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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.90 -->
+<title>A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or
+Bad? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/free-digital-society.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+
+<h2>A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad?</h2>
+
+<address class="byline">by Richard Stallman</address>
+
+<p><em>Transcription of a lecture at Sciences Po Paris, October 19, 2011</em>&nbsp; (<a
+href="http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/stallman-sciencespo-freesociety.webm">video</a>)</p>
+<hr class="thin" />
+
+<div class="summary" style="margin-top: 1em">
+<h3 class="no-display">Table of Contents</h3>
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="#intro">Introduction</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#surveillance">Surveillance</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#censorship">Censorship</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#formats">Restricted data formats</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#proprietary">Software that isn't free</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#four-freedoms">The four freedoms of free software</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#gnu">The GNU Project and the Free Software movement</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#education">Free software and education</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#services">Internet services</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#voting">Computers for voting</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#sharing">The war on sharing</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#arts">Supporting the arts</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#rights">Rights in cyberspace</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="no-display" />
+</div>
+
+<h3 id="intro">Introduction</h3>
+
+<p>Projects with the goal of digital inclusion are making a big
+assumption. They are assuming that participating in a digital society
+is good, but that's not necessarily true. Being in a digital society
+can be good or bad, depending on whether that digital society is just
+or unjust. There are many ways in which our freedom is being attacked
+by digital technology. Digital technology can make things worse, and it
+will, unless we fight to prevent it.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, if we have an unjust digital society, we should cancel
+these projects for digital inclusion and launch projects for digital
+extraction. We have to extract people from digital society if it doesn't
+respect their freedom, or we have to make it respect their freedom.</p>
+
+<h3 id="surveillance">Surveillance</h3>
+
+<p>What are the threats? First, surveillance. Computers are Stalin's
+dream: they are ideal tools for surveillance, because anything we do
+with computers, the computers can record. They can record the
+information in a perfectly indexed searchable form in a central
+database, ideal for any tyrant who wants to crush opposition.</p>
+
+<p>Surveillance is sometimes done with our own computers. For instance,
+if you have a computer that's running Microsoft Windows, that system is
+doing surveillance. There are features in Windows that send data to some
+server, data about the use of the computer. A surveillance feature was
+discovered in the iPhone a few months ago, and people started calling it
+the &ldquo;spy-phone.&rdquo; Flash player has a surveillance feature
+too, and so does the Amazon Swindle.&rdquo; They call it the Kindle, but
+I call it &ldquo;<a href="/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.html">the
+Swindle</a>,&rdquo; <em>l'escroc</em>,
+because it's meant to swindle users out of their freedom. It makes
+people identify themselves whenever they buy a book, and that means
+Amazon has a giant list of all the books each user has read. Such a list
+must not exist anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>Most portable phones will transmit their location, computed using
+GPS, on remote command. The phone company is accumulating a giant list
+of places that the user has been. A German MP in the Green Party
+[correction: Malte Spitz is on the staff of the Green Party, not an
+elected official] asked the phone company to give him the data it had
+about where he was. He had to sue, he had to go to court to get this
+information. And when he got it, he received forty-four thousand
+location points for a period of six months! That's more than two hundred
+per day! What that means is someone could form a very good picture of
+his activities just by looking at that data.</p>
+
+<p>We can stop our own computers from doing surveillance on us
+if <em>we</em> have control of the software that they run. But the
+software these people are running, they don't have control over. It's
+nonfree software, and that's why it has malicious features such as
+surveillance. However, the surveillance is not always done with our own
+computers, it's also done at one remove. For instance ISPs in Europe
+are required to keep data about the user's Internet communications for
+a long time, in case the State decides to investigate that person later
+for whatever imaginable reason.</p>
+
+<p>With a portable phone&hellip; even if you can stop the phone from
+transmitting your GPS location, the system can determine the phone's
+location approximately, by comparing the time when the signals arrive at
+different towers. So the phone system can do surveillance even without
+special cooperation from the phone itself.</p>
+
+<p>Likewise, the bicycles that people rent in Paris. Of course the
+system knows where you get the bicycle and it knows where you return the
+bicycle, and I've heard reports that it tracks the bicycles as they are
+moving around as well. So they are not something we can really trust.</p>
+
+<p>But there are also systems that have nothing to do with us that exist
+only for tracking. For instance, in the UK all car travel is monitored.
+Every car's movements are being recorded in real time and can be tracked
+by the State in real time. This is done with cameras on the side of
+the road.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the only way we can prevent surveillance that's done at one
+remove or by unrelated systems is through political action against
+increased government power to track and monitor everyone, which means of
+course we have to reject whatever excuse they come up with. For doing
+such systems, no excuse is valid&mdash;to monitor everyone.</p>
+
+<p>In a free society, when you go out in public, you are not guaranteed
+anonymity. It's possible for someone to recognize you and remember. And
+later that person could say that he saw you at a certain place. But
+that information is diffuse. It's not conveniently assembled to track
+everybody and investigate what they did. To collect that information is
+a lot of work, so it's only done in special cases when it's necessary.</p>
+
+<p>But computerized surveillance makes it possible to centralize and
+index all this information so that an unjust regime can find it all,
+and find out all about everyone. If a dictator takes power, which
+could happen anywhere, people realize this and they recognize that they
+should not communicate with other dissidents in a way that the State
+could find out about. But if the dictator has several years of stored
+records of who talks with whom, it's too late to take any precautions
+then, because he already has everything he needs to realize: &ldquo;OK,
+this guy is a dissident, and he spoke with him. Maybe he is a dissident
+too. Maybe we should grab him and torture him.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So we need to campaign to put an end to digital surveillance
+<em>now</em>. You can't wait until there is a dictator and it would
+really matter. And besides, it doesn't take an outright dictatorship to
+start attacking human rights.</p>
+
+<p>I wouldn't quite call the government of the UK a dictatorship. It's
+not very democratic, and one way it crushes democracy is using
