. All
+software should be free, so that all users can be free.
+
+Proprietary software keeps the users divided and helpless: divided,
+because they’re forbidden to share it, and helpless, because they don’t
+have the source code so they can’t change it. They can’t even study it
+to verify what it’s really doing to them, and many proprietary programs
+have malicious features which spy on the user, restrict the user, even
+back doors to attack the user.
+
+For instance, Microsoft Windows has a back door with which Microsoft can
+forcibly install software changes, without getting permission from the
+supposed owner of the computer. You may think it’s your computer, but if
+you’ve made the mistake of having Windows running in it, then really
+Microsoft has owned your computer. Computers need to be defenestrated,
+which means either throw Windows out of the computer, or throw the
+computer out the window.
+
+But any proprietary software gives the developers unjust power over the
+users. Some of the developers abuse this power more, and some abuse it
+less, but none of them ought to have it. You deserve to have control of
+your computing, and not be forcibly dependent on a particular company.
+So you deserve free software.
+
+At the end of speeches about free software, people sometimes ask whether
+these same freedoms and ideas apply to other things. If you have a copy
+of a published work on your computer, it makes sense to ask whether you
+should have the same four freedoms—whether it’s ethically essential that
+you have them or not. And that’s the question that I’m going to address
+today.
+
+If you have a copy of something that’s not software, for the most part,
+the only thing that might deny you any of these freedoms is copyright
+law. With software that’s not so. The main ways of making software
+nonfree are contracts and withholding the source code from the users.
+Copyright is a sort of secondary, back up method. For other things
+there’s no such distinction as between source code and executable code.
+
+For instance, if we’re talking about a text, if you can see the text to
+read it, there’s nothing in the text that you can’t see. So it’s not the
+same kind of issue exactly as software. It’s for the most part only
+copyright that might deny you these freedoms.
+
+So the question can be restated: “What should copyright law allow you to
+do with published works? What should copyright law say?”
+
+Copyright has developed along with copying technology, so it’s useful to
+review the history of copying technology. Copying developed in the
+ancient world, where you’d use a writing instrument on a writing
+surface. You’d read one copy and write another.
+
+This technology was rather inefficient, but another interesting
+characteristic was that it had no economy of scale. To write ten copies
+would take ten times as long as to write one copy. It required no
+special equipment other than the equipment for writing, and it required
+no special skill other than literacy itself. The result was that copies
+of any particular book were made in a decentralized manner. Wherever
+there was a copy, if someone wanted to copy it, he could.
+
+There was nothing like copyright in the ancient world. If you had a copy
+and wanted to copy it, nobody was going to tell you you weren’t
+allowed—except if the local prince didn’t like what the book said, in
+which case he might punish you for copying it. But that’s not copyright,
+but rather something closely related, namely censorship. To this day,
+copyright is often used in attempts to censor people.
+
+That went on for thousands of years, but then there was a big advance in
+copying technology, namely the printing press. The printing press made
+copying more efficient, but not uniformly. \[This was\] because mass
+production copying became a lot more efficient, but making one copy at a
+time didn’t benefit from the printing press. In fact, you were better
+off just writing it by hand; that would be faster than trying to print
+one copy.
+
+The printing press has an economy of scale: it takes a lot of work to
+set the type, but then you can make many copies very fast. Also, the
+printing press and the type were expensive equipment that most people
+didn’t own; and the ability to use them, most literate people didn’t
+know. Using a press was a different skill from writing. The result was a
+centralized manner of producing copies: the copies of any given book
+would be made in a few places, and then they would be transported to
+wherever someone wanted to buy copies.
+
+Copyright began in the age of the printing press. Copyright in England
+began as a system of censorship in the 1500s. I believe it was
+originally meant to censor Protestants, but it was turned around and
+used to censor Catholics and presumably lots of others as well.
+According to this law, in order to publish a book you had to get
+permission from the Crown, and this permission was granted in the form
+of a perpetual monopoly to publish it. This was allowed to lapse in the
+1680s, I believe \[it expired in 1695 according to the Wikipedia
+entry\]. The publishers wanted it back again, but what they got was
+something somewhat different. The Statute of Anne gave authors a
+copyright, and only for 14 years, although the author could renew it
+once.
+
+This was a totally different idea—a temporary monopoly for the author,
+instead of a perpetual monopoly for the publisher. The idea developed
+that copyright was a means of promoting writing.
+
+When the US constitution was written, some people wanted authors to be
+entitled to a copyright, but that was rejected. Instead, the US
+Constitution says that Congress can optionally adopt a copyright law,
+and if there is a copyright law, its purpose is to promote progress. In
+other words, the purpose is not benefits for copyright holders or
+anybody they do business with, but for the general public. Copyright has
+to last a limited time; publishers keep hoping for us to forget about
+this.
