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 GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <h2>Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks</h2>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p>The following is an edited transcript from a speech given
 at <abbr title="Massachusetts Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr> in
 the Communications Forum on Thursday, April 19, 2001.</p>
 </div>
 <hr class="thin" />
 
 <p>
 <b>DAVID THORBURN, moderator</b>: Our speaker today, Richard Stallman,
 is a legendary figure in the computing world, and my experience in
 trying to find a respondent to share the podium with him was
 instructive.  One distinguished MIT professor told me
 that Stallman needs to be understood as a charismatic figure in a
 biblical parable&mdash;a kind of Old Testament anecdote-lesson.
 &ldquo;Imagine,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a Moses or a Jeremiah&mdash;better
 a Jeremiah.&rdquo; And I said, &ldquo;Well, that's very
 admirable.
 That sounds wonderful.  It confirms my sense of the kind of
 contribution he has made to the world.  Then why are you reluctant to
 share the podium with him?&rdquo; His answer: &ldquo;Like Jeremiah or
 Moses, he would simply overwhelm me.  I won't appear on the same panel
 him, but if you asked me to name five people alive in the world who
 have truly helped us all, Richard Stallman would be one of
 them.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 <b>RICHARD STALLMAN</b>: I should [begin by explaining why I have
 refused to allow this Forum to be web cast], in case it wasn't clear
 fully what the issue is: The software they use for web broadcasting
 requires the user to download certain software in order to receive the
 broadcast.  That software is not free software.  It's available at zero
 price but only as an executable, which is a mysterious bunch of numbers.</p>
 <p>
 What it does is secret.  You can't study it; you can't change it; and
 you certainly can't publish it in your own modified version.  And
 those are among the freedoms that are essential in the definition of
 &ldquo;free software.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 So if I am to be an honest advocate for free software, I can hardly go
 around giving speeches, then put pressure on people to use nonfree
 software.  I'd be undermining my own cause.  And if I don't show that
 I take my principles seriously, I can't expect anybody else to take
 them seriously.</p>
 <p>
 However, this speech is not about free software.  After I'd been
 working on the free software movement for several years and people
 started using some of the pieces of the GNU operating system, I began
 getting invited to give speeches [at which] &hellip; people started
 asking me: &ldquo;Well, how do the ideas about freedom for software
 users generalize to other kinds of things?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 And, of course, people asked silly questions like, &ldquo;Well, should
 hardware be free?&rdquo; &ldquo;Should this microphone be
 free?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 Well, what does that mean?  Should you be free to copy it and change
 it?  Well, as for changing it, if you buy the microphone, nobody is
 going to stop you from changing it.  And as for copying it, nobody has
 a microphone copier.  Outside of <cite>Star Trek</cite>, those things
 don't exist.  Maybe some day there'll be nanotechnological analyzers
 and assemblers, and it really will be possible to copy a physical
 object, and then these issues of whether you're free to do that will
 start being really important.  We'll see agribusiness companies trying
 to stop people from copying food, and that will become a major
 political issue, if that technological capability will ever exist.  I
 don't know if it will; it's just speculation at this point.</p>
 <p>
 But for other kinds of information, you can raise the issue because
 any kind of information that can be stored on a computer, conceivably,
 can be copied and modified.  So the ethical issues of free software,
 the issues of a user's right to copy and modify software, are the same
 as such questions for other kinds of published information.  Now I'm
 not talking about private information, say, personal information,
 which is never meant to be available to the public at all.  I'm
 talking about the rights you should have if you get copies of
 published things where there's no attempt to keep them secret.</p>
 <p>
 In order to explain my ideas on the subject, I'd like to review the
 history of the distribution of information and of copyright.  In the
 ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and anybody who
 knew how to read and write could copy a book about as efficiently as
 anybody else.  Now somebody who did it all day would probably learn to
 be somewhat better at it, but there was not a tremendous difference.
 And because the copies were made one at a time, there was no great
 economy of scale.  Making ten copies took ten times as long as making
 one copy.  There was also nothing forcing centralization; a book could
 be copied anywhere.</p>
 <p>
 Now because of this technology, because it didn't force copies to be
 identical, there wasn't in the ancient world the same total divide
 between copying a book and writing a book.  There are things in
 between that made sense.  They did understand the idea of an author.
 They knew, say, that this play was written by Sophocles but in between
 writing a book and copying a book, there were other useful things you
 could do.  For instance, you could copy a part of a book, then write
 some new words, copy some more and write some new words and on and on.
 This was called &ldquo;writing a commentary&rdquo;&mdash;that was a
 common thing to do&mdash;and these commentaries were
 appreciated.</p>
 <p>
 You could also copy a passage out of one book, then write some other
 words, and copy a passage from another book and write some more and so
 on, and this was making a compendium.  Compendia were also very
 useful.  There are works that are lost but parts of them survived when
 they were quoted into other books that got to be more popular than the
 original.  Maybe they copied the most interesting parts, and so people
 made a lot of copies of these, but they didn't bother copying the
 original because it wasn't interesting enough.</p>
 <p>
 Now as far as I can tell, there was no such thing as copyright in the
 ancient world.  Anyone who wanted to copy a book could copy the book.