+surveillance. A few years ago, people believed to be on their way to a
+protest, they were going to protest, they were arrested before they
+could get there because their car was tracked through this universal car
+tracking system.</p>
+
+<h3 id="censorship">Censorship</h3>
+
+<p>The second threat is censorship. Censorship is not new, it existed
+long before computers. But 15 years ago, we thought that the Internet
+would protect us from censorship, that it would defeat censorship. Then,
+China and some other obvious tyrannies went to great lengths to
+impose censorship on the Internet, and we said: &ldquo;Well that's not
+surprising, what else would governments like that do?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>But today we see censorship imposed in countries that are not
+normally thought of as dictatorships, such as for instance the UK,
+France, Spain, Italy, Denmark&hellip;</p>
+
+<p>They all have systems of blocking access to some websites. Denmark
+established a system that blocks access to a long list of web pages,
+which was secret. The citizens were not supposed to know how the
+government was censoring them, but the list was leaked and posted on
+WikiLeaks. At that point, Denmark added the WikiLeaks page to its
+censorship list. So, the whole rest of the world can find out how Danes
+are being censored, but Danes are not supposed to know.</p>
+
+<p>A few months ago, Turkey, which claims to respect some human rights,
+announced that every Internet user would have to choose between
+censorship and more censorship. Four different levels of censorship they
+get to choose! But freedom is not one of the options.</p>
+
+<p>Australia wanted to impose filtering on the Internet, but that was
+blocked. However Australia has a different kind of censorship: it has
+censorship of links. That is, if a website in Australia has a link
+to some censored site outside Australia, the one in Australia can be
+punished. Electronic Frontiers Australia, that is an organization that
+defends human rights in the digital domain in Australia, posted a link
+to a foreign political website. It was ordered to delete the link or
+face a penalty of $11,000 a day. So they deleted it, what else could
+they do? This is a very harsh system of censorship.</p>
+
+<p>In Spain, the censorship that was adopted earlier this year allows
+officials to arbitrarily shut down an Internet site in Spain, or impose
+filtering to block access to a site outside of Spain. And they can do
+this without any kind of trial. This was one of the motivations for the
+<cite>Indignados</cite>, who have been protesting in the street.</p>
+
+<p>There were protests in the street in Turkey as well, after that
+announcement, but the government refused to change its policy.</p>
+
+<p>We must recognize that a country that imposes censorship on the
+Internet is not a free country. And is not a legitimate government
+either.</p>
+
+<h3 id="formats">Restricted data formats</h3>
+
+<p>The next threat to our freedom comes from data formats that restrict
+users.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes it's because the format is secret. There are many
+application programs that save the user's data in a secret format, which
+is meant to prevent the user from taking that data and using it with
+some other program. The goal is to prevent interoperability.</p>
+
+<p>Now, evidently, if a program implements a secret format, that's
+because the program is not free software. So this is another kind of
+malicious feature. Surveillance is one kind of malicious feature that
+you find in some nonfree programs; using secret formats to restrict the
+users is another kind of malicious feature that you also find in some
+nonfree programs.</p>
+
+<p>But if you have a free program that handles a certain format,
+<em>ipso facto</em> that format is not secret. This kind of malicious
+feature can only exist in a nonfree program. Surveillance features,
+well, theoretically they could exist in a free program but you don't
+find them happening. Because the users would fix it, you see. The users
+wouldn't like this, so they would fix it.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, we also find secret data formats in use for publication
+of works. You find secret data formats in use for audio, such as music,
+for video, for books&hellip; And these secret formats are known as
+Digital Restrictions Management, or DRM, or digital handcuffs <em>(les
+menottes num&eacute;riques)</em>.</p>
+
+<p>So, the works are published in secret formats so that only
+proprietary programs can play them, so that these proprietary programs
+can have the malicious feature of restricting the users, stopping them
+from doing something that would be natural to do.</p>
+
+<p>And this is used even by public entities to communicate with the
+people. For instance Italian public television makes its programs
+available on the net in a format called VC-1, which is a standard
+supposedly, but it's a secret standard. Now I can't imagine how any
+publicly supported entity could justify using a secret format to
+communicate with the public. This should be illegal. In fact I think
+all use of Digital Restrictions Management should be illegal. No company
+should be allowed to do this.</p>
+
+<p>There are also formats that are not secret but almost might as well
+be secret, for instance Flash. Flash is not actually secret but Adobe
+keeps making new versions, which are different, faster than anyone can
+keep up and make free software to play those files; so it has almost
+the same effect as being secret.</p>
+
+<p>Then there are the patented formats, such as
+MP3<a href="#f1"><sup>1</sup></a> for audio. It's bad to distribute
+audio in MP3 format. There is free software to handle MP3 format, to
+play it and to generate it, but because it's patented in many
+countries, many distributors of free software don't dare include those
+programs; so if they distribute the GNU+Linux system, their system
+doesn't include a player for MP3. As a result if anyone distributes
+some music in MP3, that's putting pressure on people not to use
+GNU/Linux. Sure, if you're an expert you can find a free software and
+install it, but there are lots of non experts, and they might see that
+they installed a version of GNU/Linux which doesn't have that
+software, and it won't play MP3 files, and they think it's the
+system's fault. They don't realize it's MP3's fault. But this is the
+fact.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, if you want to support freedom, don't distribute MP3
+files. That's why I say if you're recording my speech and you want to
+distribute copies, don't do it in a patented format such as MPEG-2,
+or MPEG-4, or MP3. Use a format friendly to free software, such as the
+OGG formats or WebM. And by the way, if you are going to distribute
+copies of the recording, please put on it the Creative Commons, No
+Derivatives license. This is a statement of my personal views. If it
+were a lecture for a course, if it were didactic, then it ought to be
+free, but statements of opinion are different.</p>
+
+<h3 id="proprietary">Software that isn't free</h3>
+
+<p>Now this leads me to the next threat which comes from software that
+the users don't have control over. In other words, software that isn't
+free, that is not <cite>libre</cite>. In this particular point French
+is clearer than English. The English word &ldquo;free&rdquo; means
+<cite>libre</cite> and <cite>gratuit</cite>, but what I mean when I say
+&ldquo;free software&rdquo; is <cite>logiciel libre</cite>. I don't mean
+<cite>gratuit</cite>. I'm not talking about price. Price is a side
+issue, just a detail, because it doesn't matter ethically. You know, if
+I have a copy of a program and I sell it to you for one euro or a
+hundred euros, who cares? Right? Why should anyone think that's good or
+bad? Or suppose I gave it to you <cite>gratuitement</cite>&hellip;
+Still, who cares? But whether this program respects your freedom, that's
+important!</p>
+
+<p>So free software is software that respects users' freedom. What does
+this mean? Ultimately there are just two possibilities with software:
+either the users control the program or the program controls the users.
