RMS Calls to Liberate Cyberspace

Henri Poole writes "In an interview with Groklaw's Sean Daly at GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona, RMS talks with passion about the dangers of DRM. From the article: 'the point is, we shouldn't be passive victims! We should decide that it will not happen! And the way we decide that is by activism. We have to do everything possible to make sure that those products are rejected, that they fail, that they give bad reputations to whoever makes them.' He closed the interview with a far reaching goal for the Free Software Movement: 'the goal is to liberate everyone in cyberspace.'"

Comments

The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always enjoy it when Richard Stallman gives interviews. He was probably the first person--many, many years ago!--to fundamentally understand that we have a CHOICE of whether we want to preserve freedoms to do whatever we want with our software, or whether we're going to let other parties take those freedoms away from us.

Also, he had the guts to stand up for his freedoms and everyone else's, to be able to do what they want with their software. He's done more than just about any other single person to try and protect those freedoms for regular folks like you and me.

Can you imagine what the software landscape would look like today without the GPL, without the FSF and without all the free software that has been licensed under the GPL (both by the FSF and by many other open-source contributors)? Even if many of us continue to use non-free systems such as Windows XP, it is nice to know we have a choice. And we WOULDN'T have that choice anymore if Richard and many others had not stood up when they did.

Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.

There are a small number of people who understand the issues but aren't particularly concerned about them; extreme pragmatists like Linus probably fall into this category. Still, I don't often hear Linus or others from this category criticising Stallman.

The people who criticise Richard Stallman are those who are afraid of his message.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In the same way that I am sympathetic to the animal rights movement yet think PETA is counterproductive, I am sympathetic to the Open Source movement yet think Stallman is, generally, overshrill for his/our own good. The idea that you have to match extremity with extremity in politics finds no home with me.

I don't think you know what extreme is.

Communism as a solution to the problems of proprietary software would be extreme, but that isn't even close to what Stallman promotes.

Stallman's position is to the proprietary software industry as the expectation of being able to open the hood of your car is to the automobile industry. No reasonable person would argue that the hoods of all cars should be welded shut and only openable by the manufacturer, so why is it extreme for Stallman to make the same argument about software?

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Wow. Pre-emptively demonizing those who might dare disagree with the great RMS. I'm sure all those people won't post now!

I think you've illustrated the RMS cult of personality far better than you realize. Keep that mind closed! It's much safer that way!

You are way over-stretching your example. Anyone who has been on slashdot very long has heard all the complaints about RMS, by now its just a litany of repitition - nobody has come up with anything new to complain about RMS for long, long time.

So the guy posts first and says, "yeah, yeah, yeah, we've heard it all before and most of the arguments against RMS break down as either A, B or C." That doesn't mean he's close minded, it means he's tired of hearing the same well refuted drivel over and over again.

Anyone who wants to criticize RMS should take that as a declaration that they need to do better than they have in the past, that same tired old specious arguments aren't worth the effort to type them in.

By the way, your "cult of personality" bit - that's one of the referenced specious arguments that nobody cares about.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[AuMatar]

People don't use the software because the GPL is so rigid. If we used Perl's Artistic License instead of the GPL we'd finally have progress. Who cares if others change your software? It's at least being used and improving the world.

That quote shows you completely do not understand the GPL. People can charge for my GPLed software if they wish. Nothing in the license stops them. What they can't do is take it and make software from it without releasing their own code. In other words, it keeps the code open. Taking the code and making a proprietary branch doesn't improve the world. IT just continues the cycle of proprietary shit used to fuck over consumers. The GPL does improve the world- it forces offshoots to be GPLed as well, so people can use the code to improve their lives and the lives of others.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[rolfwind]

The extremists founded the US government. Read up on Samuel Adams as the best example, he was a propagandist that, among other things, helped organize the Boston Tea Party and generally rally people around the idea of revolution through his 1-sided newspaper. He was as extreme as you can get.

Like it or not, but moderates stir no one to action exactly because they have no defining ideological principles. It is simply a relative marker of the "middle ground." Extremist serve their purpose by marking the extreme (the edge).

A moderate today is different from a moderate yesterday but sets of principles are more firm. If there were no Richard Stallman setting up his extreme, the current leftist (or what have you) extreme would be moved closer to your middle, and you'd be the extremist, unless of course, if you don't stand for anything, then your stand would be significantly pushed to closer to the status quo and away from what Stallman stands for.

In fact, being a moderate is much of an deceit on people to appear "reasonable" when it really is just a way not to ruffle anybodies feathers by having a stance. Their opinions change with the tide.

If moderates were the flag bearers (which by definition they are the exact opposite of), would there be slavery in our country still? What about woman's suffrage? Or the civil rights movement?

None of these were started by moderates nor advocated by moderates until the "extremists" stood up and then moved the "middle position" away from the status quo.