 Later on, the printing press was developed and books started to be
 copied on the printing press.  Now the printing press was not just a
 quantitative improvement in the ease of copying.  It affected
 different kinds of copying unevenly because it introduced an inherent
 economy of scale.  It was a lot of work to set the type and much less
 work to make many identical copies of the page.  So the result was
 that copying books tended to become a centralized, mass-production
 activity.  Copies of any given book would probably be made in only a
 few places.</p>
 <p>
 It also meant that ordinary readers couldn't copy books efficiently.
 Only if you had a printing press could you do that.  So it was an
 industrial activity.</p>
 <p>
 Now for the first few centuries of printing, printed books did not
 totally replace hand-copying.  Hand-copied books were still made,
 sometimes by rich people and sometimes by poor people.  The rich
 people did this to get an especially beautiful copy that would show
 how rich they were, and poor people did it because maybe they didn't
 have enough money to buy a printed copy but they had the time to copy
 a book by hand.  As the song says, &ldquo;Time ain't money when all
 you got is time.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 So hand-copying was still done to some extent.  I think it was in the
 1800s that printing actually got to be cheap enough that even poor
 people could afford printed books if they were literate.</p>
 <p>
 Now copyright was developed along with the use of the printing press
 and given the technology of the printing press, it had the effect of
 an industrial regulation.  It didn't restrict what readers could do;
 it restricted what publishers and authors could do.  Copyright in
 England was initially a form of censorship.  You had to get government
 permission to publish the book.  But the idea has changed.  By the
 time of the U.S. Constitution, people came to a different idea of the
 purpose of copyright, and I think that that idea was accepted in
 England as well.</p>
 <p>
 For the U.S. Constitution it was proposed that authors should be
 entitled to a copyright, a monopoly on copying their books.  This
 proposal was rejected.  Instead, a crucially different proposal was
 adopted which is that, for the sake of promoting progress, Congress
 could optionally establish a copyright system that would create these
 monopolies.  So the monopolies, according to the U.S. Constitution, do
 not exist for the sake of those who own them; they exist for the sake
 of promoting the progress of science.  The monopolies are handed out
 to authors as a way of modifying their behavior to get them to do
 something that serves the public.</p>
 <p>
 So the goal is more written and published books which other people can
 then read.  And this is believed to contribute to increased literary
 activity, increased writing about science and other fields, and
 society then learns through this.  That's the purpose to be served.
 The creation of private monopolies was a means to an end only, and the
 end is a public end.</p>
 <p>
 Now copyright in the age of the printing press was fairly painless
 because it was an industrial regulation.  It  restricted only the
 activities of publishers and authors.  Well, in some strict sense, the
 poor people who copied books by hand may have been infringing
 copyright, too.  But nobody ever tried to enforce copyright against
 them because it was understood as an industrial regulation.</p>
 <p>
 Copyright in the age of the printing press was also easy to enforce
 because it had to be enforced only where there was a publisher, and
 publishers, by their nature, make themselves known.  If you're trying
 to sell books, you've got to tell people where to come to buy them.
 You don't have to go into everybody's house to enforce copyright.</p>
 <p>
 And, finally, copyright may have been a beneficial system in that
 context.  Copyright in the U.S. is considered by legal scholars as a
 trade, a bargain between the public and authors.  The public trades
 away some of its natural rights to make copies, and in exchange gets
 the benefit of more books' being written and published.</p>
 <p>
 Now, is this an advantageous trade?  Well, when the general public
 can't make copies because they can only be efficiently made on
 printing presses&mdash;and most people don't own printing presses&mdash;the
 result is that the general public is trading away a
 freedom it is unable to exercise, a freedom that is of no practical
 value.  So if you have something that is a byproduct of your life and
 it's useless and you have the opportunity to exchange it for something
 else of any value, you're gaining.  So that's why copyright may have
 been an advantageous trade for the public in that time.</p>
 <p>
 But the context is changing, and that has to change our ethical
 evaluation of copyright.  Now the basic principles of ethics are not
 changed by advances in technology; they're too fundamental to be
 touched by such contingencies.  But our decision about any specific
 question is a matter of the consequences of the alternatives
 available, and the consequences of a given choice may change when the
 context changes.  That is what is happening in the area of copyright
 law because the age of the printing press is coming to an end, giving
 way gradually to the age of the computer networks.</p>
 <p>
 Computer networks and digital information technology are bringing us
 back to a world more like the ancient world where anyone who can read
 and use the information can also copy it and can make copies about as
 easily as anyone else could make them.  They are perfect copies and
 they're just as good as the copies anyone else could make.  So the
 centralization and economy of scale introduced by the printing press
 and similar technologies is going away.</p>
 <p>
 And this changing context changes the way copyright law works.  You
 see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is
 now a Draconian restriction on a general public.  It used to be a
 restriction on publishers for the sake of authors.  Now, for practical
 purposes, it's a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.
 Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial.  It didn't
 restrict the general public.  Now that's not true.  If you have a
 computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest
 priority.  Copyright was easy to enforce because it was a restriction
 only on publishers who were easy to find and what they published was
 easy to see.  Now the copyright is a restriction on each and everyone
 of you.  To enforce it requires surveillance&mdash;an intrusion&mdash;and
 harsh punishments, and we are seeing these being enacted
 into law in the U.S. and other countries.</p>
 <p>
 And copyright used to be, arguably, an advantageous trade for the
 public to make because the public was trading away freedoms it
 couldn't exercise.  Well, now it can exercise these freedoms.  What do
 you do if you have been producing a byproduct which was of no use to
 you and you were in the habit of trading it away and then, all of a
 sudden, you discover a use for it?  You can actually consume it, use
 it.  What do you do?  You don't trade at all; you keep some.  And
 that's what the public would naturally want to do.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>That's what the
 public does whenever it's given a chance to voice its preference; it
 keeps some of this freedom and exercises it.  Napster is a big example
 of that, the public deciding to exercise the freedom to copy instead
 of giving it up.  So the natural thing for us to do to make copyright
 law fit today's circumstances is to reduce the amount of copyright
 power that copyright owners get, to reduce the amount of restriction
 that they place on the public and to increase the freedom that the
 public retains.</p>
 <p>
 But this is not what the publishers want to do.  What they want to do
 is exactly the opposite.  They wish to increase copyright powers to
 the point where they can remain firmly in control of all use of
 information.  This has led to laws that have given an unprecedented
 increase in the powers of copyright.  Freedoms that the public used to
 have in the age of the printing press are being taken away.</p>
 <p>
 For instance, let's look at e-books.  There's a tremendous amount of
 hype about e-books; you can hardly avoid it.  I took a flight in
 Brazil and in the in-flight magazine, there was an article saying that
 maybe it would take 10 or 20 years before we all switched to e-books.
 Clearly, this kind of campaign comes from somebody paying for it.  Now
 why are they doing that?  I think I know.  The reason is that e-books
 are the opportunity to take away some of the residual freedoms that
 readers of printed books have always had and still have&mdash;the
 freedom, for instance, to lend a book to your friend or borrow it from
 the public library or sell a copy to a used bookstore or buy a copy
 anonymously, without putting a record in the database of who bought
 that particular book.  And maybe even the right to read it twice.</p>
 <p>
 These are freedoms that the publishers would like to take away, but
 they can't do this for printed books because that would be too obvious
 a power-grab and would raise an outcry. So they have found an indirect
 strategy:  First, they obtain the legislation to take away these
 freedoms for e-books when there are no e-books; so there's no
 controversy.  There are no pre-existing users of e-books who are
 accustomed to their freedoms and will defend them.  That they obtained
 with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998.  Then they
 introduce e-books and gradually get everybody to switch from printed
 books to e-books and eventually the result is, readers have lost these
 freedoms without ever having an instant when those freedoms were being
 taken away and when they might have fought back to retain them.</p>
 <p>
 We see at the same time efforts to take away people's freedom in using
 other kinds of published works.  For instance, movies that are on DVDs
 are published in an encrypted format that used to be secret&mdash;it
 was meant to be secret&mdash;and the only way the movie companies
 would tell you the format, so that you could make a DVD player, was if
 you signed a contract to build certain restrictions into the player,
 with the result that the public would be stopped even from fully
 exercising their legal rights.  Then a few clever programmers in
 Europe figured out the format of DVDs and they wrote a free software
 package that would read a DVD.  This made it possible to use free
 software on top of the GNU+Linux operating system to watch the DVD
 that you had bought, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  You
 ought to be able to do that with free software.</p>
 <p>
 But the movie companies objected and they went to court.  You see, the
 movie companies used to make a lot of films where there was a mad
 scientist and somebody was saying, &ldquo;But, Doctor, there are some
 things Man was not meant to know.&rdquo; They must have watched their
 own films too much because they came to believe that the format of
 DVDs is something that Man was not meant to know.  And they obtained a
 ruling for total censorship of the software for playing DVDs.  Even
 making a link to a site where this information is legally available
 outside the U.S. has been prohibited.  An appeal has been made against
 this ruling.  I signed a friend-of-the-court brief in that appeal, I'm
 proud to say, although I'm playing a fairly small role in that
 particular battle.</p>
 <p>
 The U.S. government intervened directly on the other side.  This is
 not surprising when you consider why the Digital Millennium Copyright
 Act was passed in the first place.  The reason is the campaign finance
 system that we have in the U.S., which is essentially legalized
 bribery where the candidates are bought by business before they even
 get elected.  And, of course, they know who their master is&mdash;they
 know whom they're working for&mdash;and they pass the laws to
 give business more power.</p>
 <p>
 What will happen with that particular battle, we don't know.  But
 meanwhile Australia has passed a similar law and Europe is almost
 finished adopting one; so the plan is to leave no place on earth where
 this information can be made available to people.  But the U.S.
 remains the world leader in trying to stop the public from
 distributing information that's been published.</p>
 <p>
 The U.S. though is not the first country to make a priority of this.