+If the users have certain essential freedoms, then <em>they</em> control
+the program, and those freedoms are the criterion for free software. But
+if the users <em>don't</em> fully have the essential freedoms, then
+the program controls the users. But somebody controls that program and,
+through it, has <em>power</em> over the users. </p>
+
+<p>So, a nonfree program is an instrument to give somebody <em>power</em>
+over a lot of other people, and this is unjust power that nobody should
+ever have. This is why nonfree software <cite>(les logiciels privateurs,
+qui privent de la libert&eacute;)</cite>, why proprietary software is
+an injustice and should not exist; because it leaves the users without
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Now, the developer who has control of the program often feels tempted
+to introduce malicious features to <em>further</em> exploit or abuse
+those users. He feels a temptation because he knows he can get away with
+it. Because his program controls the users and the users do not have
+control of the program, if he puts in a malicious feature, the users
+can't fix it; they can't remove the malicious feature.</p>
+
+<p>I've already told you about two kinds of malicious features:
+surveillance features, such as are found in Windows and the iPhone and
+Flash player and the Swindle, sort of. And there are also features to
+restrict users, which work with secret data formats, and those are found
+in Windows, Macintosh, the iPhone, Flash player, the Amazon Swindle,
+the Playstation 3 and lots and lots of other programs.</p>
+
+<p>The other kind of malicious feature is the backdoor. That means
+something in that program is listening for remote commands and obeying
+them, and those commands can mistreat the user. We know of backdoors in
+Windows, in the iPhone, in the Amazon Swindle. The Amazon Swindle has
+a backdoor that can delete books, remotely delete books. We know this
+by observation, because Amazon did it: in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted
+thousands of copies of a particular book. Those were authorized copies,
+people had obtained them directly from Amazon, and thus Amazon knew
+exactly where they were, which is how Amazon knew where to send the
+commands to delete those books. You know which book Amazon deleted?
+<em>1984</em> by George Orwell. [laughter] It's a book everyone should
+read, because it discusses a totalitarian state that did things like
+delete books it didn't like. Everybody should read it, but not on the
+Amazon Swindle. [laughter]</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, malicious features are present in the most widely used
+nonfree programs, but they are rare in free software, because with free
+software the users have control. They can read the source code and they
+can change it. So, if there were a malicious feature, somebody would
+sooner or later spot it and fix it. This means that somebody who is
+considering introducing a malicious feature does not find it so
+tempting, because he knows he might get away with it for a while but
+somebody will spot it, will fix it, and everybody will loose trust in
+the perpetrator. It's not so tempting when you know you're going to
+fail. And that's why we find that malicious features are rare in free
+software, and common in proprietary software.</p>
+
+<h3 id="four-freedoms">The four freedoms of free software</h3>
+
+<p>The essential freedoms are four:</p>
+
+<ul>
+ <li>Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.</li>
+ <li>Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code and change it,
+ so the program does your computing the way you wish.</li>
+ <li>Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others. That's the freedom to
+ make exact copies and redistribute them when you wish.</li>
+ <li>Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community. That's
+ the freedom to make copies of your modified versions, if you
+ have made any, and then distribute them to others when you wish.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>These freedoms, in order to be adequate, must apply to all activities
+of life. For instance if it says &ldquo;this is free for academic
+use,&rdquo; it's not free. Because that's too limited. It doesn't apply
+to all areas of life. In particular, if a program is free, that means
+it can be modified and distributed commercially, because commerce is
+an area of life, an activity in life. And this freedom has to apply to
+all activities.</p>
+
+<p>However, it's not obligatory to do any of these things. The point
+is you're free to do them if you wish, when you wish. But you never have
+to do them. You don't have to do any of them. You don't have to run the
+program. You don't have to study or change the source code. You don't
+have to make any copies. You don't have to distribute your modified
+versions. The point is you should be free to do those things <em>if
+you wish</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Now, freedom number 1, the freedom to study and change the source
+code to make the program do your computing as you wish, includes
+something that might not be obvious at first. If the program comes in a
+product, and the developer can provide an upgrade that will run, then
+you have to be able to make your version run in that product. If the
+product will only run the developer's versions, and refuses to run
+yours, the executable in that product is not free software. Even if it
+was compiled from free source code, it's not free because you don't have
+the freedom to make the program do your computing the way you wish. So,
+freedom 1 has to be real, not just theoretical. It has to include the
+freedom to use <em>your</em> version, not just the freedom to make some
+source code that won't run.</p>
+
+<h3 id="gnu">The GNU Project and the Free Software movement</h3>
+
+<p>I launched the Free Software movement in 1983, when I announced
+the plan to develop a free software operating system whose name is
+GNU. Now GNU, the name GNU, is a joke; because part of the hacker's
+spirit is to have fun even when you're doing something <em>very</em>
+serious. Now I can't think of anything more seriously important than
+defending freedom.</p>
+
+<p>But that didn't mean I couldn't give my system a name that's a joke.
