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Stallman Crashes Talk, Fights 'War On Sharing'
schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"
Censorship, DRM, and surveillance are all very dangerous and annoying things that only hurt the average person. It's hardly going to affect the pirates and will likely only affect 'normal' people, robbing them of some of their rights in the process. These corporations must be stopped, that much is clear.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Shouting, running, making a fool out of himself. I think if only he would do the sort of things he does without calling a ruckus, then people might take him more seriously.
I admire the sort of things he's doing, but the way he does them is troublesome. He shouldn't for example be blocking access to an Apple store despite their terribly non-free products. Nobody likes an asshole and would tend to ignore it. Now, if he were to stand outside, offering leaflets on why Apple is wrong, but disguising it as something like "Bad Computer Practises", or "Why Software Freedom is Important" instead of "Apple is crap! Don't buy from them!" which no one will pay attention to, I think he'd get a lot further.
Good luck, rms.
He secured his place in history a long time ago and is STILL at it, and most impressive, still relevant.
Company X spends $1B developing a new idea, be it a physical widget or an algorithm. Said company sells widgets or software licenses at $A to recoup the invested money (first) and then to make a profit. Company Y sees the widget or software and can cheaply reverse engineer it, skipping 70% of the development costs. Company Y can sell their product at 0.4*$A and still make profit. Company X only gets $0.2B revenue for the item, and is out $0.8B.
How would we prevent this situation without IP? If the above happens, no one will want to invest in research, because they'd lose money, even if they "invented" the next IPod.
Maybe if all research funding came from the public, then all development successes (and failures) would be public knowledge.
There is a problem currently with laws that were written with humans in mind, being interpreted to cover corporations.
For example; California's property tax reform a few decades back, was written to protect older citizen's from being taxed out of their family homes. It limits the amount your property tax can go up, unless you sell your property or perform a major upgrade. Now, however, there is a problem. Corporations also own property, but quite often they never sell it or transfer it... and they don't die of old age. There is simply no mechanism in place to allow Corporations to have the value of their property reassessed on a periodic basis to adjust their property tax to reflect current value.
Whether this is good or bad is not the point. The point I am making is that corporations are not human beings and thus laws written for human beings might not work as intended when applied to corporations.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
while in fact majority always represents just the most marketed, the most advertised, the most imposed position.
[emphasis mine]
OK, as a first approximation, you are right, but to say "always" is to overstate the case. There is no question that people who invest in propaganda don't do so out of naiveté... they expect a return on their investment. They expect to wield public sentiment like a tool, but it is a treacherous tool.
I think propaganda works best when it is directs people's attention away from their day to day lives, as opposed to changing their assessment of those lives. You can say, "your life is hell because of the Jews" or "you are insecure because of the homosexual agenda." You can't say, "your life is actually pretty good so far as the world standard of living is concerned," even if that is true. You can't say "it's actually quite easy to get a job; people who don't have jobs are just lazy," unless you are talking to somebody with a secure job.
If you could simply manufacture the opinions you wanted, then the public would have continued to favor the Iraq war in the run up to the 2008 elections, but the war had gone on so long that people were touched by it in some way, by a family member, friend or colleague who was deployed and maybe didn't come back. Likewise the Democrats are going to pay in 2010 because they can't credibly claim to have improved peoples' lives in the twenty months they've had power. That's common in mid-term elections.
In such cases, propaganda has a way of turning on its masters.
Perhaps we should evaluate people's political sanity not on their absolute position on some political axis, but on their open or narrow mindedness. A political position becomes pernicious fantasy, no matter where it is on your favorite philosophical axis, when it willfully ignores the probable outcomes of the actions it advocates.
For example, other people with me on the left favored single payer health insurance or even a socialized medical system during the recent debates on health insurance reform. While I am philosophically well disposed to these things, I did not favor them at that time. I thought if they were enacted that existing businesses would immediately collapse, and that working public replacements could not be conjured into existence quickly enough to take their place. Now I realize many who prefer socialized medicine or single payer (not the same things at all by the way) might disagree with that assessment. They may even be right. But that's not the point I'm trying to make. I moderated my position based on a critical examination of the likely outcomes of my *ideal* solution. That examination might be faulty, but I did not twist my evaluation of the facts in order to justify my a priori position.
It's tricky to evaluate the political sanity of a figure like Stallman. He is very, very bright,and bright people have a way of finding credible sounding rationalizations for really ill considered opinions. That said, I think that Stallman's positions on the viability of free software sound a lot more credible today than they did twenty years ago. True, free software projects haven't produced viable competition in a number of important niches; but after two decades of experience with free software success, it isn't so hard to believe that a free software ecosystem could meet all the software needs of an individual or enterprise.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.