 The Soviet Union treated it as very important.  There this
 unauthorized copying and redistribution was known as <i>samizdat</i> and to
 stamp it out, they developed a series of methods: First, guards
 watching every piece of copying equipment to check what people were
 copying to prevent forbidden copying.  Second, harsh punishments for
 anyone caught doing forbidden copying. You could be sent to Siberia.
 Third, soliciting informers, asking everyone to rat on their neighbors
 and co-workers to the information police.  Fourth, collective
 responsibility&mdash;You!  You're going to watch that group!  If I
 catch any of them doing forbidden copying, you are going to prison.
 So watch them hard.  And, fifth, propaganda, starting in childhood to
 convince everyone that only a horrible enemy of the people would ever
 do this forbidden copying.</p>
 <p>
 The U.S. is using all of these measures now.  First, guards watching
 copying equipment.  Well, in copy stores, they have human guards to
 check what you copy.  But human guards to watch what you copy in your
 computer would be too expensive; human labor is too expensive.  So
 they have robot guards.  That's the purpose of the Digital Millennium
 Copyright Act.  This software goes in your computer; it's the only way
 you can access certain data and it stops you from copying.</p>
 <p>
 There's a plan now to introduce this software into every hard disk, so
 that there could be files on your hard disk that you can't even access
 except by getting permission from some network server to access the
 file.  And to bypass this software or even tell other people how to
 bypass it is a crime.</p>
 <p>
 Second, harsh punishments.  A few years ago, if you made copies of
 something and handed them out to your friends just to be helpful, this
 was not a crime; it had never been a crime in the U.S.  Then they made
 it a felony, so you could be put in prisons for years for sharing with
 your neighbor.</p>
 <p>
 Third, informers.  Well, you may have seen the ads on TV, the ads in
 the Boston subways asking people to rat on their co-workers to the
 information police, which officially is called the Software Publishers
 Association.</p>
 <p>
 And fourth, collective responsibility.  In the U.S., this has been
 done by conscripting Internet service providers, making them legally
 responsible for everything their customers post.  The only way they
 can avoid always being held responsible is if they have an invariable
 procedure to disconnect or remove the information within two weeks
 after a complaint.  Just a few days ago, I heard that a clever protest
 site criticizing City Bank for some of its nasty policies was
 disconnected in this way.  Nowadays, you don't even get your day in
 court; your site just gets unplugged.</p>
 <p>
 And, finally, propaganda, starting in childhood.  That's what the word
 &ldquo;pirate&rdquo; is used for.  If you'll think back a few years,
 the term &ldquo;pirate&rdquo; was formerly applied to publishers that
 didn't pay the author.  But now it's been turned completely around.
 It's now applied to members of the public who escape from the control
 of the publisher.  It's being used to convince people that only a
 nasty enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying.  It
 says that &ldquo;sharing with your neighbor is the moral equivalent of
 attacking a ship.&rdquo; I hope that you don't agree with that and if
 you don't, I hope you will refuse to use the word in that way.</p>
 <p>
 So the publishers are purchasing laws to give themselves more power.
 In addition, they're also extending the length of time the copyright
 lasts.  The U.S. Constitution says that copyright must last for a
 limited time, but the publishers want copyright to last forever.
 However, getting a constitutional amendment would be rather difficult,
 so they found an easier way that achieves the same result.  Every 20
 years they retroactively extend copyright by 20 years.  So the result
 is, at any given time, copyright nominally lasts for a certain period
 and any given copyright will nominally expire some day.  But that
 expiration will never be reached because every copyright will be
 extended by 20 years every 20 years; thus no work will ever go into
 the public domain again.  This has been called &ldquo;perpetual
 copyright on the installment plan.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 The law in 1998 that extended copyright by 20 years is known as the
 &ldquo;Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act&rdquo; because one of the
 main sponsors of this law was Disney.  Disney realized that the
 copyright on Mickey Mouse was going to expire, and they don't want
 that to ever happen because they make a lot of money from that
 copyright.</p>
 <p>
 Now the original title of this talk was supposed to be
 &ldquo;Copyright and Globalization.&rdquo; If you look at
 globalization, what you see is that it's carried out by a number of
 policies which are done in the name of economic efficiency or
 so-called free-trade treaties, which really are designed to give
 business power over laws and policies.  They're not really about free
 trade.  They're about a transfer of power: removing the power to
 decide laws from the citizens of any country who might conceivably
 consider their own interests and giving that power to businesses who
 will not consider the interests of those citizens.</p>
 <p>
 Democracy is the problem in their view, and these treaties are
 designed to put an end to the problem.  For instance,
 <abbr title="North American Free Trade Agreement">NAFTA</abbr>
 actually contains provisions, I believe, allowing companies to sue
 another government to get rid of a law that they believe is
 interfering with their profits in the other country.  So foreign
 companies have more power than citizens of the country.</p>
 <p>
 There are attempts being made to extend this
 beyond NAFTA.  For instance, this is one of the goals of
 the so-called free trade area of the Americas, to extend this
 principle to all the countries in South America and the Caribbean as
 well, and the multilateral agreement on investment was intended to
 spread it to the whole world.</p>
 <p>
 One thing we've seen in the '90s is that these treaties begin to
 impose copyright throughout the world, and in more powerful and
 restrictive ways.  These treaties are not free-trade treaties.