+So GNU is a joke because it's a recursive acronym, it stands for
+&ldquo;GNU's Not Unix,&rdquo; so G.N.U.: GNU's Not Unix. So the G in
+GNU stands for GNU.</p>
+
+<p>In fact this was a tradition at the time. The tradition was: if
+there was an existing program and you wrote something similar to it,
+inspired by it, you could give credit by giving your program a name
+that's a recursive acronym saying it's not the other one. So I gave
+credit to Unix for the technical ideas of Unix, but with the name GNU,
+because I decided to make GNU a Unix-like system, with the same
+commands, the same system calls, so that it would be compatible, so that
+people who used Unix could switch over easily.</p>
+
+<p>But the reason for developing GNU, that was unique. GNU is the
+only operating system, as far as I know, ever developed for the
+purpose of freedom. Not for technical motivations, not for commercial
+motivations. GNU was written for <em>your</em> freedom. Because without
+a free operating system, it's impossible to have freedom and use a
+computer. And there were none, and I wanted people to have freedom,
+so it was up to me to write one.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays there are millions of users of the GNU operating system and
+most of them don't <em>know</em> they are using the GNU operating
+system, because there is a widespread practice which is not nice. People
+call the system &ldquo;Linux.&rdquo; Many do, but some people don't, and
+I hope you'll be one of them. Please, since we started this, since we
+wrote the biggest piece of the code, please give us equal mention, please
+call the system &ldquo;GNU+Linux,&rdquo; or &ldquo;GNU/Linux.&rdquo;
+It's not much to ask.</p>
+
+<p>But there is another reason to do this. It turns out that the person
+who wrote Linux, which is one component of the system as we use it
+today, he doesn't agree with the Free Software movement. And so if you
+call the whole system Linux, in effect you're steering people towards
+his ideas, and away from our ideas. Because he's not gonna say to them
+that they deserve freedom. He's going to say to them that he likes
+convenient, reliable, powerful software. He's going to tell people that
+those are the important values.</p>
+
+<p>But if you tell them the system is GNU+Linux&mdash;it's the GNU
+operating system plus Linux the kernel&mdash;then they'll know about us,
+and then they might listen to what we say: you deserve freedom. And
+since freedom will be lost if we don't defend it&mdash;there's always
+going to be a Sarkozy to take it away&mdash;we need above all to teach
+people to demand freedom, to be ready to stand up for their freedom the
+next time someone threatens to take it away.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, you can tell who doesn't want to discuss these ideas of
+freedom because they don't say <cite>logiciel libre</cite>. They don't
+say <cite>libre</cite>, they say &ldquo;open source.&rdquo; That term
+was coined by the people like Mr Torvalds who would prefer that these
+ethical issues don't get raised. And so the way you can help us raise
+them is by saying <cite>libre</cite>. You know, it's up to you where you
+stand, you're free to say what you think. If you agree with them, you
+can say open source. If you agree with us, show it, say
+<cite>libre</cite>!</p>
+
+<h3 id="education">Free software and education</h3>
+
+<p>The most important point about free software is that schools
+<em>must</em> teach exclusively free software. All levels of schools
+from kindergarten to university, it's their moral responsibility to
+teach only free software in their education, and all other educational
+activities as well, including those that say that they're spreading
+digital literacy. A lot of those activities teach Windows, which means
+they're teaching <em>dependence</em>. To teach people the use of
+proprietary software is to teach dependence, and educational activities
+must never do that because it's the opposite of their mission.
+Educational activities have a social mission to educate good citizens of
+a strong, capable, cooperating, independent and free society. And in the
+area of computing, that means: teach free software; never teach a
+proprietary program because that's inculcating dependence.</p>
+
+<p>Why do you think some proprietary developers offer gratis copies to
+schools? They want the schools to make the children dependent. And then,
+when they graduate, they're still dependent and, you know, the company
+is not going to offer them gratis copies. And some of them get jobs and
+go to work for companies. Not many of them anymore, but some of them.
+And those companies are not going to be offered gratis copies. Oh no!
+The idea is: if the school directs the students down the path of
+permanent dependence, they can drag the rest of society with them into
+dependence. That's the plan! It's just like giving the school gratis
+needles full of addicting drugs, saying: &ldquo;Inject this into your
+students, the first dose is gratis. Once you're dependent, then you have
+to pay.&rdquo; Well, the school would reject the drugs because it isn't
+right to teach the students to use addictive drugs, and it's got to
+reject the proprietary software also. </p>
+
+<p>Some people say: &ldquo;Let's have the school teach both proprietary
+software and free software, so the students become familiar with
+both.&rdquo; That's like saying: &ldquo;For the lunch let's give the
+kids spinach and tobacco, so that they become accustomed to both.&rdquo;
+No! The schools are only supposed to teach good habits, not bad ones! So
+there should be no Windows in a school, no Macintosh, nothing
+proprietary in the education.</p>
+
+<p>But also, for the sake of educating the programmers. You see, some
+people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old,
+typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to
+know: &ldquo;How does it do this?&rdquo; But when they ask the teacher,
+if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: &ldquo;I'm sorry, it's a
+secret, we can't find out.&rdquo; Which means education is forbidden. A
+proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's
+knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even
+though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about
+programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of
+the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school. </p>
+
+<p>But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows,
+and then give out copies of the source code, saying: &ldquo;Read it and
+you'll understand everything.&rdquo; And those who are really
+fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to
+start to learn how to be good programmers.</p>
+
+<p>To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that
+certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they
+are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble
+understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an
+easy time working on when they need to make further changes.</p>
+
+<p>How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots
+of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the
+chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then
+you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes
+in large programs.</p>
+
+<p>How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have
+to start small, which does <em>not</em> mean small program, oh no! The
+challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in
+small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large
+programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free
+software gives you the chance to do that.</p>
+
+<p>So, if a school wants to offer the possibility of learning to be a
+good programmer, it needs to be a free software school.</p>
+
+<p>But there is an even deeper reason, and that is for the sake of
+moral education, education in citizenship. It's not enough for a school
+to teach facts and skills, it has to teach the spirit of goodwill, the
+habit of helping others. Therefore, every class should have this rule:
+&ldquo;Students, if you bring software to class, you may not keep it for
+yourself, you must share copies with the rest of the class, including
+the source code in case anyone here wants to learn. Because this class
+is a place where we share our knowledge. Therefore, bringing a
+proprietary program to class is not permitted.&rdquo; The school must
+follow its own rule to set a good example. Therefore, the school must
+bring only free software to class, and share copies, including the
+source code, with anyone in the class that wants copies.</p>
+
+<p>Those of you who have a connection with a school, it's <em>your</em>
+duty to campaign and pressure that school to move to free software. And
+you have to be firm. It may take years, but you can succeed as long
+as you never give up. Keep seeking more allies among the students, the
+faculty, the staff, the parents, anyone! And always bring it up as an
+ethical issue. If someone else wants to sidetrack the discussion into
+this practical advantage and this practical disadvantage, which means
+they're ignoring the most important question, then you have to say:
+&ldquo;This is not about how to do the best job of educating, this is
+about how to do a good education instead of an evil one. It's how to do
+education right instead of wrong, not just how to make it a little more
+effective, or less.&rdquo; So don't get distracted with those secondary
+issues, and ignore what really matters!</p>
+
+<h3 id="services">Internet services</h3>
+
+<p>So, moving on to the next menace. There are two issues that arise
+from the use of Internet services. One of them is that the server
+could abuse your data, and another is that it could take control of
+your computing.</p>
+
+<p>The first issue, people already know about. They are aware that, if
+you upload data to an Internet service, there is a question of what it
+will do with that data. It might do things that mistreat you. What could
+it do? It could lose the data, it could change the data, it could refuse
+to let you get the data back. And it could also show the data to someone
+else you don't want to show it to. Four different possible things.</p>
+
+<p>Now, here, I'm talking about the data that you <em>knowingly</em>
+gave to that site. Of course, many of those services do
+<em>surveillance</em> as well.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, consider Facebook. Users send lots of data to Facebook,
+and one of the bad things about Facebook is that it shows a lot of that
+data to lots of other people, and even if it offers them a setting to
+say &ldquo;no,&rdquo; that may not really work. After all, if you say
+&ldquo;some other people can see this piece of information,&rdquo;
+one of them might publish it. Now, that's not Facebook's fault,
+there is nothing they could do to prevent that, but it ought to warn
+people. Instead of saying &ldquo;mark this as only to your so-called
+friends,&rdquo; it should say &ldquo;keep in mind that your so-called
+friends are not really your friends, and if they want to make trouble
+for you, they could publish this.&rdquo; Every time, it should say that,
+if they want to deal with people ethically.</p>
+
+<p>As well as all the data users of Facebook voluntarily give to
+Facebook, Facebook is collecting data about people's activities on the
+net through various methods of surveillance. But that's the first
+menace. For now I am talking about the data that people <em>know</em>
+they are giving to these sites.</p>
+
+<p>Now, losing data is something that could always happen by accident.