My point is, people like RMS are exactly what's needed because the whiny people in the middle don't want to obstruct the flow and, in the absense of two extremes but having only one to follow, would tend to sway toward that group.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[LuYu]

As is typical with Stallman, his proposal predates the current debate by about a decade.

-- Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

The accusation of fanaticism has been levelled at Stallman for more than two decades now, and it is still absurd. It is typical that whenever Stallman sees a new threat to freedom, one that most or nearly all other people in society do not see, he his called names and people say he is hurting Free Software. However, Free Software, and Open Source software for that matter, would have died long ago if Stallman had not been defending it. In fact, if Stallman had listened to his critics in the past, Microsoft would still be the only choice, unless it could be imagined that a broken rewrite of MacOS could have posed a serious challenge to Microsoft -- which really is hard to imagine.

I think the main reason for this freqent and unfair criticism is the outlook of those trapped in the Emerald City, those with green glasses locked to their faces forcing them to everywhere see green. They are the same ones who think the "free" in Free Software means "free of charge", which is indeed a limited view of the word free. For those who live in a world where there is only green, that seems to be the only freedom.

This could not be farther from the truth, of course. The freedom to speak freely and the freedom to think for oneself and the freedom to learn what one wants are certainly beyond pricing. There is a reason that selling oneself into slavery cannot be allowed in a Free Society. There is also a reason that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America protects one's right to free speech. Rights are priceless. Their value is unlimited. Rights should not be curtailed based on the whinings of some crooked entertainment industry executives.

DRM directly threatens the right to free speech. It will allow third parties to control which computers communicate with which computers. It will allow authorization of all speech by third parties. It will control whether you can or cannot alter or copy any file on your computer. Hardware implementation of this will mean that the cost to free oneself of this will be the cost of fabrication of chips to alter the code for this. In fact, it would be possible to eliminate Free Software altogether with hardware DRM. This will leave 1984 style control of free speech in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and a handful of other companies that will be able to basically control all of your communication with the outside world.

Richard Stallman has seen this future, and he understands the implications. Does it matter if Free Software is in the majority of computers and devices if we do not have the freedom to modify it? What is the difference between Linux and Microsoft when someone can tell you what you can and cannot do with your computer, with your software? If DRM wins, everybody, all six billion of us, loses.

I will leave this with another quote from a much darker book, nothing less than 1984 (Book I, Chapter IV):

Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck him [Winston Smith] as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

DRM makes Winston Smith's job convenient.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

There's a difference though in the way cars and software are both made. However, I feel the original analogy is correct. If I want to know how mozilla works, I can look at the source and try to figure it out. Since I'm a coder, I have an idea of what does what and it makes sense to me. The same way a mechanic can look inside a car's hood and find out how a car works.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[janzen]

George Bernard Shaw made this same point very eloquently: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[javilon]

"No reasonable person would argue that the hoods of all cars should be welded shut and only openable by the manufacturer"

Right now, you are allowed to sell a car where the hood is welded shut, but police wouldn't stop people from opening it.
On the other hand, with DRM if you manage to open it up, the RIAA will call the police, and at the expense of taxpayers, police will come and take you to jail.
I don't have anything against DRM except the police enforcement. If they can come up with a technological measure that stops me from making a copy of digital information, so be it. The less of my worries will be music or movies. But if they don't, I don't know why the goverment has to protect them and not me.

Re:The people who criticise Richard Stallman...

[QuantumG]

I believe one day you will be able to copy physical objects, and when that day comes you can say goodbye to any DRM laws that have been passed for digital media, because people just won't stand for having the government prohibiting them from copying whatever they want.

Interesting read.

[Mikachu]

I really can't say it gave all that much new information, but he definitely made some points. DRM, in any shape or form, is essentially incompatible with the idea of Free Software. When your goal is to restrict the public, there's really no room for compromise. Richard Stallman = smart man.

DRM education

[remembertomorrow]

I think the biggest problem is educating the public about what DRM is.

In my experiences, after explaining what DRM is to people that I know, they think it is the dumbest thing that they have ever heard.

I am sure the public would reject it, but the problem remains then: how do we educate the public? :/

Re:DRM education

[MoonFog]

Most people know about region coding on DVD's, but they don't really care much. There are now DVD players that are region free, and the CSS thing has bascially just been forgotten. People have a short attention span, and if they are going to stand up for something, they need to see it happen to them regularly I guess.

Educating them would also mean that they would have to give more thought in technology, and from my point of view, it seems most of them just want it to work. Perhaps we can hope that the DRM makers make DRM so incredibly hard to work out that people will actually pay attention to it. Until then, we're trying to swim uphill while picking up a couple of people here and there.