+
+Here we have an idea of copyright which is an industrial regulation on
+publishers, controlled by authors, and designed to provide benefits to
+the public at large. It functioned this way because it didn’t restrict
+the readers.
+
+Now in the early centuries of printing, and still I believe in the
+1790s, lots of readers wrote copies by hand because they couldn’t afford
+printed copies. Nobody ever expected copyright law to be something other
+than an industrial regulation. It wasn’t meant to stop people from
+writing copies, it was meant to regulate the publishers. Because of this
+it was easy to enforce, uncontroversial, and arguably beneficial for
+society.
+
+It was easy to enforce, because it only had to be enforced against
+publishers. And it’s easy to find the unauthorized publishers of a
+book—you go to a bookstore and say, “Where do these copies come from?”
+You don’t have to invade everybody’s home and everybody’s computer to do
+that.
+
+It was uncontroversial because, as the readers were not restricted, they
+had nothing to complain about. Theoretically they were restricted from
+publishing, but not being publishers and not having printing presses,
+they couldn’t do that anyway. In what they actually could do, they were
+not restricted.
+
+It was arguably beneficial because the general public, according to the
+concepts of copyright law, traded away a theoretical right they were not
+in a position to exercise. In exchange, they got the benefits of more
+writing.
+
+Now if you trade away something you have no possible use for, and you
+get something you can use in exchange, it’s a positive trade. Whether or
+not you could have gotten a better deal some other way, that’s a
+different question, but at least it’s positive.
+
+So if this were still in the age of the printing press, I don’t think
+I’d be complaining about copyright law. But the age of the printing
+press is gradually giving way to the age of the computer
+networks—another advance in copying technology that makes copying more
+efficient, and once again not uniformly so.
+
+Here’s what we had in the age of the printing press: mass production
+very efficient, one at a time copying still just as slow as the ancient
+world. Digital technology gets us here: they’ve both benefited, but
+one-off copying has benefited the most.
+
+We get to a situation much more like the ancient world, where one at a
+time copying is not so much worse \[i.e., harder\] than mass production
+copying. It’s a little bit less efficient, a little bit less good, but
+it’s perfectly cheap enough that hundreds of millions of people do it.
+Consider how many people write CDs once in a while, even in poor
+countries. You may not have a CD-writer yourself, so you go to a store
+where you can do it.
+
+This means that copyright no longer fits in with the technology as it
+used to. Even if the words of copyright law had not changed, they
+wouldn’t have the same effect. Instead of an industrial regulation on
+publishers controlled by authors, with the benefits set up to go to the
+public, it is now a restriction on the general public, controlled mainly
+by the publishers, in the name of the authors.
+
+In other words, it’s tyranny. It’s intolerable and we can’t allow it to
+continue this way.
+
+As a result of this change, \[copyright\] is no longer easy to enforce,
+no longer uncontroversial, and no longer beneficial.
+
+It’s no longer easy to enforce because now the publishers want to
+enforce it against each and every person, and to do this requires cruel
+measures, draconian punishments, invasions of privacy, abolition of our
+basic ideas of justice. There’s almost no limit to how far they will
+propose to go to prosecute the War on Sharing.
+
+It’s no longer uncontroversial. There are political parties in several
+countries whose basic platform is “freedom to share.”
+
+It’s no longer beneficial because the freedoms that we conceptually
+traded away (because we couldn’t exercise them), we now can exercise.
+They’re tremendously useful, and we want to exercise them.
+
+What would a democratic government do in this situation?
+
+It would reduce copyright power. It would say: “The trade we made on
+behalf of our citizens, trading away some of their freedom which now
+they need, is intolerable. We have to change this; we can’t trade away
+the freedom that is important.” We can measure the sickness of democracy
+by the tendency of governments to do the exact opposite around the
+world, extending copyright power when they should reduce it.
+
+One example is in the dimension of time. Around the world we see
+pressure to make copyright last longer and longer and longer.
+
+A wave of this started in the US in 1998. Copyright was extended by 20
+years on both past and future works. I do not understand how they hope
+to convince the now dead or senile writers of the 20s and 30s to write
+more back then by extending copyright on their works now. If they have a
+time machine with which to inform them, they haven’t used it. Our
+history books don’t say that there was a burst of vigor in the arts in
+the 20s when all the artists found out that their copyrights would be
+extended in 1998.