+That possibility is always there, no matter how careful someone is.
+Therefore, you need to keep multiple copies of data that matters. If you
+do that, then, even if someone decided to delete your data
+intentionally, it wouldn't hurt you that much, because you'd have other
+copies of it.</p>
+
+<p>So, as long as you are maintaining multiple copies, you don't have
+to worry too much about someone's losing your data. What about whether
+you can get it back. Well, some services make it possible to get back
+all the data that you sent, and some don't. Google services will let the
+user get back the data the user has put into them. Facebook, famously,
+does not.</p>
+
+<p>Of course in the case of Google, this only applies to the data the
+user <em>knows</em> Google has. Google does lots of surveillance, too,
+and that data is not included. But in any case, if you can get the data
+back, then you could track whether they have altered it. And they're not
+very likely to start altering people's data if the people can tell. So
+maybe we can keep a track on that particular kind of abuse.</p>
+
+<p>But the abuse of showing the data to someone you don't want it to
+be shown to is very common and almost impossible for you to prevent,
+especially if it's a US company. You see, the most hypocritically named
+law in US history, the so-called USA Patriot Act, says that Big
+Brother's police can collect just about all the data that companies
+maintain about individuals. Not just companies, but other organizations
+too, like public libraries. The police can get this massively, without
+even going to court. Now, in a country that was founded on an idea of
+freedom, there's nothing more unpatriotic than this. But this is what
+they did. So you mustn't ever trust any of your data to a US company.
+And they say that foreign subsidiaries of US companies are subject to
+this as well. So the company you're directly dealing with may be in
+Europe, but if it's owned by a US company, you've got the same problem
+to deal with.</p>
+
+<p>However, this is mainly of concern when the data you're sending to
+the service is not for publication. There are some services where you
+publish things. Of course, if you publish something, you know everybody
+is gonna be able to see it. So, there is no way they can hurt you by
+showing it to somebody who wasn't supposed to see it. There is nobody
+who wasn't supposed to see it, if you published it. So in that case the
+problem doesn't exist.</p>
+
+<p>So these are four sub-issues of this one threat of abusing our data.
+The idea of the Freedom Box project is you have your own server in your
+own home, and when you want to do something remotely, you do it with
+your own server, and the police have to get a court order in order to
+search your server. So you have the same rights this way that you would
+have traditionally in the physical world.</p>
+
+<p>The point here and in so many other issues is: as we start doing
+things digitally instead of physically, we shouldn't lose any of our
+rights; because the general tendency is that we do lose rights.</p>
+
+<p>Basically, Stallman's law says that, in an epoch when governments
+work for the mega-corporations instead of reporting to their citizens,
+every technological change can be taken advantage of to reduce our
+freedom. Because reducing our freedom is what these governments want
+to do. So the question is: when do they get an opportunity? Well, any
+change that happens for some other reason is a possible opportunity,
+and they will take advantage of it if that's their general desire.</p>
+
+<p>But the other issue with Internet services is that they can take
+control of your computing, and that's not so commonly known. But it's
+becoming more common. There are services that offer to do computing for
+you on data supplied by you&mdash;things that you should do in your own
+computer but they invite you to let somebody else's computer do that
+computing work for you. And the result is you lose control over it. It's
+just as if you used a nonfree program.</p>
+
+<p>Two different scenarios, but they lead to the same problem. If you
+do your computing with a nonfree program&hellip; well, the users don't
+control the nonfree program, it controls the users, which would include
+you. So you've lost control of the computing that's being done. But
+if you do your computing in his server&hellip; well, the programs that
+are doing it are the ones he chose. You can't touch them or see them,
+so you have no control over them. He has control over them, maybe.</p>
+
+<p>If they are free software and he installs them, then he has control
+over them. But even he might not have control. He might be running a
+proprietary program in his server, in which case it's somebody else
+who has control of the computing being done in his server. He doesn't
+control it and you don't.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose he installs a free program, then he has control over the
+computing being done in his computer, but you don't. So, either way,
+<em>you don't!</em> So the only way to have control over your computing
+is to do it with <em>your copy</em> of a free program.</p>
+
+<p>This practice is called &ldquo;Software as a Service.&rdquo; It means
+doing your computing with your data in somebody else's server. And
+I don't know of anything that can make this acceptable. It's always
+something that takes away your freedom, and the only solution I know of
+is to refuse. For instance, there are servers that will do translation
+or voice recognition, and you are letting them have control over this
+computing activity, which we shouldn't ever do.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, we are also giving them data about ourselves which they
+shouldn't have. Imagine if you had a conversation with somebody through
+a voice-recognition translation system that was Software as a Service
+and it's really running on a server belonging to some company. Well,
+that company also gets to know what was said in the conversation, and
+if it's a US company that means Big Brother also gets to know. This is
+no good.</p>
+
+<h3 id="voting">Computers for voting</h3>
+
+<p>The next threat to our freedom in a digital society is using
+computers for voting. You can't trust computers for voting. Whoever
+controls the software in those computers has the power to commit
+undetectable fraud.</p>
+
+<p>Elections are special, because there's nobody involved that we dare
+trust fully. Everybody has to be checked, crosschecked by others, so
+that nobody is in a position to falsify the results by himself. Because
+if anybody is in a position to do that, he might do it. So our
+traditional systems for voting were designed so that nobody was fully
+trusted, everybody was being checked by others. So that nobody could
+easily commit fraud. But once you introduce a program, this is
+impossible.</p>
+
+<p>How can you tell if a voting machine will honestly count the
+votes? You'd have to study the program that's running in it during the
+election, which of course nobody can do, and most people wouldn't even
+know how to do. But even the experts who might theoretically be capable
+of studying the program, they can't do it while people are voting.
