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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.87 -->
+<title>RMS on Radio New Zealand -
+GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/rms-on-radio-nz.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>RMS on Radio NZ - October 2009</h2>
+
+<p><em>Interview between Kim Hill (presenter) and Richard M Stallman</em></p>
+<hr class="thin" />
+
+<div class="summary">
+<h3>Interesting sections</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>[<a href="#t0">00:00</a>] Introduction</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t1">00:40</a>] Surveillance</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t2">00:19</a>] Terrorism and 9/11</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t3">04:30</a>] Barack Obama</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t4">06:23</a>] Airline Security</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t5">08:02</a>] Digital Surveillance</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t6">10:26</a>] Systematic Surveillance</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t7">12:20</a>] Taxi surveillance</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t8">14:25</a>] Matters of Principle &mdash; cellphones</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t9">15:33</a>] Free Software and Freedom</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t10">17:24</a>] Free Trade treaties</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t11">20:08</a>] Cars, microwaves and planes</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t12">21:05</a>] Copying books</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t13">25:31</a>] E-books &amp; supporting artists</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t14">28:42</a>] Micropayments</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t15">30:47</a>] A simplistic political philosophy?</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t16">32:51</a>] Income</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t17">33:48</a>] Digital handcuffs &mdash; Amazon Kindle</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t18">36:13</a>] Buying books</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t19">37:16</a>] Social networking</li>
+<li>[<a href="#t20">38:08</a>] The
+<abbr title="Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement">ACTA</abbr></li>
+</ul>
+<hr class="no-display" />
+</div>
+
+<dl>
+<dt id="t0">[00:00]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>We spoke to Richard Stallman a while ago last year about his
+campaign for Free Software. He's a hero, of course, of the movement;
+launched the Free Software Foundation, campaigns against software
+patents and extensions of copyright laws. His battle is, as he told
+us last year, against what he calls extreme capitalism. His GNU
+operating system with Linux was the first Free operating system that
+could run on a PC. Richard Stallman says &ldquo;it's all about
+freedom&rdquo;, a cause which goes beyond software; and we could talk
+about the others he's identified, surveillance and censorship, because
+he joins me now, hello.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t1">[00:40]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>Hello</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Let us talk about surveillance and censorship. I've been looking
+at your personal website and you're talking about fingerprinting of
+air travelers, for example, which is something you're very hot
+about.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes, I urge people to refuse to go to the US where they would be
+mistreated that way.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Why is that mistreatment, do you think?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Because it's too much information to collect about people who
+aren't criminals. And by the way for the same reason I will not ever
+go to Japan again unless they changed that policy, which makes me sad,
+but one must &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt id="t2">[01:19]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>It's not justifiable in order to make sure that terrorists aren't
+getting on the plane?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>There's no need. Basically terrorism, and by the way we don't
+really know who was behind the September 11th attacks in the US, we
+don't know whether it was a bunch of Muslim fanatics, or it was a
+bunch of Christian fanatics and the White House. We do know that Bush
+corrupted and sabotaged the investigation when he was unable to
+prevent it from happening.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>So, are you an advocate of the conspiracy theories surrounding
+9/11?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I can't say &hellip; first of all I think it's unfair &mdash; we
+know that the attack was a conspiracy. All the theories are
+conspiracies.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Well, all right, the conspiracy theory for example, that has the
+Bush administration staging the 9/11 attack in order to justify
+&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I don't know. The only way there could ever be proof of that is
+with a real investigation, but when you have a government not allowing
+a real investigation of a horrible crime then you've got to suspect
+that they're hiding something. Now I can't know for certain what
+they're hiding, but I want a real investigation to be carried out with
+the power to subpoena anyone possibly concerned, including Bush, and
+make those people testify under oath and show them no deference that
+everyone else wouldn't get.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Putting 9/11 aside then because we haven't got time here to go
+into the various theories about what could possibly have caused 9/11,
+there is undoubtedly a thing called terrorism.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes, but it's a minor problem. More people died in the US in
+September 2001 from car accidents than from a terrorist attack, and
+that continues month after month, but we don't have a Global War on
+Accidents, so basically politicians used a real danger, but not the
+world's biggest danger, as an excuse for what they want to do, which
+is &hellip; and remember that these governments are much more
+dangerous, it's quite clear that Bush's invasion of Iraq was far more
+destructive than anything non state-sponsored terrorists have been
+able to do &mdash; that's assuming that those terrorists in September
+2001 were not state-sponsored, which we don't know &mdash; but the
+point is, what Bush did by invading Iraq, using those attacks as an
+excuse, was tremendously worse and we must remember than governments
+gone amok can do far more damage than anybody not state-sponsored.