 They're actually corporate-controlled trade treaties being used to
 give corporations control over world trade, in order to eliminate free
 trade.</p>
 <p>
 When the U.S. was a developing country in the 1800s, the U.S. did not
 recognize foreign copyrights.  This was a decision made carefully, and
 it was an intelligent decision.  It was acknowledged that for the U.S.
 to recognize foreign copyrights would just be disadvantageous, that it
 would suck money out and wouldn't do much good.</p>
 <p>
 The same logic would apply today to developing countries but the U.S.
 has sufficient power to force them to go against their interests.
 Actually, it's a mistake to speak of the interests of countries in
 this context.  In fact, I'm sure that most of you have heard about the
 fallacy of trying to judge the public interest by adding up
 everybody's wealth.  If working Americans lost $1 billion and Bill
 Gates gained $2 billion, would Americans generally be better off?
 Would this be good for America?  Or if you look only at the total, it
 looks like it's good.  However, this example really shows that the
 total is the wrong way to judge because Bill Gates really doesn't need
 another $2 billion, but the loss of the $1 billion by other people who
 don't have as much to start with might be painful.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Well, in a
 discussion about any of these trade treaties, when you hear people
 talk about the interests of this country or that country, what they're
 doing, within each country, is adding up everybody's income.  The rich
 people and the poor people are being added up.  So it's actually an
 excuse to apply that same fallacy to get you to ignore the effect on
 the distribution of wealth within the country and whether the treaty
 is going to make that more uneven, as it has done in the U.S.</p>
 <p>
 So it's really not the U.S. interest that is being served by enforcing
 copyright around the world.  It's the interests of certain business
 owners, many of whom are in the U.S. and some of whom are in other
 countries.  It doesn't, in any sense, serve the public interest.</p>
 <p>
 But what would make sense to do?  If we believe in the goal of
 copyright stated, for instance in the U.S. Constitution, the goal of
 promoting progress, what would be intelligent policies to use in the
 age of the computer network?  Clearly, instead of increasing copyright
 powers, we have to pull them back so as to give the general public a
 certain domain of freedom where they can make use of the benefits of
 digital technology, make use of their computer networks.  But how far
 should that go?  That's an interesting question because I don't think
 we should necessarily abolish copyright totally.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>The idea of trading
 some freedoms for more progress might still be an advantageous trade
 at a certain level, even if traditional copyright gives up too much
 freedom.  But in order to think about this intelligently, the first
 thing we have to recognize is, there's no reason to make it totally
 uniform.  There's no reason to insist on making the same deal for all
 kinds of work.</p>
 <p>
 In fact, that already isn't the case because there are a lot of
 exceptions for music.  Music is treated very differently under
 copyright law.  But the arbitrary insistence on uniformity is used by
 the publishers in a certain clever way.  They pick some peculiar
 special case and they make an argument that, in that special case, it
 would be advantageous to have this much copyright.  And then they say
 that for uniformity's sake, there has to be this much copyright for
 everything.  So, of course, they pick the special case where they can
 make the strongest argument, even if it's a rather rare special case
 and not really very important overall.</p>
 <p>
 But maybe we should have that much copyright for that particular
 special case.  We don't have to pay the same price for everything we
 buy.  A thousand dollars for a new car might be a very good deal.  A
 thousand dollars for a container of milk is a horrible deal.  You
 wouldn't pay the special price for everything you buy in other areas
 of life.  Why do it here?</p>
 <p>
 So we need to look at different kinds of works, and I'd like to
 propose a way of doing this.</p>
 <p>
 This includes recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks,
 reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias.  For all these
 functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as
 they are for software and the same conclusions apply.  People should
 have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very
 useful to modify functional works.  People's needs are not all the
 same.  If I wrote this work to do the job I think needs doing, your
 idea as a job you want to do may be somewhat different.  So you want
 to modify this work to do what's good for you.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>At that point, there
 may be other people who have similar needs to yours, and your modified
 version might be good for them.  Everybody who cooks knows this and
 has known this for hundreds of years.  It's normal to make copies of
 recipes and hand them out to other people, and it's also normal to
 change a recipe.  If you change the recipe and cook it for your
 friends and they like eating it, they might ask you, &ldquo;Could I
 have the recipe?&rdquo; Then maybe you'll write down your version and
 give them copies.  That is exactly the same thing that we much later
 started doing in the free-software community.</p>
 <p id="opinions">
 So that's one class of work.   The second class of work is works whose
 purpose is to say what certain people think.  Talking about those
 people is their purpose.  This includes, say, memoirs, essays of
 opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of
 goods for sale.  The whole point of those works is that they tell you
 what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes.