+They'd have to do it in advance, and then how do they know that the
+program they studied is the one that's running while people vote? Maybe
+it's been changed.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if this program is proprietary, that means some company
+controls it. The election authority can't even tell what that program
+is doing. Well, this company then could rig the election. And there
+are accusations that this was done in the US within the past ten years,
+that election results were falsified this way.</p>
+
+<p>But what if the program is free software? That means the election
+authority who owns this voting machine has control over the software in
+it, so the election authority could rig the election. You can't trust
+them either. You don't dare trust <em>anybody</em> in voting, and the
+reason is, there's no way that the voters can verify for themselves that
+their votes were correctly counted, nor that false votes were not added.</p>
+
+<p>In other activities of life, you can usually tell if somebody is
+trying to cheat you. Consider for instance buying something from a
+store. You order something, maybe you give a credit card number. If the
+product doesn't come, you can complain and you can&hellip; of course if
+you've got a good enough memory you'll notice if that product doesn't
+come. You're not just giving total blind trust to the store, because you
+can check. But in elections you can't check.</p>
+
+<p>I saw once a paper where someone described a theoretical system for
+voting which used some sophisticated mathematics so that people could
+check that their votes had been counted, even though everybody's vote
+was secret, and they could also verify that false votes hadn't been
+added. It was very exciting, powerful mathematics; but even if that
+mathematics is correct, that doesn't mean the system would be acceptable
+to use in practice, because the vulnerabilities of a real system might
+be outside of that mathematics. For instance, suppose you're voting over
+the Internet and suppose you're using a machine that's a zombie. It
+might tell you that the vote was sent for A while actually sending a
+vote for B. Who knows whether you'd ever find out? So, in practice the
+only way to see if these systems work and are honest is through years,
+in fact decades, of trying them and checking in other ways what
+happened.</p>
+
+<p>I wouldn't want my country to be the pioneer in this. So, use paper
+for voting. Make sure there are ballots that can be recounted.</p>
+
+<h4>Speaker's note, added subsequently</h4>
+
+<p>Remote voting by internet has an inherent social danger, that your
+boss might tell you, &ldquo;I want you to vote for candidate C, and do it
+from the computer in my office while I watch you.&rdquo; He does not need
+to say out loud that you might be fired if you do not comply. This
+danger is not based on a technical flaw, so it can't be fixed by
+fixing the technology.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="sharing">The war on sharing</h3>
+
+<p>The next threat to our freedom in a digital society comes from the
+war on sharing.</p>
+
+<p>One of the tremendous benefits of digital technology is that it is
+easy to copy published works and share these copies with others. Sharing
+is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy. So, millions of
+people share. Those who profit by having power over the distribution
+of these works don't want us to share. And since they are businesses,
+governments which have betrayed their people and work for the Empire of
+mega-corporations try to serve those businesses, they are against their
+own people, they are for the businesses, for the publishers.</p>
+
+<p>Well, that's not good. And with the help of these governments,
+the companies have been waging <em>war</em> on sharing, and they've
+proposed a series of cruel draconian measures. Why do they propose cruel
+draconian measures? Because nothing less has a chance of success: when
+something is good and easy, people do it, and the only way to stop them
+is by being very nasty. So of course, what they propose is nasty, nasty,
+and the next one is nastier. So they tried suing teenagers for hundreds
+of thousands of dollars. That was pretty nasty. And they tried turning
+our technology against us, Digital Restrictions Management that means,
+digital handcuffs.</p>
+
+<p>But among the people there were clever programmers too and they found
+ways to break the handcuffs. So for instance, DVDs were designed to have
+encrypted movies in a secret encryption format, and the idea was that
+all the programs to decrypt the video would be proprietary with digital
+handcuffs. They would all be designed to restrict the users. And their
+scheme worked OK for a while. But some people in Europe figured out the
+encryption and they released a free program that could actually play
+the video on a DVD.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the movie companies didn't leave it there. They went to the US
+congress and bought a law making that software illegal. The United
+States invented censorship of software in 1998, with the Digital
+Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). So the distribution of that free
+program was forbidden in the United States. Unfortunately it didn't stop
+with the United States. The European Union adopted a directive, in 2003
+I believe, requiring such laws. The directive only says that commercial
+distribution has to be banned, but just about every country in the
+European Union has adopted a nastier law. In France, the mere possession
+of a copy of that program is an offense punished by imprisonment, thanks
+to Sarkozy. I believe that was done by the law DADVSI. I guess he hoped
+that with an unpronounceable name, people wouldn't be able to criticize
+it. [laughter]</p>
+
+<p>So, elections are coming. Ask the candidates in the parties: will you
+repeal the DADVSI? And if not, don't support them. You mustn't give up
+lost moral territory forever. You've got to fight to win it back.</p>
+
+<p>So, we still are fighting against digital handcuffs. The Amazon
+Swindle has digital handcuffs to take away the traditional freedoms of
+readers to do things such as: give a book to someone else, or lend a
+book to someone else. That's a vitally important social act. That is
+what builds society among people who read, lending books. Amazon doesn't
+want to let people lend books freely. And then there is also selling a
+book, perhaps to a used bookstore. You can't do that either.</p>
+
+<p>It looked for a while as if DRM had disappeared on music, but now
+they're bringing it back with streaming services such as Spotify. These
+services all require proprietary client software, and the reason is
+so they can put digital handcuffs on the users. So, reject them! They
+already showed quite openly that you can't trust them, because first
+they said: &ldquo;You can listen as much as you like.&rdquo; And then
+they said: &ldquo;Oh, no! You can only listen a certain number of hours
+a month.&rdquo; The issue is not whether that particular change was good
+or bad, just or unjust; the point is, they have the power to impose any
+change in policies. So don't let them have that power. You should have
+your <em>own</em> copy of any music you want to listen to.</p>
+
+<p>And then came the next assault on our freedom: HADOPI, basically
+punishment on accusation. It was started in France but it's been
+exported to many other countries. The United States now demand such
+unjust policies in its free exploitation treaties. A few months ago,
+Colombia adopted such a law under orders from its masters in Washington.