+
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>After all, governments have a lot more men under arms and they don't
+have to hide the fact that they have men under arms, so they're in a
+much bigger position to do damage, so we must be concerned about
+letting them have too much power. A world in which the police can
+easily do whatever they'd like to do is a world in which the police
+are a threat.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t3">[04:30]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>Last time we spoke, and we were talking about the issue of Free
+Software, but specifically in relation to that you doubted that
+President Bush's successor, who we now know is Barack Obama, would be
+pretty much any different from Bush.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>He's a little different, but I have to say he's small change. On
+human rights issues he's not very different. He's still in favor of
+keeping people in prison, without charges, indefinitely, and you can't
+get much worse than that in terms of human rights.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Well except he's addressing Guantanamo Bay.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well that's just one of the places where it's done, it's done also
+in Bagram in Afghanistan, and I really don't see why it would be
+better to move those people to Bagram. What has to be done is charge
+them or release them. They're entitled to that.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Yeah, they may be entitled to that but he's also democratically
+elected President who &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>That doesn't mean he's entitled to violate human rights.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>No, but would the American people be in favor of the release of
+those &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I don't know.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>&hellip; that's got to be a consideration.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>No it's not, if they're not that just makes them responsible.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I know you're &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I don't think I can excuse massive violations of human rights by
+saying that the public is maddened and supports it. Especially, why
+are they so maddened? Because of a constant propaganda campaign
+telling you &ldquo;Be terrified of terrorists&rdquo;, &ldquo;throw
+away your human rights and everyone else's because you're so scared of
+these terrorists&rdquo;. It's disproportionate, we have to keep these
+dangers in their proportion, there isn't a campaign saying &ldquo;be
+terrified of getting in a car&rdquo; but maybe there ought to be.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t4">[06:23]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>Most airline security, getting back to the fingerprinting issue,
+you've said is just for show.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>A lot of it is, not all of it is, I'm very glad that they have
+reinforced the cabin doors so that hijackers can't get at the pilots,
+OK, that's a sensible measure.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>But are you? I would have thought that you would have said
+&ldquo;why would they spend money reinforcing the cabin doors because
+hijackers are a minor issue&rdquo;.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I'm not against spending a little bit of money.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>You're saying that that issue isn't an infringement of human
+rights.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>OK, and I don't mind spending some money for safety, I even make
+some compromises you know on issues of rights, I'm not saying police
+shouldn't be able to get a search warrant, but they should have to go
+to a Judge, to present probable cause, to keep them in check because
+police are very dangerous when they run amok, as people discovered a
+few months ago in London, when the police did run amok, and they
+killed somebody who was trying to walk home past a protest, and he
+couldn't get home because the police were just deliberately blocking
+the streets, and then they hit him. And then they lied about it too,
+which they typically do. Whenever the police attack someone they lie
+about him, they lie about what they did, and they lie about what he
+was doing, to make it sound that they were justified in mistreating
+him in the first place, it's standard practice, they're like an armed
+gang.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t5">[08:02]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>If you don't agree with surveillance, is there any way that you
+would accept that it might be quite a handy thing, CCTV &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Wait a second, your view of surveillance is oversimplifying
+things, what I see happening with computers is they make possible a
+form of total surveillance which wasn't feasible in the past, even
+governments like Romania under Ceau&#x0219;escu, or East Germany with
+the Stasi, they did a lot of surveillance but it took a lot of people
+working on it and even then it was limited what they could actually
+watch and record because it was so hard. Now, we're entering a kind
+of surveillance society that has never been seen before &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>You're talking about digital surveillance.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes, but as people do more things using digital technology it
+becomes easy to keep a record of everything everyone has done, things
+that weren't done in the past and still aren't done with other media,
+there's no record of who sends a letter to who for all letters, it
+just isn't done. But there are records in many countries of who sends
+an email to whom and those records can be saved for years and we don't
+know that they'll ever be disposed of.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>If you think that governments are not to be trusted, which is a
+legitimate position of course, and if you think that the police are