+
+It’s theoretically conceivable that 20 years more copyright on future
+works would convince people to make more effort in producing those
+works. But not anyone rational, because the discounted present value of
+20 more years of copyright starting 75 years in the future—if it’s a
+work made for hire—and probably even longer if it’s a work with an
+individual copyright holder, is so small it couldn’t persuade any
+rational person to do anything different. Any business that wants to
+claim otherwise ought to present its projected balance sheets for 75
+years in the future, which of course they can’t do because none of them
+really looks that far ahead.
+
+The real reason for this law, the desire that prompted various companies
+to purchase this law in the US Congress, which is how laws are decided
+on for the most part, was they had lucrative monopolies and they wanted
+those monopolies to continue.
+
+For instance, Disney was aware that the first film in which Mickey Mouse
+appeared would go into the public domain in a few years, and then
+anybody would be free to draw that same character as part of other
+works. Disney didn’t want that to happen. Disney borrows a lot from the
+public domain, but is determined never to give the slightest thing back.
+So Disney paid for this law, which we refer to as the Mickey Mouse
+Copyright Act.
+
+The movie companies say they want perpetual copyright, but the US
+Constitution won’t let them get that officially. So they came up with a
+way to get the same result unofficially: “perpetual copyright on the
+installment plan.” Every 20 years they extend copyright for 20 more
+years. So that at any given time, any given work has a date when it will
+supposedly fall into the public domain. But that date is like tomorrow,
+it never comes. By the time you get there they will have postponed it,
+unless we stop them next time.
+
+That’s one dimension, the dimension of duration. But even more important
+is the dimension of breadth: which uses of the work does copyright
+cover?
+
+In the age of the printing press, copyright wasn’t supposed to cover all
+uses of a copyrighted work, because copyright regulated certain uses
+that were the exceptions in a broader space of unregulated uses. There
+were certain things you were simply allowed to do with your copy of a
+book.
+
+Now the publishers have got the idea that they can turn our computers
+against us, and use them to seize total power over all use of published
+works. They want to set up a pay-per-view universe. They’re doing it
+with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)—the intentional features of
+software that’s designed to restrict the user. And often the computer
+itself is designed to restrict the user.
+
+The first way in which the general public saw this was in DVDs. A movie
+on a DVD was usually encrypted, and the format was secret. The DVD
+conspiracy kept this secret because they said anyone that wants to make
+DVD players has to join the conspiracy, promise to keep the format
+secret, and promise to design the DVD players to restrict the users
+according to the rules, which say it has to stop the user from doing
+this, from doing that, from doing that—a precise set of requirements,
+all of which are malicious towards us.
+
+It worked for a while, but then some people figured out the secret
+format, and published free software capable of reading the movie on a
+DVD and playing it. Then the publishers said, “Since we can’t actually
+stop them, we have to make it a crime.” And they started that in the US
+in 1998 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which imposed
+censorship on software capable of doing such jobs.
+
+So that particular piece of free software was the subject of a court
+case. Its distribution in the US is forbidden; the US practices
+censorship of software.
+
+The movie companies are well aware that they can’t really make that
+program disappear—it’s easy enough to find it. So they designed another
+encryption system, which they hoped would be harder to break, and it’s
+called AACS, or the axe.
+
+The AACS conspiracy makes precise rules about all players. For instance,
+in 2011 it’s going to be forbidden to make analog video outputs. So all
+video outputs will have to be digital, and they will carry the signal
+encrypted into a monitor specially designed to keep secrets from the
+user. That is malicious hardware. They say that the purpose of this is
+to “close the analog hole.” *\[Stallman takes off his glasses.\]* Here’s
+one and here’s another, that they’d like to poke out
+permanently.[(1)](#FOOT1)
+
+How do I know about these conspiracies? The reason is they’re not
+secret—they have web sites. The AACS web site proudly describes the
+contracts that manufacturers have to sign, which is how I know about
+this requirement. It proudly states the names of the companies that have
+established this conspiracy, which include Microsoft and Apple, and
+Intel, and Sony, and Disney, and IBM.
+
+A conspiracy of companies designed to restrict the public’s access to
+technology ought to be prosecuted as a serious crime, like a conspiracy
+to fix prices, except it’s worse, so the prison sentences for this
+should be longer. But these companies are quite confident that our
+governments are on their side against us. They have no fear against
+being prosecuted for these conspiracies, which is why they don’t bother
+to hide them.
+
+In general, DRM is set up by a conspiracy of companies. Once in a while
+a single company can do it, but generally it requires a conspiracy
+between technology companies and publishers, so \[it’s\] almost always a
+conspiracy.
+
+They thought that nobody would ever be able to break the AACS, but about
+three and a half years ago someone released a free program capable of
+decrypting that format. However, it was totally useless, because in
+order to run it you need to know the key.
