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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."
Because the anime industry is one of those really quirky things where they let fans do things which is against the law.
:)
Fansubbing is illegal the way it's most often done. They pirate TV programs with added text and then give them to hundreds or thousands of people. Now the companies could start being assholes and try to shut these groups down, but instead they have a gentleman's contract. Subbers stop subbing when a series is licenced and a blind eye is turned to the subbers.
In this way companies learn what is popular and get free market research, fans get what they want when they want it and then in an ideal world the fans buy the official releases to support the original companies and the ones who licenced the anime.
So basically, it's a good way to show copyright isn't always the answer. If you allow people leeway they will repay you back at a later date by supporting you. One could argue fansubs work as the perfect advertisement for merchandise to people outside of Japan and if copyright was put down on it, it would hurt the industry more than if they ignore it.
So anime is a good example of copyright done correctly in a lot of people's opinion.
I like muppets.
Not everyone who saw the lecture agreed with the contents. A counterpoint can be found here.
I didn't write that counterpoint, but there's one thing the author and I agree on: Richard Stallman is a lot more crazy in person. One guy in the audience asked how he was supposed to pay for his university education by releasing free software. Stallman didn't really give him an answer, he just told the student that he didn't have to go to school, and he had no right to release closed source software in an attempt to earn money. Stallman has compared closed source software to "a crime against humanity", yes?
I talked to Stallman after the lecture. I asked him how he paid the mortgage after leaving MIT in 1984. He said that that he's never had a mortgage and "he lives cheaply". I later heard that he basically squatted on the MIT campus.
See, here's the problem with Stallman's philosophies: they're highly incompatible with the status quo, and there's no clear path for change. If you want people to do $Y instead of $X, $Y has to be relatively pin-compatible with $X. Telling people to write free software is well and good, but your paradigm isn't going to have much success if it also requires programmers to buy a house, get married, and otherwise have a normal life.
On a related note, I also asked Stallman what he thought of the wedding photography industry. For those of you who don't know, typical wedding photographers cost over a thousand dollars, show up at your wedding to take pictures, and then make you pay through the nose for prints. They don't even give you the copyright, if you want more prints you have to go back to the photographer! One must shop around to find a photographer who'll actually give you the digital originals. Anyway, I asked Stallman if he thought this was analogous to what was happening in the software world, and he said no. He thought closed source software was a greater imposition on freedom than holding wedding memories hostage.
The man is too close to his particular pet cause.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
No-one said it did.
The argument RMS puts forward is that Copyright was a good deal for the public when the only people it affected was a small percentage of the population.. when it was seen as a restriction on trade. Now, with the PC, we all copy, all the time and Copyright is just in the way. It's no longer just a restriction on trade.. it's a restriction on private acts and requires intrusive policing to enforce.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What needs to happen in a lot of circumstances is that copyright should not be transferable. So, if I write a song, it belongs to me. If a company wants to promote it, we can make a service contract. But the copyright is mine, not theirs. The labels are my agents, they could provide studios, or off-site storage for my works, and people with marketing savvy. But guess what? The industry that gave us the indentured servitude of the recording contract is no more. iTunes is more of a music company than any label out there. All they are are assholes with legal degrees.
Not being able to force artists into loan sharking arrangements with the labels would mean, however that all the labels as they exist now are effectively and instantly bankrupt. Yay. Without this leverage, The artist writes contracts with agents, and grants his or her managers a piece of his copyright for say, five years. So, the more tracks of mine they sell, the more they make. The more concerts I give to the bigger audiences, the more money they make. But the artist is in control. He has the copyright. I might spare them 10% of revenues, or 50% if I'm a newbie. But it will revert to me.
Because, after all, what function do the huge conglomerated labels have? They used to provide money for manufacture and distribution. They no longer have any significant burden, since once the final track is laid down, all they have to do is sell copies for more than it costs to download. And they were loan sharks. Game over. Finita la commedia.