+Of course, the ones in Washington are not the real masters, they're just
+the ones who control the United States on behalf of the Empire. But
+they're the ones who also dictate to Colombia on behalf of the Empire.</p>
+
+<p>In France, since the Constitutional Council objected to explicitly
+giving people punishment without trial, they invented a kind of trial
+which is not a real trial, it's just a form of a trial, so they can
+<em>pretend</em> that people have a trial before they're punished. But
+in other countries they don't bother with that, it's explicit punishment
+on accusation only. Which means that for the sake of their war on
+sharing, they're prepared to abolish the basic principles of justice. It
+shows how thoroughly anti-freedom anti-justice they are. These are not
+legitimate governments.</p>
+
+<p>And I'm sure they'll come up with more nasty ideas because they're
+paid to defeat the people no matter what it takes. Now, when they do
+this, they always say that it's for the sake of the artists, that they
+have to &ldquo;protect&rdquo; the &ldquo;creators.&rdquo; Now those are
+both propaganda terms. I am convinced that the reason they love the word
+&ldquo;creators&rdquo; is because it is a comparison with a deity. They
+want us to think of artists as super-human, and thus deserving special
+privileges and power over us, which is something I disagree with.</p>
+
+<p>In fact though, the only artists that benefit very much from this
+system are the big stars. The other artists are getting crushed into the
+ground by the heels of these same companies. But they treat the stars
+very well, because the stars have a lot of clout. If a star threatens to
+move to another company, the company says: &ldquo;Oh, we'll give you
+what you want.&rdquo; But for any other artist they say: &ldquo;You
+don't matter, we can treat you any way we like.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>So the superstars have been corrupted by the millions of dollars
+or euros that they get, to the point where they'll do almost
+anything for more money. For instance, J. K. Rowling is a good
+example. J. K. Rowling, a few years ago, went to court in Canada and
+obtained an order that people who had bought her books must not read
+them. She got an order telling people not to read her books!</p>
+
+<p>Here's what happened. A bookstore put the books on display for sale
+too early, before the date they were supposed to go on sale. And people
+came into the store and said: &ldquo;Oh, I want that!&rdquo; And they
+bought it and took away their copies. And then, they discovered the
+mistake, so they took the copies off of display. But Rowling wanted to
+crush any circulation of any information from those books, so she went
+to court, and the court ordered those people not to read the books that
+they now owned.</p>
+
+<p>In response, I call for a total boycott of Harry Potter. But I don't
+say you shouldn't read those books or watch the movies, I only say you
+shouldn't buy the books or pay for the movies. [laughter] I leave it to
+Rowling to tell people not to read the books. As far as I am concerned,
+if you borrow the book and read it, that's OK. [laughter] Just don't
+give her any money! But this happened with paper books. The court could
+make this order but it couldn't get the books back from the people who
+had bought them. Imagine if they were ebooks. Imagine if they were
+ebooks on the Swindle. Amazon could send commands to erase them.</p>
+
+<p>So, I don't have much respect for stars who will go to such lengths
+for more money. But most artists aren't like that, they never got
+enough money to be corrupted. Because the current system of copyright
+supports most artists very badly. And so, when these companies demand to
+expand the war on sharing, supposedly for the sake of the artists, I'm
+against what they want but I would like to support the artists better. I
+appreciate their work and I realize if we want them to do more work we
+should support them.</p>
+
+<h3 id="arts">Supporting the arts</h3>
+
+<p>I have two proposals for how to support artists, methods that are
+compatible with sharing, that would allow us to end the war on sharing
+and still support artists.</p>
+
+<p>One method uses tax money. We get a certain amount of public funds to
+distribute among artists. But, how much should each artist get? Well,
+we have to measure popularity. You see, the current system supposedly
+supports artists based on their popularity. So I'm saying: let's keep
+that, let's continue in this system to support them based on their
+popularity. We can measure the popularity of all the artists with some
+kind of polling or sampling, so that we don't have to do surveillance.