+not to be trusted, again a legitimate position, why can't you feel
+happier about digital surveillance and CCTV surveillance given that it
+may well give the people more protection.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Oh, I'm all in favor of the right to make and record videos, such
+as when you're on the street or when you're watching a protest or
+whatever, I'm concerned about systematic surveillance.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>What is that, systematic surveillance?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well suppose the police set up a camera that always watches the
+street, and connects it to a face recognition program and make a
+database of everyone who passes, that's systematic surveillance. Now
+if you walk down the street and maybe you see somebody you know and
+you recognize him, that's not systematic surveillance, that's a whole
+bunch of people knowing something, there's nothing wrong with that,
+that's just what life is.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t6">[10:26]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>What makes systematic surveillance more sinister to you?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Because we know that there's a tendency for many different
+governments to treat dissenters as terrorists, and investigate them
+using laws that were set up supposedly to help them prevent terrorism.
+We know also that they tend to sabotage political activities, and this
+is dangerous.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>What's wrong with being investigated?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well, it depends if the government's investigating you because
+you're a political dissident, there are a lot of things they could do
+to harass you. One thing I remember was in England, a busload of
+protesters, they were on they way to a protest, the police stopped
+their bus and drove them away from the protest, and they cited a law
+that had been passed to supposedly prevent terrorism. Well this is
+sabotaging political activity. And then another thing that happens I
+know in England, is people have been prosecuted for copies of texts
+that they have, you know reading is sometimes illegal, it's really
+dangerous. What we see is a global tendency for governments to bring
+out the worst side of themselves with terrorism as the excuse, so we
+must be on guard against that, that's potentially a much bigger danger
+than the terrorists it's supposed to protect us from. I don't have to
+say that they don't exist, or that they're no danger at all.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>No, the difficulty is being on guard against the danger that
+you've cited, without giving quarter to &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt id="t7">[12:20]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>Ah, no I don't see it's any problem at all. Police have lots of
+things they can do to investigate people and it's more all the time
+and whenever there's a specific reason to suspect particular people
+they can basically get permission to search whatever. So OK, that's
+necessary, but beyond that we've got to be careful not to go, and the
+digital surveillance society goes far beyond that, there's a tendency
+to keep records of everything, check everything. In New York City for
+instance a taxi driver told me he had been required to install a
+camera which transmits by radio people's faces to the police where
+they run face recognition over it.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>I don't think that should be
+allowed. I don't mind if they have a system that records people's
+faces and keeps it for a week in case somebody attacks the taxi
+driver, that's not going to do anything to us if we don't attack taxi
+drivers. We can make use of surveillance technology in ways that
+don't threaten people's rights but we've got to make sure we use them
+in those ways.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>How come you can justify people being treated as if they're going
+to attack taxi drivers &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>But you see there the point is, those are not looked at unless
+there's a crime to investigate and then they get erased if it's done
+right, but the way it's actually being done in New York City is
+they're sent to the police, and the police keep track of who goes
+where, and that's what scares me. Having all the information about
+what you do available to the police for years in the past whenever
+they want to look. Well part of what I do about this is I don't buy
+things with credit cards unless it's something where they demand to
+know who I am anyway, I don't use a credit card or any digital method,
+I use cash, and that way Big Brother's not making a database of every
+place I've been, that I bought anything in, what I bought.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t8">[14:25]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>As a matter of principle, rather than &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>As a matter of principle. It's not an issue of convenience.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>You don't do quite a lot of things actually.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yeah, I don't carry a cellphone because I really don't want to be
+telling Big Brother where I am all the time, every place I go.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Is that why?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes, that's why. Well now there's another reason. Today,
+cellphones are powerful computers and there's no way to run one
+without proprietary software.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I thought that would be your main reason.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Actually there is one you can get, although they're not producing
+it anymore, it didn't work all that well, it's Mark One. So that's
+another issue, but that didn't exist, that issue wasn't there when
+cellphones first came out, people didn't install programs in them,
+they were just fixed appliances, but they have always raised the issue
