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Richard Stallman Talks On Copyright Vs. the People

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it-takes-a-village dept.

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."

3 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. nothing new under the Sun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    RMS gave the same speech two years ago in Bulgaria.

  2. That's how I bought fraps. by bronney · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you allow people leeway they will repay you back at a later date by supporting you.

    That's exactly how I bought fraps. When it first came out I was a poor student and couldn't afford the proggy. But I've tried it and it just kicks ass.

    Years later, when I become a poor designer, I shelled out the $40, and send the author a mail giving props. If I had never tried fraps I bet I would just pirate it to "see" how good it is and ended up not paying. But to revisit the site after all these years and see this guy still at it, with a lifetime upgrade, that $40 was one of the best $40 I've spent on useful stuff. Even more useful now with youtube.

    The same can be said for Wii. I am in Hong Kong and I can pirate the Wii like no tomorrow, but I chose not to in order to thank nintendo. After all these years of being the underdog, the big N never gave up on us and made something truly new. I don't even play much on it, but it's a good feeling.

    1. Re:That's how I bought fraps. by Merusdraconis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We have a very similar setup at Caravel Games. Our product, the DROD series, started as an open source remake of a closed-source game, but as we eventually gathered enough fans clamouring for a sequel we found that we couldn't sell what we'd worked on without breaking the license, as it was built on the top of the open source engine.

      What we ended up doing is something rather unique: we sell the content we create, levels, voice acting, so on and so forth, and the game engine (including the editor we used to make the game) is free. Because DROD is a niche game that doesn't appeal to everybody, this works out well: players can play and create user-made levels to their heart's content, and most will enjoy the game enough to want to see 'everything', and to support the creators, so they'll pay for the stuff we create. It also helps build a community around the game. (We also let people get full versions of the game for other operating systems for free for the same reason - they've paid for the content, not the code they play it on.)