Re:DRM education

[NutscrapeSucks]

A big part of the problem is that the hyperbole about the terrors of DRM seen at Slashdot and other places doesn't correspond to the reality of how people perceive their DVD players and iPods.

Admittedly, DRM could have terrible consequences, but right now a key part of the next generation DRM is the "managed copy" bits which the consumer ironically perceives as granting them *more* rights rather than less because the copying features are integrated into the product. You see this already in Apple's Fairplay system.

Actually convincing people that DRM is worse than their nifty new consumer products is a difficult problem. Arguments about pubic domain and (academic) fair use don't have much traction among consumers. And the "boiling the frog", "road to fascism" arguments honestly come off as over-the-top and kooky, even if they are plausible.

Education?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Before liberation, shouldn't we educate the public first? Most people today know nothing about DRM, FSF, or that MP3 is a patented format. We all remember the Sony rootkit scandal, but the average consumer does not. The average consumer uses proprietary Windows formats and never considers the dangerous problems that closed systems present to free information. As long as the ignorant masses stay complacent and docile, and as long as consumers obsesquiently gobble up DRM-laced products, there is no chance that free software will win.

"there is no room for DRM in Free Software"

[Broadcatch]

I couldn't agree more.

The fact that machines are being built to suppress what people can do with them rather than to enhance our abilities to grow and perhaps go beyond their intended purposes makes them defective by design. Imagine not being able to make a copy of your music for use in your car because you already have one at home, one at your office, and three that were made for iPods (the first two of which were lost or broken). What if you wanted to include it in a mix tape [sic]?

Or it's like buying a computer that will only run M$ software - software that purposely spies on everything you do so that M$ can "protect" you from doing something their contract (that you signed when you turned the machine on) disallows.

It's FUBAR.

DRM isn't dangerous.

[RexRhino]

DRM isn't dangerous... DRM is simply encryption, and encryption isn't bad. I don't think anyone here wants encryption restricted in any way. Everyone has the right to encrypt any data in any way they want, period!

What IS dangerous is the government requiring DRM or giving it special legal protection. It is dangerous if the government mandates DRM, and makes it illegal for me to circumvent DRM. If I can crack the DRM on media, and convert it to an unprotected format for myself, without any fear of legal consequences, then my rights are not being restricted in any way.

What is also dangerous is people thinking that the government should act against DRM. Seriously, that is just as bad as DRM. It is going to come back to bite people in the ass when those anti-DRM laws start restricting how you are allowed to encrypt your own data. If I create data, I want to be able to encrypt it in any way I choose... just because you find it annoying that it takes 10 seconds to run your itunes music through a utility to convert it to mp3, doesn't mean you have the right to restrict me from encrypting my data however I want.

Basicly, keep all the legal restrictions out of it, and let people do whatever the hell they want want... that is the only truly safe thing to do.

Re:DRM isn't dangerous.

[zelzax]

What is also dangerous is people thinking that the government should act against DRM. Seriously, that is just as bad as DRM. It is going to come back to bite people in the ass when those anti-DRM laws start restricting how you are allowed to encrypt your own data. If I create data, I want to be able to encrypt it in any way I choose... just because you find it annoying that it takes 10 seconds to run your itunes music through a utility to convert it to mp3, doesn't mean you have the right to restrict me from encrypting my data however I want.

That kind of thinking is wrong on so many levels...

Encrypting files for personal use has almost nothing to do with DRM. If an RIAA exec wants to encrypt his music, good for him, but he has no business encrypting music I PAID FOR. If I've bought the music, no one has any right to restrict how/where/when I use it, especially if it's well within my fair use rights.

And yes, government has every right to restrict DRM. It's not about regulating files encrypted for personal use, it's regulating business transactions, something that governments have legitimately long been involved in. One party in the business transaction is being very deceptive and insidious about what it is selling.

Essentially, consumers expect certain rights when they purchase things. When I buy a car, the car manufacturer has no right to restrict things like where I take the car, whether I can sell the car, and whether I put Chevron or Exxon gasoline in it. When they buy music, they expect that they own the music, and can play it on any device they own, and put it on any playlist or mixtape they want, and maybe even sell the music to someone else when they're done with it, or at least archive the music in an easily accessible format so they won't ever have to repurchase it. All in the full quality they purchased it in too, not downsampled or recompressed to a different lossy format.

No DRM I've seen yet gives consumers all these rights, or even close, hence the need for governments to get involved.

Soylent Green is people

[Dachannien]

Obviously, denouncing DRM and the products and companies that sustain it is what any fair use advocate should do. But such a strategy will never work unless the unwashed masses are also made aware of how DRM negatively impacts their lives. The anti-DRM slashdot type accounts for such a small piece of the pie compared to the workaday single mom who wants to record her soaps in HD, or the 13-year-old girl who wants to record Britney's new trailer trash offering off of the radio, or the recent business school graduate who wants to save what he hears on his new XM or Sirius radio for later. All those folks will be seriously impacted by the encroachment of DRM as the digital entertainment age emerges, but none of them are aware that their fair use liberties are in danger.

