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."

Comments

For all you Windows users

[Marcion]

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.

Partial poor quality transcript

[Anonymous Coward]

I did this late at night. There will be typos, word transpositions, etc. I may well have missed a sentence or two since I don't type as fast as he talks. I know nothing about the "proper" way to do transcriptions, and this is the first I've tried.

[2:22]

Anyway, I started the free software movement in 1983. Announcing a plan to devolop a free software operating system that would make it possible to use a computer and have freedom. Because the existing operating systems were all proprietary, all of them subjugated the user. Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless - divided because everyone is forbidden to share it with anyone else, and helpless because the users don't have the source code so they can't change it, they can't even verify what it's doing. And many non-free programs contain malicious features, designed to spy on the user, restrict the user, or even attack the user. And these features are possible because the developers have power over the users in teh first place. If the developer want to impose something nasty on the user, he can. And the only recourse the users have is not to use that program. And sometimes all the alternatives have similar malicious features, which means the users effectively have no influence at all.

So. The idea of the free software movement is that users should have freedom. What does that mean? THere are four essential freedoms that users should have: freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish (there are programs that don't even give you that much freedom). Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code of the program and then change it to make it do what you wish, instead of what the developer chose to impose on you. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor. That's the freedom to distribute exact copies to others when you wish, up to and including republication. And freedom three is the freedom to contribute to your community. That's the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, when you wish. Up to and including publication. With these four freedoms, the users are in control, both individually and collectively. You can always take control of your copy and do exactly what you want with it, if it's important enough to you to be worth the effort. And meanwile the users together are deciding what will happen to the program in general, which features they want, what features they don't want. And thus, nobody has power over anybody else.

Since a computer is useless without an operating system, the only way this freedom can be a reality is if we have a free operating system. Of course, that's not enough - every program we run has to be free, but the first thing we need is an operating system. The computer's just a hunk of metal and plastic without that. So, I'd set out to develop a free software operating system called GNU. Most of you have heard of this system, but under the wrong name. You've probably heard it called Linux. What happened was when GNU was almost complete in 1992, just one important piece was missing. And at that time - and the peice that was missing is called the kernel, it's the piece that allocates the machines resources -- why are you laughing? I'm serious, some people have the idea that the kernel in 90% of the system and all the rest is sort of a garnish. Actually the kernel is juse one of many important components. We developed a lot of them, and that was the one that we hadn't finished yet. So, a kernel called Linux which had previously not been free software was liberated in 1992, and at that point it filled the last gap in the mostly complete GNU operating system, producing a system wich is GNU, plus Linux. So, this GNU plus Linux system began to catch on. People got confused, they thought that the - they started calling the whole system Linux, and so they started thinking that it was all developed by Linus Torvals in 1991. But it wasn't. We'd been working on it for many years. And we had developed many large and essential components, to get so close to having a complete s