 To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these
 works is not a socially useful activity.   And so verbatim copying is
 the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.</p>
 <p>
 The next question is: Should people have the right to do commercial
 verbatim copying?  Or is noncommercial enough?  You see, these are
 two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider
 the questions separately&mdash;the right to do noncommercial
 verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying.
 Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover
 commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do
 noncommercial verbatim copying.  This way, the copyright on the
 commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions&mdash;only
 the author could approve a modified version&mdash;would
 still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the
 writing of these works, to whatever extent it does.</p>
 <p>
 By allowing the noncommercial verbatim copying, it means the
 copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody's home.  It becomes
 an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no
 longer requiring draconian punishments and informers for the sake of
 its enforcement.  So we get most of the benefit&mdash;and avoid most
 of the horror&mdash;of the current system.</p>
 <p>
 The third category of works is aesthetic or entertaining works, where
 the most important thing is just the sensation of looking at the
 work.  Now for these works, the issue of modification is a very
 difficult one because on the one hand, there is the idea that these
 works reflect the vision of an artist and to change them is to mess up
 that vision.  On the other hand, you have the fact that there is the
 folk process, where a sequence of people modifying a work can
 sometimes produce a result that is extremely rich.  Even when you have
 artists' producing the works, borrowing from previous works is often
 very useful.  Some of Shakespeare's plays used a story that was taken
 from some other play.  If today's copyright laws had been in effect
 back then, those plays would have been illegal.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So it's a hard
 question what we should do about publishing modified versions of an
 aesthetic or an artistic work, and we might have to look for further
 subdivisions of the category in order to solve this problem.  For
 example, maybe computer game scenarios should be treated one way;
 maybe everybody should be free to publish modified versions of them.
 But perhaps a novel should be treated differently; perhaps for that,
 commercial publication should require an arrangement with the original
 author.</p>
 <p>
 Now if commercial publication of these aesthetic works is covered by
 copyright, that will give most of the revenue stream that exists today
 to support the authors and musicians, to the limited extent that the
 present system supports them, because it does a very bad job.  So that
 might be a reasonable compromise, just as in the case of the works
 which represent certain people.</p>
 <p>
 If we look ahead to the time when the age of the computer networks
 will have fully begun, when we're past this transitional stage, we can
 envision another way for the authors to get money for their work.
 Imagine that we have a digital cash system that enables you to get
 money for your work.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Imagine that we have a digital cash system that
 enables you to send somebody else money through the Internet; this can
 be done in various ways using encryption, for instance.  And imagine
 that verbatim copying of all these aesthetic works is permitted.  But
 they're written in such a way that when you are playing one or reading
 one or watching one, a box appears on the side of your screen that
 says, &ldquo;Click here to send a dollar to the author,&rdquo; or the
 musician or whatever.  And it just sits there; it doesn't get in your
 way; it's on the side.  It doesn't interfere with you, but it's there,
 reminding you that it's a good thing to support the writers and the
 musicians.</p>
 <p>
 So if you love the work that you're reading or listening to,
 eventually you're going to say, &ldquo;Why shouldn't I give these
 people a dollar?  It's only a dollar.  What's that?  I won't even miss
 it.&rdquo; And people will start sending a dollar.  The good thing
 about this is that it makes copying the ally of the authors and
 musicians.  When somebody e-mails a friend a copy, that friend might
 send a dollar, too.  If you really love it, you might send a dollar
 more than once and that dollar is more than they're going to get today
 if you buy the book or buy the CD because they get a tiny fraction of
 the sale.  The same publishers that are demanding total power over the
 public in the name of the authors and musicians are giving those
 authors and musicians the shaft all the time.</p>
 <p>
 I recommend you read Courtney Love's article in <cite>Salon</cite>
 magazine, an article about pirates that plan to use musicians' work
 without paying them.  These pirates are the record companies that pay
 musicians 4% of the sales figures, on the average.  Of course, the
 very successful musicians have more clout.  They get more than 4% of
 their large sales figures, which means that the great run of musicians
 who have a record contract get less than 4% of their small sales
 figures.</p>
 <p>
 Here's the way it works: The record company spends money on publicity
 and they consider this expenditure as an advance to the musicians,
 although the musicians never see it.  So nominally when you buy a CD,
 a certain fraction of that money is going to the musicians, but really
 it isn't.  Really, it's going to pay back the publicity expenses, and
 only if the musicians are very successful do they ever see any of that
 money.</p>
 <p>
 The musicians, of course, sign their record contracts because they
 hope they're going to be one of those few who strike it rich.  So
 essentially a rolling lottery is being offered to the musicians to
 tempt them.  Although they're good at music, they may not be good at
 careful, logical reasoning to see through this trap.  So they sign and