+We can respect people's anonymity.</p>
+
+<p>OK, we get a raw popularity figure for each artist, how do we convert
+that into an amount of money? Well, the obvious way is: distribute
+the money in proportion to popularity. So if A is a thousand times as
+popular as B, A will get a thousand times as much money as B. That's not
+efficient distribution of the money. It's not putting the money to good
+use. You see, it's easy for a star A to be a thousand times as popular
+as a fairly successful artist B. And if we use linear proportion, we'll
+give A a thousand times as much money as we give B. And that means that,
+either we have to make A tremendously rich, or we are not supporting
+B enough.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the money we use to make A tremendously rich is failing to do
+an effective job of supporting the arts; so, it's inefficient. Therefore
+I say: let's use the cube root. Cube root looks sort of like this. The
+point is: if A is a thousand times as popular as B, with the cube root A
+will get ten times as much as B, not a thousand times as much, just ten
+times as much. So the use of the cube root shifts a lot of the money
+from the stars to the artists of moderate popularity. And that means,
+with less money we can adequately support a much larger number of
+artists.</p>
+
+<p>There are two reasons why this system would use less money than we
+pay now. First of all because it would be supporting artists but not
+companies, second because it would shift the money from the stars to the
+artists of moderate popularity. Now, it would remain the case that the
+more popular you are, the more money you get. And so the star A would
+still get more than B, but not astronomically more.</p>
+
+<p>That's one method, and because it won't be so much money it doesn't
+matter so much how we get the money. It could be from a special tax on
+Internet connectivity, it could just be some of the general budget that
+gets allocated to this purpose. We won't care because it won't be so
+much money, much less than we're paying now.</p>
+
+<p>The other method I've proposed is voluntary payments. Suppose each
+player had a button you could use to send one euro. A lot of people
+would send it; after all it's not that much money. I think a lot of
+you might push that button every day, to give one euro to some artist
+who had made a work that you liked. But nothing would demand this, you
+wouldn't be required or ordered or pressured to send the money; you
+would do it because you felt like it. But there are some people who
+wouldn't do it because they're poor and they can't afford to give one
+euro. And it's good that they won't give it, we don't have to squeeze
+money out of poor people to support the artists. There are enough
+non-poor people who'll be happy to do it. Why wouldn't you give one euro
+to some artists today, if you appreciated their work? It's too
+inconvenient to give it to them. So my proposal is to remove the
+inconvenience. If the only reason not to give that euro is you would
+have one euro less, you would do it fairly often.</p>
+
+<p>So these are my two proposals for how to support artists, while
+encouraging sharing because sharing is good. Let's put an end to the
+war on sharing, laws like DADVSI and HADOPI, it's not just the methods
+that they propose that are evil, their purpose is evil. That's why they
+propose cruel and draconian measures. They're trying to do something
+that's nasty by nature. So let's support artists in other ways.</p>
+
+<h3 id="rights">Rights in cyberspace</h3>
+
+<p>The last threat to our freedom in digital society is the fact that we
+don't have a firm right to do the things we do, in cyberspace. In the
+physical world, if you have certain views and you want to give people
+copies of a text that defends those views, you're free to do so. You
+could even buy a printer to print them, and you're free to hand them out
+on the street, or you're free to rent a store and hand them out there.
+If you want to collect money to support your cause, you can just have
+a can and people could put money into the can. You don't need to get
+somebody else's approval or cooperation to do these things.</p>
+
+<p>But, in the Internet, you <em>do</em> need that. For instance if want
+to distribute a text on the Internet, you need companies to help you
+do it. You can't do it by yourself. So if you want to have a website,
+you need the support of an ISP or a hosting company, and you need a
+domain name registrar. You need them to continue to let you do what
+you're doing. So you're doing it effectively on sufferance, not by
+right.</p>
+
+<p>And if you want to receive money, you can't just hold out a can. You
+need the cooperation of a payment company. And we saw that this makes
+all of our digital activities vulnerable to suppression. We learned this
+when the United States government launched a &ldquo;distributed denial
+of service attack&rdquo; (DDoS) against WikiLeaks. Now I'm making a
+bit of joke because the words &ldquo;distributed denial of service
+attack&rdquo; usually refer to a different kind of attack. But they
+fit perfectly with what the United States did. The United States went
+to the various kinds of network services that WikiLeaks depended on,
+and told them to cut off service to WikiLeaks. And they did!</p>
+
+<p>For instance, WikiLeaks had rented a virtual Amazon server, and the
+US government told Amazon: &ldquo;Cut off service for WikiLeaks.&rdquo;
+And it did, arbitrarily. And then, Amazon had certain domain names such
+as wikileaks.org. The US government tried to get all those domains shut
+off. But it didn't succeed, some of them were outside its control and
+were not shut off.</p>
+
+<p>Then, there were the payment companies. The US went to PayPal and
+said: &ldquo;Stop transferring money to WikiLeaks or we'll make life
+difficult for you.&rdquo; And PayPal shut off payments to WikiLeaks. And
+then it went to Visa and Mastercard and got them to shut off payments
+to WikiLeaks. Others started collecting money on WikiLeaks' behalf and
+their accounts were shut off too. But in this case, maybe something can
+be done. There's a company in Iceland which began collecting money on
+behalf of WikiLeaks, and so Visa and Mastercard shut off its account;
+it couldn't receive money from its customers either. And now, that
+business is suing Visa and Mastercard apparently, under European Union
+law, because Visa and Mastercard together have a near-monopoly. They're
+not allowed to arbitrarily deny service to anyone.</p>
+
+<p>Well, this is an example of how things need to be for all kinds of
+services that we use in the Internet. If you rented a store to hand
+out statements of what you think, or any other kind of information
+that you can lawfully distribute, the landlord couldn't kick you out
+just because he didn't like what you were saying. As long as you keep
+paying the rent, you have a right to continue in that store for a
+certain agreed-on period of time that you signed. So you have some
+rights that you can enforce. And they couldn't shut off your telephone
+line because the phone company doesn't like what you said, or because
+some powerful entity didn't like what you said and threatened the phone
+company. No! As long as you pay the bills and obey certain basic rules,
+they can't shut off your phone line. This is what it's like to have some
+rights!</p>
+
+<p>Well, if we move our activities from the physical world to the
+virtual world, then either we have the same rights in the virtual world,
+or we have been harmed. So, the precarity of all our Internet activities
+is the last of the menaces I wanted to mention.</p>
+
+<p>Now I'd like to say that for more information about free software,
+look at gnu.org. Also look at fsf.org, which is the website of the Free
+Software Foundation. You can go there and find many ways you can help
+us, for instance. You can also become a member of the Free Software
+Foundation through that site. [&hellip;] There is also the Free Software
+Foundation of Europe fsfe.org. You can join FSF Europe also. [&hellip;]</p>
+
+<div class="column-limit"></div>
+<h3 id="footnotes" style="font-size: 1.2em">Footnotes</h3>
+
+<ol>
+ <li id="f1">As of 2017 the patents on playing MP3 files have
+ reportedly expired.</li>
+</ol>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
+ &lt;web-translators@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
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+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
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+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
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+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ being publicly visible on the web or in a revision control system).
+
+ There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
+ Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
+
+<p>Copyright &copy; 2011, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 Richard Stallman</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2020/10/06 08:25:53 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div><!-- for class="inner", starts in the banner include -->
+</body>
+</html>