+
+And then, six months later, I saw a photo of two adorable puppies, with
+32 hex digits above them, and I wondered, “Why put those two things
+together? I wonder if those numbers are some important key, and someone
+could have put the numbers together with the puppies, figuring people
+would copy the photo of the puppies because they were so cute. This
+would protect the key from being wiped out.”
+
+And that’s what it was—that was the key to break the axe. People posted
+it, and editors deleted it, because laws in many countries now conscript
+them to censor this information. It was posted again, they deleted it;
+eventually they gave up, and in two weeks this number was posted in over
+700,000 web sites.
+
+That’s a big outpouring of public disgust with DRM. But it didn’t win
+the war, because the publishers changed the key. Not only that: with HD
+DVD, this was adequate to break the DRM, but not with Blu-ray. Blu-ray
+has an additional level of DRM and so far there is no free software that
+can break it, which means that you must regard Blu-ray disks as
+something incompatible with your own freedom. They are an enemy with
+which no accommodation is possible, at least not with our present level
+of knowledge.
+
+Never accept any product designed to attack your freedom. If you don’t
+have the free software to play a DVD, you mustn’t buy or rent any DVDs,
+or accept them even as gifts, except for the rare non-encrypted DVDs,
+which there are a few of. I actually have a few \[of these\]—I don’t
+have any encrypted DVDs, I won’t take them.
+
+So this is how things stand in video, but we’ve also seen DRM in music.
+
+For instance, about ten years ago we started to see things that looked
+like compact disks, but they weren’t written quite like compact disks.
+They didn’t follow the standard. We called them “corrupt disks,” and the
+idea of them was that they would play in an audio player, but it was
+impossible to read them on a computer. These different methods had
+various problems.
+
+Eventually Sony came up with a clever idea. They put a program on the
+disk, so that if you stuck the disk into a computer, the disk would
+install the program. This program was designed like a virus to take
+control of the system. It’s called a “root kit,” meaning that it has
+things in it to break the security of the system so that it can install
+the software deep inside the system, and modify various parts of the
+system.
+
+For instance, it modified the command you could use to examine the
+system to see if the software was present, so as to disguise itself. It
+modified the command you could use to delete some of these files, so
+that it wouldn’t really delete them. Now all of this is a serious crime,
+but it’s not the only one Sony committed, because the software also
+included free software code—code that had been released under the GNU
+General Public License.
+
+Now the GNU GPL is a copyleft license, and that means it says, “Yes,
+you’re free to put this code into other things, but when you do, the
+entire program that you put things into you must release as free
+software under the same license. And you must make the source code
+available to users, and to inform them of their rights you must give
+them a copy of this license when they get the software.”
+
+Sony didn’t comply with all that. That’s commercial copyright
+infringement, which is a felony. They’re both felonies, but Sony wasn’t
+prosecuted because the government understands that the purpose of the
+government and the law is to maintain the power of those companies over
+us, not to help defend our freedom in any way.
+
+People got angry and they sued Sony. However, they made a mistake. They
+focused their condemnation not on the evil purpose of this scheme, but
+only on the secondary evils of the various methods that Sony used. So
+Sony settled the lawsuits and promised that in the future, when it
+attacks our freedom, it will not do those other things.
+
+Actually, that particular corrupt disk scheme was not so bad, because if
+you were not using Windows it would not affect you at all. Even if you
+were using Windows, there’s a key on the keyboard—if you remembered
+every time to hold it down, then the disk wouldn’t install the software.
+But of course it’s hard to remember that every time; you’re going to
+slip up some day. This shows the kind of thing we’ve had to deal with.
+
+Fortunately music DRM is receding. Even the main record companies sell
+downloads without DRM. But we see a renewed effort to impose DRM on
+books.
+
+You see, the publishers want to take away the traditional freedoms of
+book readers—freedom to do things such as borrow a book from the public
+library, or lend it to a friend; to sell a book to a used book store, or
+buy it anonymously paying cash (which is the only way I buy books—we’ve
+got to resist the temptations to let Big Brother know everything that
+we’re doing.)
+
+Even the freedom to keep the book as long as you wish, and read it as
+many times as you wish, they plan to get rid of.
+
+The way they do it is with DRM. They knew that so many people read books
+and would get angry if these freedoms were taken away that they didn’t
+believe they could buy a law specifically to abolish these
+freedoms—there would be too much opposition. Democracy is sick, but once
+in a while people manage to demand something. So they came up with a
+two-stage plan.
+
+First, take away these freedoms from e-books, and second, convince
+people to switch from paper books to e-books. They’ve succeeded with
+stage 1.
+
+In the US they did it with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in
+New Zealand, that was part of the Copyright Act \[of 2008\]; censorship
+on software that can break DRM was part of that law. That’s an unjust
+provision; it’s got to be repealed.