Now, if each of us told our parents and siblings about the imminent mainstream DRM fiasco, and all of them told their coworkers and fellow students, and so on, then maybe - just maybe - the public outrage would reach the critical point where Congress and the electronics companies would finally see the light and tell the copyright cartels where to cram it. Until then, the nerdiest of us will just have to sit and watch as our fair use rights are taken away one by one.

RMS doesn't speak for "Open Source".

[jbn-o]

Then when you get around to reading the transcript of the interview or listening to it, you should be pleased to learn that Stallman is not with the Open Source movement. He takes pains to tell people that his movement, the Free Software movement, is older than the Open Source movement and pursues a different philosophy. Stallman doesn't speak for the Open Source movement.

In this interview he points out one of the differences between the two movements:

Now, this is an interesting example of the difference between Free Software and Open Source. Some people promote what they call "Open Source DRM". Now, recall the difference in fundamental values between Free Software and Open Source. In Free Software, our values are freedom and community. We want to be part of a community of free people. Whereas, in Open Source, they talk about making powerful, reliable software and they promote a development model. Now, for us, the question of how a program is developed is a secondary issue. I mean, if some models work better than others, fine -- use them. But that's not what's really important to Free Software, to people who value -- who support the Free Software movement and value freedom.

So, there are people who say that they could apply that development model to developing software designed to restrict us. And maybe it's true; maybe if people study and share and collaborate in developing software designed to take away our freedom, it might become more powerful and reliable in taking away our freedom. But that's a bad thing. That's evil. It's -- in spirit, it's similar to collaborative development of a virus. If something is evil, we don't want it to be done well. We want it to be done as badly as possible.

I'll address the troll

[Infonaut]

Since none of his ideas even remotely make any real world sense, why is he even publicized?

RMS is publicized because he initiated the Free Software movement. The GNU software license, which he and Eben Moglen created, has been used in some software projects you may have heard of: the Linux kernel, CVS, GNU Emacs, MySQL, and literally thousands of others.

More open source projects are developed under the GPL than under any other license, and companies like Red Hat, IBM, and others have built business units or entire buinesses around GNU-licensed software. When is the last time you saw IBM act out of naive idealism?

A lot of people in the open source world don't agree with everything RMS says, but he's incredibly smart, and people respect his ideas enough to pay attention to what he says. Get out from under the bridge and grapple with his ideas, instead of trolling.

"Don't buy it" is not enough

[Subacultcha]

I was thinking don't buy it

In general, I'm ambivilant to this topic. I tend to think there's extremists at both sides. I like my Tivo, and my mp3s, but I also feel people gotta be paid for their work.

However, when I see this response, I think--Are you kidding? The only way people against DRM are going to change anything is by making a stink about it. Saying "Don't buy it" is about as productive as vegitarians boycotting McDonald's because they serve meat. If you're not the target market, your opinion doesn't matter.

If only the anti-DRM crowd stopped buying the products, it would be a statistical glitch on balance sheet. It's not going to make an impression when most consumers are unaware of the DRM issue.

The Anti-DRM campaign has to make itself heard, while at the same time not coming off as shrill and fringe like PETA does.

Re:From one revolutionary to another

[node 3]

As you've described it, most Americans are socialists. There are very few Americans who would strip all socialist programs from our country (examples: public schooling, fire departments, depts of transportation, farm subsidies, libraries, anti-pollution laws, car safety laws, etc).

Unfortunately, the far right has been able to control the language, and make us think that the word "socialist" means "communist" or "fascist". That leaves your average, moderately socialist, American with a sense of morality and reason who knows that capitalism must be tempered with socialism, yet can only speak intelligently about capitalism, while any discourse in favor of socialism is hampered and limited to emotional pleas because the rational words are off-limits or misrepresented.

The death knell for any public debate of a socially beneficial program is the question, "but isn't that really socialism?" The honest answer ends the debate right there. The only political acceptable answer is, "no, because..." followed by an attempt to hide the fact that it is socialism, which puts the progressive and liberal proponent at an obvious rhetorical disadvantage. That's why you have no difficulty finding people who will say and believe silly things regarding how DRM is necessary to be able to produce television shows, or how private industry should replace NASA today, when private industry can barely place two people into a short, sub-orbital trip to the closest reaches of space.

What really needs to be made known to every American is that socialism is not a bad thing. It is a necessary part of the Western world. Capitalism is also necessary. It's not an either-or choice. Capitalism for a fluid economy and personal freedom, Socialism to keep Capitalism viable, and promote a healthy society.