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Richard Stallman Talks On Copyright Vs. the People
holden writes "Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved over time from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them. In keeping with his wishes to use open formats, the talk and QA are available in ogg theora only."
He talking about the importance of derivative works for some works. Typically, functional works.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Am happy to say: I was there! :)
It was a good lecture, Stallman has some interesting ideas on what should be done. In particular he talks about how society and copyright never clashed before as the public never had the ability to create commercial grade copies of content (before the advent of the PC). He then goes on to explain a way that copyright can be reformed, including some possible categories for works (based upon their usefulness and application within society). Bit of a spoiler: the works that are instructional (cook books, car manuals, GNU+Linux howtos etc.) should be totally Free, but art for arts sake should have a 5-10 year copyright. There are many more details that you should watch the video to find out about (plus my memory of the event is a little vague and the video hasn't downloaded yet).
The talk drifted at the start and in the middle, with blather about GNU+Linux and the evils of Vista; although some of the Vista evils are on-topic, Stallman did lose his way a bit on the subject. Otherwise it was damn good, well worth going to and/or watching on your OGG player!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
VLC is just one player that can play Oggs, download it free here.
If someone did an ogg vorbis (just the sound) that would be good for us to listen to on the go, the main video file is 686.3 MB which would mean I would have to ditch a lot of stuff to get it on my rockbox.
My little Linux and tech blog
Please kindly ignore the incorrect link. The correct one is here. (Damn tabs)
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Well, I cannot speak for anyone else, but I have actually bought multiple different anime series after downloading and liking them.
And actually on some of them, the fan subbing is a hell of a lot better than the actual subtitles on the DVD. I mean, common, if the characters say a name (in English even), then should the subtitle not reflect what was said? Or they could at least be consistent in the same conversation and keep the same name on what they are talking about.
Well, guess we can not expect a company to actually do something sane...
actually not even close (too far off for your disclamer to count;) ); what communists demanded was abolishing the private ownership of means of production only. Factories, etc. And their common management. Which meant, state management, by some twisted logic... That was not called communism, btw, there never existed a communist state, actually thats an oxymoron (though widely used in the west), since communism is by definition stateless, that was socialism, supposedly 'on the way' to communism.
But in any case, in socialism, your computer/cdplayer... that is possesions, were just as yours as they are in capitalism.
My country was socialist not that long time ago...
The site's gone down, so here's a copy of the torrent file:
rms-talk.ogg.torrent
I didn't get the Q&A torrent.
Why is there no transcript?
Because you haven't typed one. And neither has anyone else.
minor nit that needs to be picked.
Amoral=without moral value.
Immoral=Not Moral
"There are some things generally considered amoral by the population. Murder. Rape. Hunting a species to extinction""
Are we not confusing IMmoral with Amoral? One being opposite to those values we consider moral, and the other being unconcerned with morality altogether?
If someone's interested I can search my Karekano collection for her answer and translate it. But the short answer is: no, the OP isn't making stuff. This is for real.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
if the characters say a name (in English even), then should the subtitle not reflect what was said?
There are several reasons a name might be mentioned in the Japanese dialog and not be used in the English translation. For one, Japanese speakers tend to go out of their way to avoid using second-person pronouns like "anata", so they will often speak in the third person about the person they are talking to. In English this would sound bizarre, and we would just use a word like "you". Also, the level of formality the culture uses for names is different and doesn't always translate well. You might have Japanese students referring to one another as "Yamada-kun" but the most direct translation, "Mr. Yamada", sounds far too stiff and formal for kids to be speaking of one another as, so in English dubs, and sometimes subs as well, a first name might be substituted in.
I was at the lecture at U of Waterloo and he explicitly said the opposite. He said that he is fine with software-for-money (which in any case does not preclude its being free-as-in-speech), and in fact is even fine with custom or in-house software -- which he argued is the vast majority of paid software -- not being made publicly available.
Second half, since slashdot can't handle a 68Kb comment.
... the user's computer, and then disguising its own presence so if the user tried to look for it in certain obvious ways, it wouldn't even show up. It also damaged the security of the machine against other threats, and if that wasn't bad enough it also committed copyright infringement because it had ... it contained code of free programs that were released under the GNU General Public License. [laughter]
... really enforcing those laws strictly against mega-corporations. Laws are meant to be enforced strictly only against you and me. However Sony did get a lot of hostility and eventually promised that in the future when it developed Digital Restrictions Management it wouldn't do all the other nasty things that it did that time. You see, the hostility was mostly based on the other nasty things that Sony did along the way, rather than on the evil purpose of doing this in the first place: the evil of trying to stop people from copying. Most people accepted that, and they only criticized the means. So Sony said "oh no, we won't put rootkits on our CDs anymore." So having learned their lesson, their idea is that the rootkit will be installed on your computer before you buy it and it will be impossible to remove. And that's called "Windows Vista." [laughter]
... to increase Microsoft's control over everything. It keeps on contacting Microsoft over the Net and demanding upgrades and the user can't even refuse them. Which means it's nothing but one big back door. Anytime Microsoft wants to stop you from doing this or that, control ... take more control of any kind, it can just do so, because your computer has no security against Microsoft, if it's running Windows Vista. And that is very dangerous.
... developing Windows itself, and accused them of uh ... working for Al Quaida as well as Microsoft, trying to insert a back door that Microsoft wasn't supposed to know about. Well, apparently that attempts failed. We have no way of checking if there was another that succeeded. But we do know that in 1999, Microsoft was caught having installed a back door for the use of another even more violent terrorist organization: the United States Government, [laughter] specifically the National Security Agency.
... basi
[41:55]
[Stallman drinks]
So, that's whats going on in the area of movies and video. But we can see attempts to restrict us in music, as well. For many years, some apparent compact disks aren't real compact disks, they're corrupt disks. Because they're designed not to be standard, not to be proprly readable with your computer. Sony got in a lot of trouble, although not as much as it should have, for its scheme to produce corrupt disks, because Sony had the bright idea of putting on the disk a program that would automatically load into a Windows system if a person put that disk into it. And what did that program do? It's what's called a "rootkit," which meant that it actually broke the security of the machine and installed itself into the system. But why did it do this? Well, its purpose was to stop the user from copying whatever files were read off that disk. But they way it did this was by illegally breaking the security on the computer
[43:58]
[Stallman drinks]
Now, that was a felony in the US, but I don't think Sony was ever prosecuted. They're not interested in uh
[45:23]
[Stallman drinks]
Windows Vista is designed specifically to pull the chains tighter around every user's neck. That's what it exists for. It's entirely designed to increase
[46:24]
I mean, we don't know what there is in Microsoft software that could be used by terrorist organizations. A few years ago in India, I was told they had arrested some Windows developers, that is, people working on
[47:20]
So it's not only Microsoft that could uh