+
+The second stage is convince people to switch from printed books to
+e-books; that didn’t go so well.
+
+One publisher in 2001 had the idea they would make their line of e-books
+really popular if they started it with my biography. So they found an
+author and the author asked me if I’d cooperate, and I said, “Only if
+this e-book is published without encryption, without DRM.” The publisher
+wouldn’t go along with that, and I just stuck to it—I said no.
+Eventually we found another publisher who was willing to do this—in fact
+willing to publish the book under a free license giving you the four
+freedoms—so the book was then published, and sold a lot of copies on
+paper.
+
+But in any case, e-books failed at the beginning of this decade. People
+just didn’t want to read them very much. And I said, “They will try
+again.” We saw an amazing number of news articles about electronic ink
+(or is it electronic paper, I can never remember which), and it occurred
+to me probably the reason there’s so many is the publishers want us to
+think about this. They want us to be eager for the next generation of
+e-book readers.
+
+Now they’re upon us. Things like the Sony Shreader (its official name is
+the Sony Reader, but if you put on ‘sh’ it explains what it’s designed
+to do to your books), and the Amazon Swindle, designed to swindle you
+out of your traditional freedoms without your noticing. Of course, they
+call it the Kindle which is what it’s going to do to your books.
+
+The Kindle is an extremely malicious product, almost as malicious as
+Microsoft Windows. They both have spy features, they both have Digital
+Restrictions Management, and they both have back doors.
+
+In the case of the Kindle, the only way you can buy a book is to buy it
+from Amazon, and Amazon requires you to identify yourself, so they know
+everything that you’ve bought.
+
+Then there is Digital Restrictions Management, so you can’t lend the
+book or sell it to a used bookstore, and the library can’t lend it
+either.
+
+And then there’s the back door, which we found out about about three
+months ago, because Amazon used it. Amazon sent a command to all the
+Kindles to erase a particular book, namely 1984, by George Orwell. Yes,
+they couldn’t have picked a more ironic book to erase. So that’s how we
+know that Amazon has a back door with which it can erase books remotely.
+
+What else it can do, who knows? Maybe it’s like Microsoft Windows. Maybe
+Amazon can remotely upgrade the software, which means that whatever
+malicious things are not in it now, they could put them in it tomorrow.
+
+This is intolerable—any one of these restrictions is intolerable. They
+want to create a world where nobody lends books to anybody anymore.
+
+Imagine that you visit a friend and there are no books on the shelf.
+It’s not that your friend doesn’t read, but his books are all inside a
+device, and of course he can’t lend you those books. The only way he
+could lend you any one of those books is to lend you his whole library,
+which is obviously a ridiculous thing to ask anybody to do. So there
+goes friendship for people who love books.
+
+Make sure that you inform people what this device implies. It means
+other readers will no longer be your friends, because you will be acting
+like a jerk toward them. Spread the word preemptively. This device is
+your enemy. It’s the enemy of everyone who reads. The people who don’t
+recognize that are the people who are thinking so short-term that they
+don’t see it. It’s our job to help them see beyond the momentary
+convenience to the implications of this device.
+
+I have nothing against distributing books in digital form, if they are
+not designed to take away our freedom. Strictly speaking, it is possible
+to have an e-book reader:
+
+-   that is not designed to attack you,
+-   which runs free software and not proprietary software,
+-   which doesn’t have DRM,
+-   which doesn’t make people identify yourself to get a book,
+-   which doesn’t have a back door, \[and\]
+-   which doesn’t restrict what you can do with the files on
+    your machine.
+
+It’s possible, but the big companies really pushing e-books are doing it
+to attack our freedom, and we mustn’t stand for that. This is what
+governments are doing in cahoots with big business to attack our
+freedom, by making copyright harsher and nastier, more restrictive than
+ever before.
+
+But what should they do? Governments should make copyright power less.
+Here are my specific proposals.
+
+First of all, there is the dimension of time. I propose copyright should
+last ten years, starting from the date of publication of a work.
+
+Why from the date of publication? Because before that, we don’t have
+copies. It doesn’t matter to us whether we would have been allowed to
+copy our copies that we don’t have, so I figure we might as well let the
+authors have as much time as it takes to arrange publication, and then
+start the clock.
+
+But why ten years? I don’t know about in this country, but in the US,
+the publication cycle has got shorter and shorter. Nowadays almost all
+books are remaindered within two years and out-of-print within three. So
+ten years is more than three times the usual publication cycle—that
+should be plenty comfortable.
+
+But not everybody agrees. I once proposed this in a panel discussion
+with fiction writers, and the award-winning fantasy writer next to me
+said, “Ten years? No way. Anything more than five years is intolerable.”