+that they're constantly saying where you are, and I just don't want to
+participate in a system like that, I think people shouldn't. It would
+be very convenient for me to have a cellphone, I'm not one of those
+people who would, who says &ldquo;I resent the fact that people can
+call me&rdquo;, it's convenient when people can call me, but I'm not
+going to do it that way.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t9">[15:33]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>It's interesting that your battle for Free Software and the issues
+of freedom that you identify intersect. They didn't start out being
+the same &mdash; or did they?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well they didn't start out being the same. Pervasive digital
+surveillance wasn't a big problem twenty-seven years ago.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>But the people who were in charge were still the people who were
+in charge, the people who you identified as the people you didn't want
+to see &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well actually they're not the same people. Proprietary software's
+mostly controlled by various private entities that are developers,
+maybe Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Amazon, they're all
+distributing proprietary software.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I would have thought you'd identify them all as forces of extreme
+capitalism.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well I'm sorry, when I say extreme capitalism I'm talking about a
+philosophy, and that philosophy says &ldquo;the market should control
+everything, everything should be for sale, and business should be
+allowed to dominate politics and get the laws it wants&rdquo;, which
+is very different from mere capitalism, which says &ldquo;within a
+society which we set up to protect peoples rights and so on, there are
+lots of things that people should be free to do, and make businesses
+to do them, as they wish&rdquo;. That difference is why today's form
+of capitalism is running wild and why we see free exploitation
+treaties which basically undermine democracy and turn it in to a
+sham.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>What are you talking about there?</dd>
+
+<dt id="t10">[17:24]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well, the so-called Free Trade treaties, which I don't like to
+call that, they're designed to transfer power from our governments to
+companies. They all do this in one way, which is they let companies
+threaten to move to another country, or move their operations; and so
+any time the people are demanding that a government protect the
+environment, or the public health, or the general standard of living,
+or anything else that's more important than just who's going to buy
+and sell what, companies can say &ldquo;we're against this, and if you
+do this we'll just move our operations elsewhere&rdquo; and the
+politicians now have a wonderful excuse for why they're not going to
+do it.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>Of course it was they who decided to adopt that treaty in the
+first place which they shouldn't have done. But then a lot of these
+treaties go beyond that, and they explicitly deny democracy. Now the
+US had a law that said it wouldn't sell tuna &mdash; you weren't
+allowed to sell tuna in the US if it had been caught in a way that
+endangered dolphins. Well that law had to be scrapped because of the
+World Trade Organization, that's just one example.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Because it was regarded as a trade barrier.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Exactly. Then NAFTA, which is between the US, Canada and Mexico,
+allows companies to sue the government if they believe some law
+reduces their profits; effectively saying the highest value in society
+is how much money a company can make, and anything that gets in the
+way of that, we owe them.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Of course, we're in favor of Free Trade here, Richard, because we
+rely on it &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well I'm not in favor of free trade beyond a certain point. The
+people who are in favor of Free Trade say that it can make everyone
+more prosperous and that's true up to a point, and that point is where
+it starts subverting democracy. But the point of these treaties is
+precisely to stretch free trade to the point where it does subvert
+democracy. And you can see business think-tanks reporting how they
+expect in a few decades governments will have much less control over
+what goes on in the world and business will have more control. What
+they're predicting is essentially that these treaties will march
+on.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t11">[20:08]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>One of the other things you don't do, is you don't drive a car, is
+that right?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>No, that's not true, I don't own a car. I do have a driver's
+license.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>OK, one of the other things you don't do is you don't own a
+car.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yeah, well that's to save money. I live in a city.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>No philosophy.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>No, I don't think it's wrong to own a car, it's good if we all
+drove somewhat less.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I thought that it was because of the proprietary software in
+cars.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Now that's an interesting issue. I have appliances, I have a
+microwave oven which might have some proprietary software in it.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And you fly in planes.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yeah. Well I don't own a plane though. I don't boycott everybody
+who uses proprietary software. If a company uses proprietary software
+I say that's too bad for them, but I'm not going to punish them by
