Stallman On the UK Digital Economy Bill

superapecommando submitted a blog entry written by Stallman about the UK's bandwidth initiatives. RMS says "When I read about Gordon Brown's plan to give the UK more broadband, I couldn't restrain my laughter. Isn't this the same clown now busy circumventing democracy to take away broadband from Britons who already have it? And what good would broadband do them if they're punished for using it (or even being suspected of using it)? Laying cables would be a waste of resources if people are not allowed to use them. Brown did suggest another possible use for broadband. He said that it would enable MPs to better communicate with their constituents and keep track of what they want."

Comments

I'll tell you what the reason is

[RMH101]

...it's so Peter Mandelson can hand a nice, fat-profit-inducing mess over to Murdoch and the big media companies. Crack down on things they see as threatening their revenue stream, and give people a big fat pipe from which to slurp premium content. In return, maybe there'll be some favourable coverage in the media of Labour in the run up to the election on May 6th.

Re:I'll tell you what the reason is

[sznupi]

Hm, and it might give a nice backbone for massive enlargement of street cameras network?

Re:I'll tell you what the reason is

[FuckingNickName]

Have you ever thought that the "gutter" press simply act as an echo chamber for what their readers are thinking, and that the greatest con is performed by Murdoch on corrupt politicians, who grant him favours for essentially doing nothing at all?

Re:I'll tell you what the reason is

[FuckingNickName]

Then your problem, like Chomsky's, may be that you assume that everyone is stupid and easily influenced except you. Could you be wrong about this?

Re:I'll tell you what the reason is

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently for the torys to win the general election would require a 7% swing in their favour.
That is 7% of the people who actually vote (less than 50% of the eligible voting population and further reduced by the fact that its only a subset of the available constituencies about 100 out of about 600. Taking a guess 10% of the population is about 6 million 4 million is roughly 7% and half don't vote so thats 2 million a 1/6th of that is about 330,000 and maybe 50% of them are not registered or eligible so maybe 165,000 votes need to change in the right constituencies or 0.25% of the British population.

Can a newspaper change the minds of 165,000 people ? or 0.25% ? probably , pure coincidence but isn't that roughly the sort of response rate expected by spammers...

unfortunately there are 18 to 23 year olds who have never voted in a general election and who's only knowledge of the tories comes from family and the newspapers...

unfortunately I have family that will have to live with the choices
 

Re:I'll tell you what the reason is

[Hooya]

1997:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

2009ish:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090623/0415565326.shtml

Are we there yet?

Right things, not always right reasons.

[headkase]

Stallman does the right things but the way he relates his thoughts don't really map well onto others. He is too rigid when it comes to Free software, ideally all software should be Free but until the transition is over - say another 20 years - then some mixing is pragmatic for the now to enable functionality: like binary blobs in the Linux kernel. I like a lot of what Stallman has to say but I always translate it into less dogmatic terms and take the hard edges off. Free is the ideal Open is the pragmatic, he kicked off Free and that led to Open and Open is not as dogmatic as Free - things evolve. Open also markets better.

Re:Right things, not always right reasons.

[headkase]

Only in relation to what others are doing. If everyone is cooperating in a communal manner then yes. Real goods on the other hand behave better with money because scarcity applies to them - that makes them must more resilient to being Free.

We need British broadband

[Philip K Dickhead]

To enable the surveillance telescreens promised us with such fanfare by Orwell in 1984. Cameras on the street really don't do the job.

Tiscali blocking emails linking TFA

[ikoleverhate]

So I sent a link to article to my mum and girlfriend, both of who are with the ISP Tiscali. It came back with "Unnacceptable Mail Content". Tinfoil hat engaged, I sent a few more variations to see exactly what they're blocking. As far as I can tell, it's any link to a guardian.co.uk url. Interesting, given there's an election coming up... Try it for yourself if you know anyone on tiscali - send a mail with a guardian.co.uk URL in the body.

Re:On Stallman

[slashdotjunker]

Copyright arguments revolve around distributing other people's copyrighted works because we don't recognize their ownership of the copyright. We feel entitled to their work, because it doesn't actually belong to them. The original crime was the assignation of the copyright. Just as France refuses to recognize Scientology as a religion, I refuse to acknowledge the assignation of many kinds of copyrights.

I am not happy about being in this state, but after many years of seeing the effect of copyrights and other intellectual property entitlements on the computer industry and entertainment media my conclusion is that these forms of copyright do not benefit society. Like a CA gone bad, I have essentially put these copyrights on my ignore list. Like jaywalking across an empty street with clear visibility, I will infringe on any unjust copyrights when that infringement causes no harm to society and does not deprive anyone of their livelihood.

Telling me that I'm wrong because some human being in Washington D.C. stamped a form is not going to change my mind. Might does not make right. Stamping a form does make you the owner of something. True ownership comes when society recognizes the stamped form as valid and just. Do you understand the issue now? It's not about what constitutes infringement or piracy. It's about whether or not copyright assignments are just.