+You see, he had a legal dispute with his publisher. His books seemed to
+be out of print, but the publisher wouldn’t admit it. The publisher was
+using the copyright on his own book to stop him from distributing copies
+himself, which he wanted to do so people could read it.
+
+This is what every artist starts out wanting—wanting to distribute her
+work so it will get read and appreciated. Very few make a lot of money.
+That tiny fraction face the danger of being morally corrupted, like JK
+Rowling.
+
+JK Rowling, in Canada, got an injunction against people who had bought
+her book in a bookstore, ordering them not to read it. So in response I
+call for a boycott of Harry Potter books. But I don’t say you shouldn’t
+read them; I leave that to the author and the publisher. I just say you
+shouldn’t buy them.
+
+It’s few authors that make enough money that they can be corrupted in
+this way. Most of them don’t get anywhere near that, and continue
+wanting the same thing they wanted at the outset: they want their work
+to be appreciated.
+
+He wanted to distribute his own book, and copyright was stopping him. He
+realized that more than five years of copyright was unlikely to ever do
+him any good.
+
+If people would rather have copyright last five years, I won’t be
+against it. I propose ten as a first stab at the problem. Let’s reduce
+it to ten years and then take stock for a while, and we could adjust it
+after that. I don’t say I think ten years is the exact right number—I
+don’t know.
+
+What about the dimension of breadth? Which activities should copyright
+cover? I distinguish three broad categories of works.
+
+First of all, there are the functional works that you use to do a
+practical job in your life. This includes software, recipes, educational
+works, reference works, text fonts, and other things you can think of.
+These works should be free.
+
+If you use the work to do a job in your life, then if you can’t change
+the work to suit you, you don’t control your life. Once you have changed
+the work to suit you, then you’ve got to be free to publish it—publish
+your version—because there will be others who will want the changes
+you’ve made.
+
+This leads quickly to the conclusion that users have to have the same
+four freedoms \[for all functional works\], not just for software. And
+you’ll notice that for recipes, practically speaking, cooks are always
+sharing and changing recipes just as if the recipes were free. Imagine
+how people would react if the government tried to stamp out so-called
+recipe piracy.
+
+The term “pirate” is pure propaganda. When people ask me what I think of
+music piracy, I say, “As far as I know, when pirates attack they don’t
+do it by playing instruments badly, they do it with arms. So it’s not
+music ‘piracy,’ because piracy is attacking ships, and sharing is as far
+as you get from being the moral equivalent of attacking ships.”
+Attacking ships is bad, sharing with other people is good, so we should
+firmly denounce that propaganda term “piracy” whenever we hear it.
+
+People might have objected twenty years ago: “If we don’t give up our
+freedom, if we don’t let the publishers of these works control us, the
+works won’t get made and that will be a horrible disaster.” Now, looking
+at the free software community, and all the recipes that circulate, and
+reference works like Wikipedia—we are even starting to see free
+textbooks being published—we know that that fear is misguided.
+
+There is no need to despair and give up our freedom thinking that
+otherwise the works won’t get made. There are lots of ways to encourage
+them to get made if we want more—lots of ways that are consistent with
+and respect our freedom. In this category, they should all be free.
+
+But what about the second category, of works that say what certain
+people thought, like memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific
+papers,[(2)](#FOOT2) and various other things? To publish a modified
+version of somebody else’s statement of what he thought is
+misrepresenting \[that\] somebody. That’s not particularly a
+contribution to society.
+
+Therefore it is workable and acceptable to have a somewhat reduced
+copyright system where all commercial use is covered by copyright, all
+modification is covered by copyright, but everyone is free to
+non-commercially redistribute exact copies.
+
+That freedom is the minimum freedom we must establish for all published
+works, because the denial of that freedom is what creates the War on
+Sharing—what creates the vicious propaganda that sharing is theft, that
+sharing is like being a pirate and attacking ships. Absurdities, but
+absurdities backed by a lot of money that has corrupted our governments.
+We need to end the War on Sharing; we need to legalize sharing exact
+copies of any published work.
+
+In the second category of works, that’s all we need; we don’t need to
+make them free. Therefore I think it’s OK to have a reduced copyright
+system which covers commercial use and all modifications. And this will
+provide a revenue stream to the authors in more or less the same
+(usually inadequate) way as the present system. You’ve got to keep in
+mind \[that\] the present system, except for superstars, is usually
+totally inadequate.
+
+What about works of art and entertainment? Here it took me a while to
+decide what to think about modifications.