+boycotting them, what I will try to do is explain to them why they
+deserve to have control over their computing rather than letting
+somebody else control their computing.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t12">[21:05]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>What are you going to tell the Library and Information Association
+Conference with regard to copyright and community?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well, I'm going to explain why copyright law today is an
+injustice, because it forbids sharing, and sharing is absolutely
+essential. People must be free to share, so the New Zealand Copyright
+Law that was adopted about a year ago, and only one of several unjust
+things in it was temporarily withdrawn, that went in the wrong
+direction, but it was already too restrictive, people must be free to
+non-commercially share exact copies of any published work.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>So just let me &hellip; how would this work, for a moment? I
+write a book, I spend, you know, five years of my life writing a
+book.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well who knows, maybe you do it in a month.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Maybe I don't do it in a month.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>The point is, you do it by choice. People wrote books before
+there was copyright. I think you're going about this backwards. It's
+your choice whether to spend time writing, and the main reason most
+writers spend their time writing is because they have something they
+say they want to write and they hope people will appreciate it. It's
+only a few who get enough money that it starts to corrupt their
+spirit.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Don't most societies want to, and they don't do it fantastically
+efficiently, but to some extent they try to encourage people to
+write.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Oh, I'm all in favor of encouraging people to write.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Now how would you encourage people to write?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well first of all remember that I'm not talking about abolishing
+copyright on artistic works, I'm saying that people must be free to
+non-commercially share them. Commercial use would still be covered by
+copyright as it is now.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>If I can print off a whole book and pass it on, and they pass it
+on, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on, as an author I'm not going to
+sell many.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well that may be so, or may not be. I've seen people claim that
+it's only works that are bestsellers that are likely to sell less,
+because remember if you're not a big hit and people pass along copies
+what they're doing is getting you more fans. If you're not a
+bestseller then what you mainly want commercially is exposure, and
+this is a way you'll get more exposure, and without having to pay for
+it either, and without having to give control to a company that would
+take most of the profits anyway.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>So hang on, the only reason an author would want exposure would be
+to increase the sales of their next book.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Oh no, no no no no no. Only the ones who've been morally
+corrupted and are no longer yearning to be read and appreciated,
+that's what they start out wanting, and a few, only a few get rich,
+and then those few who get rich, when people are paid to do something
+that they originally did from pleasure or a yearning, they tend to
+start wanting the money more, and the thing that they used to yearn to
+do, they want less.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>So if being read and appreciated is what authors want
+&hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well they start out wanting. Those who have got rich, some of
+them want to be rich.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Well we'll forget about those because you're implying they write
+bad books as a consequence.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>No I'm not saying that they're all bad, I'm not making a simple
+generalization like that, I say that their feelings have been
+corrupted, that doesn't necessarily mean their books are bad, I enjoy
+some of them. The point is that that's not a typical author.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>But a typical author you seem to be condemning to even more
+penury.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Oh no I'm not, you're mistaken.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>If they cannot sell the book &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>You're mistaken, you're making a projection which people who know
+more about this disagree. Cory Doctorow who has been a bestselling
+author puts all his works on the net and he doesn't even think he
+sells less.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>So people still go out and buy the hard copy from the shop?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes they do.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Even though people can pass his book from hand to hand
+willy-nilly.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t13">[25:31]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>They can do that anyway you know with printed books, that's the
+motive for e-books. E-books are designed to stop you from doing
+things like lending the book to your friend or selling it to a used
+bookstore and borrowing it from a public library. They're designed to
+turn public libraries into retail outlets. And the reason they do
+this is they want to establish a pay-per-read universe. They're
+following the twisted logic that says the most important thing is how
+much money people pay and everybody who reads had a debt, now owes
+money and he has to be made to pay. I think this is entirely twisted
+and I'm against it, because the freedom to share must be respected.