 then probably all they get is publicity.  Well, why don't we give them
 publicity in a different way, not through a system that's based on
 restricting the public and a system of the industrial complex that
 saddles us with lousy music that's easy to sell.  Instead, why not
 make the listener's natural impulse to share the music they love the
 ally of the musicians?  If we have this box that appears in the player
 as a way to send a dollar to the musicians, then the computer networks
 could be the mechanism for giving the musicians this publicity, the
 same publicity which is all they get from record contracts now.</p>
 <p>
 We have to recognize that the existing copyright system does a lousy
 job of supporting musicians, just as lousy as world trade does of
 raising living standards in the Philippines and China.  You have these
 enterprise zones where everyone works in a sweatshop and all of the
 products are made in sweatshops.  I knew that globalization was a very
 inefficient way of raising living standards of people overseas.  Say,
 an American is getting paid $20 an hour to make something and you give
 that job to a Mexican who is getting paid maybe six dollars a day,
 what has happened here is that you've taken a large amount of money
 away from an American worker, given a tiny fraction, like a few
 percents, to a Mexican worker and given back the rest  to the
 company.  So if your goal is to raise the living standards of Mexican
 workers, this is a lousy way to do it.</p>
 <p>
 It's interesting to see how the same phenomenon is going on in the
 copyright industry, the same general idea.  In the name of these
 workers who certainly deserve something, you propose measures that
 give them a tiny bit and really mainly prop up the power of
 corporations to control our lives.</p>
 <p>
 If you're trying to replace a very good system, you have to work very
 hard to come up with a better alternative.  If you know that the
 present system is lousy, it's not so hard to find a better
 alternative; the standard of comparison today is very low.  We must
 always remember that when we consider issues of copyright policy.</p>
 <p>
 So I think I've said most of what I want to say.  I'd like to mention
 that tomorrow is Phone-In Sick Day in Canada.  Tomorrow is the
 beginning of a summit to finish negotiating the free trade area of the
 Americas to try to extend corporate power throughout additional
 countries, and a big protest is being planned for Quebec.  We've seen
 extreme methods being used to smash this protest.  A lot of Americans
 are being blocked from entering Canada through the border that they're
 supposed to be allowed to enter through at any time.  <span class="gnun-split"></span>On the flimsiest
 of excuses, a wall has been built around the center of Quebec to be
 used as a fortress to keep protesters out.  We've seen a large number
 of different dirty tricks used against public protest against these
 treaties.  So whatever democracy remains to us after government powers
 have been taken away from democratically elected governors and given
 to businesses and to unelected international bodies, whatever is left
 after that may not survive the suppression of public protest against
 it.</p>
 <p>
 I've dedicated 17 years of my life to working on free software and
 allied issues.  I didn't do this because I think it's the most
 important political issue in the world.  I did it because it was the
 area where I saw I had to use my skills to do a lot of good.  But
 what's happened is that the general issues of politics have evolved,
 and the biggest political issue in the world today is resisting the
 tendency to give business power over the public and governments.  I
 see free software and the allied questions for other kinds of
 information that I've been discussing today as one part of that major
 issue.  So I've indirectly found myself working on that issue.  I hope
 I contribute something to the effort.</p>
 <p>
 <b>RESPONSE</b>:</p>
 <p>
 <b>THORBURN</b>:   We'll turn to the audience for questions and comments in a
 moment.  But let me offer a brief general response.  It seems to me
 that the strongest and most important practical guidance that Stallman
 offers us has two key elements.  One is the  recognition that old
 assumptions about copyright, old usages of copyright are
 inappropriate; they are challenged or undermined by the advent of the
 computer and computer networks.  That may be obvious, but it is
 essential.</p>
 <p>
 Second is the recognition that the digital era requires us to
 reconsider how we distinguish and weigh forms of intellectual and
 creative labor.  Stallman is surely right that certain kinds of
 intellectual enterprises justify more copyright protection than
 others.  Trying to identify systematically these different kinds or
 levels of copyright protection seems to me a valuable way to engage
 with the problems for intellectual work posed by the advent of the
 computer.</p>
 <p>
 But I think I detect another theme that lies beneath what Stallman has
 been saying and that isn't really directly about computers at all, but
 more broadly about questions of democratic authority and the power
 that government and corporations increasingly exercise over our lives.
 This populist and anti-corporate side to Stallman's discourse is
 nourishing but also reductive, potentially simplifying.  And it is
 also perhaps overly idealistic.  For example, how would a novelist or
 a poet or a songwriter or a musician or the author of an academic
 textbook survive in this brave new world where people are encouraged
 but not required to pay authors.  In other words, it seems to me, the
 gap between existing practice and the visionary possibilities Stallman
 speculates about is still immensely wide.</p>
 <p>
 So I'll conclude by asking if Stallman would like to expand a bit on
 certain aspects of his talk and, specifically, whether he has further
 thoughts about the way in which what we'll call &ldquo;traditional
 creators&rdquo; would be protected under his copyright system.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: First of all, I have to point out that we shouldn't
 use the term &ldquo;protection&rdquo; to describe what copyright does.