+
+You see, on one hand, a work of art can have an artistic integrity and
+modifying it could destroy that. Of course, copyright doesn’t
+necessarily stop works from being butchered that way. Hollywood does it
+all the time. On the other hand, modifying the work can be a
+contribution to art. It makes possible the folk process which leads to
+things which are beautiful and rich.
+
+Even if we look at named authors only: consider Shakespeare, who
+borrowed stories from other works only a few decades old, and did them
+in different ways, and made important works of literature. If today’s
+copyright law had existed then, that would have been forbidden and those
+plays wouldn’t have been written.
+
+But eventually I realized that modifying a work of art can be a
+contribution to art, but it’s not desperately urgent in most cases. If
+you had to wait ten years for the copyright to expire, you could wait
+that long. Not like the present-day copyright that makes you wait maybe
+75 years, or 95 years. In Mexico you might have to wait almost 200 years
+in some cases, because copyright in Mexico expires a hundred years after
+the author dies. This is insane, but ten years, as I’ve proposed
+copyright should last, that people can wait.
+
+So I propose the same partly reduced copyright that covers commercial
+use and modification, but everyone’s got to be free to non-commercially
+redistribute exact copies. After ten years it goes into the public
+domain, and people can contribute to art by publishing their modified
+versions.
+
+One other thing: if you’re going to take little pieces out of a bunch of
+works and rearrange them into something totally different, that should
+just be legal, because the purpose of copyright is to promote art, not
+to obstruct art. It’s stupid to apply copyright to using snippets like
+that—it’s self-defeating. It’s a kind of distortion that you’d only get
+when the government is under the control of the publishers of the
+existing successful works, and has totally lost sight of its intended
+purpose.
+
+That’s what I propose, and in particular, this means that sharing copies
+on the internet must be legal. Sharing is good. Sharing builds the bonds
+of society. To attack sharing is to attack society.
+
+So any time the government proposes some new means to attack people who
+share, to stop them from sharing, we have to recognize that this is
+evil, not just because the means proposed almost invariably offend basic
+ideas of justice. But that’s not a coincidence; the reason is because
+the purpose is evil. Sharing is good and the government should encourage
+sharing.
+
+But copyright did after all have a useful purpose. Copyright as a means
+to carry out that purpose has a problem now, because it doesn’t fit in
+with the technology we use. It interferes with all the vital freedoms
+for all the readers, listeners, viewers, and whatever, but the goal of
+promoting the arts is still desirable. So in addition to the partly
+reduced copyright system, which would continue to be a copyright system,
+I propose two other methods.
+
+One \[works via\] taxes—distribute tax money directly to artists. This
+could be a special tax, perhaps on internet connectivity, or it could
+come from general revenue, because it won’t be that much money in total,
+not if it’s distributed in an efficient way. To distribute it
+efficiently to promote the arts means not in linear proportion to
+popularity. It should be based on popularity, because we don’t want
+bureaucrats to have the discretion to decide which artists to support
+and which to ignore, but based on popularity does not imply linear
+proportion.
+
+What I propose is measure the popularity of the various artists, which
+you could do through polling (samples) in which nobody is required to
+participate, and then take the cube root. The cube root looks like this:
+it means basically that \[the payment\] tapers off after a while.
+
+If superstar A is a thousand times as popular as successful artist B,
+with this system A would get ten times as much money as B, not a
+thousand times.
+
+Linearly would give A a thousand times as much as B, which means that if
+we wanted B to get enough to live on we’re going to have to make A
+tremendously rich. This is wasteful use of the tax money—it shouldn’t be
+done.
+
+But if we make it taper off, then yes, each superstar will get
+handsomely more than an ordinary successful artist, but the total of all
+the superstars will be a small fraction of the \[total\] money. Most of
+the money will go to support a large number of fairly successful
+artists, fairly appreciated artists, fairly popular artists. Thus the
+system will use money a lot more efficiently than the existing system.
+
+The existing system is regressive. It actually gives far, far more per
+record, for instance, to a superstar than to anybody else. The money is
+extremely badly used. The result is we’d actually be paying a lot less
+this way. I hope that’s enough to mollify some of these people who have
+a knee-jerk hostile reaction to taxes—one that I don’t share, because I
+believe in a welfare state.
+
+I have another suggestion which is voluntary payments. Suppose every
+player had a button you could push to send a dollar to the artist who
+made the work you’re currently playing or the last one you played. This
+money would be delivered anonymously to those artists. I think a lot of
+people would push that button fairly often.
+
+For instance, all of us could afford to push that button once every day,
+and we wouldn’t miss that much money. It’s not that much money for us,
+I’m pretty sure. Of course, there are poor people who couldn’t afford to
+push it ever, and it’s OK if they don’t. We don’t need to squeeze money
+out of poor people to support the artists. There are enough people who
+are not poor to do the job just fine. I’m sure you’re aware that a lot
+of people really love certain art and are really happy to support the
+artists.