+
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>But I have other proposals for ways to support artists. And remember
+the current system mostly supports corporations, so I don't think it
+works very well. And it makes a few authors quite rich, and those get
+treated with great deference by the corporations, and the rest
+basically get ground into the dust. My proposals &mdash; I have two,
+and another that combines them &mdash; one proposal is support artists
+using taxes, it could either be a specific tax on Internet
+connectivity or general funds, it wouldn't be a tremendous amount of
+money by comparison with other government expenditures, and then you
+divide this among artists by measuring their popularity, but you don't
+divide it in linear proportion, 'cos if you did that a large portion
+of this money would go to making superstars richer and it's not
+needed, what I propose is take the cube root of the popularity.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>How do you assess their popularity?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>You could do it with polling.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>How polling? Internet polling?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>All sorts of polling, there's public opinion polling and anything,
+use a sample, the point is you don't ask everybody, nobody's required
+to participate. But you use a sample, and you use that to measure
+popularity.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I'm just holding that thought, popularity. You're equating
+popularity with merit?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>No I'm not, but I'm saying you don't want bureaucrats to be
+deciding who gets these funds. So this is one way, you could do it by
+polling, after all the current system bases it on popularity to some
+extent. Take the cube root, so if A is a thousand times as popular as
+B, A will get ten times as much money as B, so this way it's the
+counterpart to a progressive income tax. So this way, yes if you're
+tremendously successful you do get more, but you don't get
+tremendously more, and most of the money goes to support a large
+number of artists of mid-range popularity.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And tell me again, where does the money come from?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>It comes from taxes. It comes from all of us.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>General taxes.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Could be general taxes, or a specific special tax. Either way is
+OK.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t14">[28:42]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>Why don't you just ask people, if you're basing it on popularity,
+why don't you just ask people just to send in the money?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well that's my other proposal. If every player had a button to
+send a dollar I think people would do it often, after all the main
+reason we don't do it is how much trouble it is. It's not that you or
+I would miss a dollar, I often would be glad to send a dollar to some
+artists, but how am I going to do it? I need to use a credit card and
+identify myself and I need to find where to send it to them and that's
+a lot of work. Well, this button, which I hope would be implemented
+in an anonymous way, would take away all the work, it would be totally
+painless to send a dollar, and then I think a lot of people would do
+it.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>What about getting rid of taxes entirely, and giving us all the
+power to direct &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I'm not against taxes.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I'm not suggesting you are, but I'm asking you why not?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Because we need to make sure that rich people pay their fair
+share, which is a bigger share than what poor people have to pay, to
+keep society going. We need a welfare state, at least at our current
+level of technology and the way society works, we need a welfare
+state, and the rich shouldn't be exempt from funding it.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Does it not matter that your popularity contest for artists may
+let the rich completely off the hook?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well, I'm not sure it matters. Supporting artists is desirable
+but it's not a matter of life and death in the same way that giving
+poor people food and shelter and medical care is, whether they're
+artists or not.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>I don't know, I think that if you look at society it's made up of
+all sorts of things that are contingent on one another for the health
+of the society.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t15">[30:47]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes, but I don't want to have one answer for every question in
+society. I'm not a proponent of a very simplistic political
+philosophy, and I hope that that's visible. There are such
+people.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Yes, I'm sure there are. No, God no, I would never ever accuse
+you of being an advocate of a simplistic political philosophy :-)</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd><p>There are people who are totally opposed to copyright and
+criticize me for not going far enough, but what I say is that works
+whose use is to do practical jobs, these works must be Free in the
+sense of the Four Freedoms that define Free Software. You've got to
+be free to republish them, to modify them, publish your modified
+versions, because this is what the users of the works need in their
+lives. But of course there are lots of works that don't, that
+contribute to society in other ways, they're not functional practical
+works.</p>
+<p>Art for instance, the contribution of an artistic work is in the
+impact it makes on your mind, not in whatever practical job you might
+figure out how to do with it sometime. And then there are works that
+state people's opinions and thoughts and what they've seen, which is a
+different way that works can contribute to society, and I have
+different recommendations for these. But the freedom to
+non-commercially share, that must be respected, and that's why the new
+New Zealand Copyright Law and the old one were both unjust, and the
+purpose of the new one is, specifically the punishing people by
+disconnecting them from the Internet, the purpose of that is to stop
+people from sharing, and it's wrong to stop people from sharing, so
+even if they work out a different way of achieving this unjust goal,
+the goal is what's wrong, not only the nasty methods that are, because
+only draconian methods can stop people from sharing.
+</p></dd>
+
+<dt id="t16">[32:51]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>How do you make your income, if you don't mind me asking?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>From speeches; not all my speeches, a lot of them I give unpaid,
+and a lot of them I get paid.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And that's how you make your income?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Yes. I don't spend a lot of money.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And you wouldn't consider that being paid for something you should
+share happily? It's a donation.</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I'd generally try to avoid having any admission charges. Once in
+a while I do agree to give a speech at a conference where they're
+charged people to register but often I will ask them to let the public
+in to my speech. So, in general I try to have it open to the public
+without charge because I want as many people as possible to come
+because I'm working for a cause, after all, and I want to do as much
+good as I can for this cause.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t17">[33:48]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>Do you think that you're winning?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>You know, gradually we are. But of course we still have a lot of
+opposition, we still have a lot to fight. You know, there's something
+else in the New Zealand Copyright Law that was adopted a year ago,
+which is unjust, and it prohibits in some cases the distribution of
+Free Software that can break digital handcuffs. More and more
+products are designed with digital handcuffs, that is features to stop
+the user from doing things. So nowadays when I hear about a new
+product or a new service my first thought is &ldquo;what's malicious
+in that?&rdquo;, &ldquo;how is it designed to restrict what you can
+do?&rdquo;. And these products are very malicious, for instance there
+is the Amazon Kindle, it's an e-book reader, and they call it the
+Kindle to express what it's designed to do to our books&nbsp;[<a href="#f1">1</a>].</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>That's not true :-)</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>But it does express what it will do with our books. The point is
+this product does surveillance, it forces the user to identify herself
+to buy a book, and Amazon has a list, knows exactly what everybody has
+bought. Then it is also designed to restrict the user, to stop people
+from sharing, from lending books to their friends, from selling them
+to a used bookstore, and various things that with printed books we can
+lawfully do. Even worse, it has a back door, that is Amazon can send
+commands remotely and do things to you, we found out about this a few
+months ago.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Do what to you?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well Amazon sent a command to all the Kindles, ordering them to
+erase all copies of a particular book, namely <cite>1984</cite> by
+George Orwell. Somebody said that they had burned up the year's
+supply of irony by choosing that book. So now we know Amazon can
+remotely erase your books. Now Amazon, after doing this, promised it
+would never do that again, but our freedom to keep a book for as long