+
+An idea just came to me. The player could also give you a certificate of
+having supported so-and-so, and it could even count up how many times
+you had done it and give you a certificate that says, “I sent so much to
+these artists.” There are various ways we could encourage people who
+want to do it.
+
+For instance, we could have a PR campaign which is friendly and kind:
+“Have you sent a dollar to some artists today? Why not? It’s only a
+dollar—you’ll never miss it and don’t you love what they’re doing? Push
+the button!” It will make people feel good, and they’ll think, “Yeah, I
+love what I just watched. I’ll send a dollar.”
+
+This is already starting to work to some extent. There’s a Canadian
+singer who used to be called Jane Siberry. She put her music on her web
+site and invited people to download it and pay whatever amount they
+wished. She reported getting an average of more than a dollar per copy,
+which is interesting because the major record companies charge just
+under a dollar per copy. By letting people decide whether and how much
+to pay, she got more—she got even more per visitor who was actually
+downloading something. But this might not even count whether there was
+an effect of bringing more people to come, and \[thus\] increasing the
+total number that this average was against.
+
+So it can work, but it’s a pain in the neck under present circumstances.
+You’ve got to have a credit card to do it, and that means you can’t do
+it anonymously. And you’ve got to go find where you’re going to pay, and
+the payment systems for small amounts, they’re not very efficient, so
+the artists are only getting half of it. If we set up a good system for
+this, it would work far, far better. So these are my two suggestions.
+
+And in [mecenat-global.org](mecenat-global.org),[(3)](#FOOT3) you can
+find another scheme that combines aspects of the two, which was invented
+by Francis Muguet and designed to fit in with existing legal systems
+better to make it easier to enact.
+
+Be careful of proposals to “compensate the rights holders,” because when
+they say “compensate,” they’re trying to presume that if you have
+appreciated a work, you now have a specific debt to somebody, and that
+you have to “compensate” that somebody. When they say “rights holders,”
+it’s supposed to make you think it’s supporting artists while in fact
+it’s going to the publishers—the same publishers who basically exploit
+all the artists (except the few that you’ve all heard of, who are so
+popular that they have clout).
+
+We don’t owe a debt; we have nobody that we have to “compensate.”
+\[But\] supporting the arts is still a useful thing to do. That was the
+motivation for copyright back when copyright fit in with the technology
+of the day. Today copyright is a bad way to do it, but it’s still good
+to do it other ways that respect our freedom.
+
+Demand that they change the two evil parts of the New Zealand Copyright
+Act. They shouldn’t replace the three strikes punishment,[(4)](#FOOT4)
+because sharing is good, and they’ve got to get rid of the censorship
+for the software to break DRM. Beware of ACTA—they’re trying to
+negotiate a treaty between various countries, for all of these countries
+to attack their citizens, and we don’t know how because they won’t tell
+us.
+
+<div class="footnote">
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+### Footnotes
+
+### [(1)](#DOCF1)
+
+@raggedright In 2010, the encryption system for digital video output was
+definitively cracked. (See Mark Hachman’s “HDCP Master Key Confirmed;
+Blu-Ray Content Vulnerable” (September 16 2010), at
+<http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369280,00.asp>, for more
+information.) @end raggedright
+
+### [(2)](#DOCF2)
+
+@raggedright 2015: I included scientific papers because I thought that
+publishing modified versions of someone else’s paper would cause harm;
+however, publishing physics and math papers under the Creative Commons
+Attribution License on [arXiv.org](arXiv.org) and many libre journals
+seems to have no problems. Thus, I subsequently concluded that
+scientific papers ought to be free. @end raggedright
+
+### [(3)](#DOCF3)
+
+@raggedright That page is no longer active; please see
+[https://stallman.org/mecenat/\
+global-patronage.html](https://stallman.org/mecenat/%3Cbr%3Eglobal-patronage.html)
+instead. @end raggedright
+
+### [(4)](#DOCF4)
+
+@raggedright New Zealand had enacted a system of punishment without
+trial for internet users accused of copying; then, facing popular
+protest, the government did not implement it, and announced a plan to
+implement a modified unjust punishment system. The point here was that
+they should not proceed to implement a replacement—rather, they should
+have no such system. However, the words I used don’t say this clearly.
+
+@hglue@defaultparindent The New Zealand government subsequently
+implemented the punishment scheme more or less as originally planned.
+@end raggedright
+
+</div>
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This document was generated by *tonghuix* on *March 25, 2016* using
+[*texi2html 1.82*](http://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/).\