+as we want, and read it as many times as we want, should not be
+dependent on any company's goodwill.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Where do you get your books from?</dd>
+
+<dt id="t18">[36:13]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>I buy books from bookstores, yes I go to a store and I say
+&ldquo;I want that one&rdquo;.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And you hand money over for it? Even though you think that that's
+not particularly a good system?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>Well I didn't say that's a bad system.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>Well aren't you handing money over to the corporates rather than
+the author?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>To a large extent yes, but I'm not going to refuse to buy just
+because of that, with books actually typically some of the authors do
+get some money. With academic textbooks they generally don't.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>As a matter of interest we've been talking about freedoms,
+surveillance and digital monitoring, does the extraordinary rise of
+social networking &hellip;</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I buy CDs of music as well even though in that case I know the
+musicians are not going to get paid, so I'd rather send them some
+money.</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>OK. And do you?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>I wish I could, I don't have a way, so I try to convince people to
+set up the system to make it easy.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t19">[37:16]<br />
+KH</dt>
+<dd>I'm sure they're sending us their addresses as you speak. Very
+briefly, the rise of social networking, is that a concern in terms of
+privacy for you?</dd>
+
+<dt>RMS</dt>
+<dd>It is, and I don't use those sites, it's more because I don't have
+time, I'm busy doing other things. I don't think social network sites
+are necessarily bad but they lead people into foolish activities. So
+I think an ethical social network site should warn people, and every
+time you connect to it it should warn you, &ldquo;anything you post
+here might get known to the public no matter how you set up settings
+about supposed privacy. So if you don't want it published, you
+shouldn't say it here.&rdquo;</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>That's a nice warning. Thank you, it's very nice to talk to you
+Richard Stallman.</dd>
+
+<dt id="t20">[38:08]<br />
+RMS</dt>
+<dd>We didn't even mention ACTA, the secret treaty that New Zealand is
+negotiating to restrict its citizens, and they won't; they tell
+publishers what's in the text that they're working on, but they won't
+tell the public. So the point is that the; many governments,
+including of course the US are conspiring in secret to impose new
+restrictions on us relating to copyright and part of their latest
+propaganda is they call sharing &ldquo;counterfeiting&rdquo;.
+<span class="gnun-split"></span>But the
+point is that this treaty will have provisions to restrict the public,
+we think, but they won't tell us. This is called Policy Laundering,
+this general practice; instead of democratically considering a law,
+which means the public gets to know what's being considered, gets to
+talk to the legislators, sees how they voted and so on, in secret they
+negotiate a treaty and then they come back and they say &ldquo;we
+can't change the treaty and we obviously can't refuse it, so we're all
+now, we've just arranged for our country to be stuck with this
+law.&rdquo;</dd>
+
+<dt>KH</dt>
+<dd>And we may well look at that law in a couple or three weeks
+time.</dd>
+</dl>
+
+<div class="column-limit"></div>
+<h3 style="font-size: 1.2em">Footnote</h3>
+<ol>
+ <li id="f1">[2019] We call it <a
+href="/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.html">the Swindle</a>
+because it's designed to swindle readers out of the traditional
+freedoms of readers of books.</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>
+
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+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
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+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
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+ be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
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+
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+
+<!-- This page is an exception; only the web page copyright year should
+ get updated. -->
+<p>Web page Copyright &copy; 2014, 2019, 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.</p>
+<p>Transcript Copyright &copy; 2009, 2010 Jim Cheetham.</p>
+
+<p>This transcript is licensed under the
+<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/nz/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives New Zealand</a> license.
+</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2020/07/01 15:25:23 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>