 Copyright restricts people.  The term &ldquo;protection&rdquo; is a
 propaganda term of the copyright-owning businesses.  The term
 &ldquo;protection&ldquo; means stopping something from being somehow
 destroyed.  Well, I don't think a song is destroyed if there are more
 copies of it being played more.  I don't think that a novel is
 destroyed if more people are reading copies of it, either.  So I won't
 use that word.  I think it leads people to identify with the wrong
 party.</p>
 <p>
 Also, it's a very bad idea to think about intellectual property for
 two reasons: First, it prejudges the most fundamental question in the
 area which is: How should these things be treated and should they be
 treated as a kind of property?  To use the term &ldquo;intellectual
 property&rdquo; to describe the area is to presuppose the answer is
 &ldquo;yes,&rdquo; that that's the way to treat things, not some other
 way.</p>
 <p>
 Second, it encourages over-generalization.  Intellectual property is a
 catch-all for several different legal systems with independent origins
 such as, copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and some other
 things as well.  They are almost completely different; they have
 nothing in common.  But people who hear the term &ldquo;intellectual
 property&rdquo; are led to a false picture where they imagine that
 there's a general principle of intellectual property that was applied
 to specific areas, so they assume that these various areas of the law
 are similar.  This leads not only to confused thinking about what is
 right to do, it leads people to fail to understand what the law
 actually says because they suppose that the copyright law and patent
 law and trademark law are similar, when, in fact, they are totally
 different.</p>
 <p>
 So if you want to encourage careful thinking and clear understanding
 of what the law says, avoid the term &ldquo;intellectual
 property.&rdquo; Talk about copyrights.  Or talk about patents.  Or
 talk about trademarks or whichever subject you want to talk about.
 But don't talk about intellectual property.  Opinion about
 intellectual property almost has to be a foolish one.  I don't have an
 opinion about intellectual property.  I have opinions about copyrights
 and patents and trademarks, and they're different.  I came to them
 through different thought processes because those systems of law are
 totally different.</p>
 <p>
 Anyway, I made that digression, but it's terribly important.</p>
 <p>
 So let me now get to the point.  Of course, we can't see now how well
 it would work, whether it would work to ask people to pay money
 voluntarily to the authors and musicians they love.  One thing that's
 obvious is that how well such a system would work is proportional to
 the number of people who are participating in the network, and that
 number, we know, is going to increase by an order of magnitude over a
 number of years.  If we tried it today, it might fail, and that
 wouldn't prove anything because with ten times as many people
 participating, it might work.</p>
 <p>
 The other thing is, we do not have this digital cash payment system;
 so we can't really try it today.  You could try to do something a
 little bit like it.  There are services you can sign up for where you
 can pay money to someone&mdash;things like PayPal.  But before you
 can pay anyone through PayPal, you have to go through a lot of
 rigmarole and give them personal information about you, and they
 collect records of whom you pay.  Can you trust them not to misuse
 that?</p>
 <p>
 So the dollar might not discourage you, but the trouble it takes to
 pay might discourage you.  The whole idea of this is that it should be
 as easy as falling off a log to pay when you get the urge, so that
 there's nothing to discourage you except the actual amount of money.
 And if that's small enough, why should it discourage you.  We know,
 though, that fans can really love musicians, and we know that
 encouraging fans to copy and redistribute the music has been done by
 some bands that were, and are, quite successful like the
 &ldquo;Grateful Dead.&rdquo; They didn't have any trouble making a
 living from their music because they encouraged fans to tape it and
 copy the tapes.  They didn't even lose their record sales.</p>
 <p>
 We are gradually moving from the age of the printing press to the age
 of the computer network, but it's not happening in a day.  People are
 still buying lots of records, and that will probably continue for many
 years&mdash;maybe forever.  As long as that continues, simply having
 copyrights that still apply to commercial sales of records ought to do
 about as good a job of supporting musicians as it does today.  Of
 course, that's not very good, but, at least, it won't get any
 worse.</p>
 <p>
 <b>DISCUSSION</b>:</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  [A comment and question about free downloading and
 about Stephen King's attempt to market one of his novels serially over
 the web.]</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Yes, it's interesting to know what he did and what
 happened.  When I first heard about that, I was elated.  I thought,
 maybe he was taking a step towards a world that is not based on trying
 to maintain an iron grip on the public.  Then I saw that he had
 actually written to ask people to pay.  To explain what he did, he was
 publishing a novel as a serial, by installments, and he said,
 &ldquo;If I get enough money, I'll release more.&rdquo; But the
 request he wrote was hardly a request.  It brow-beat the reader.  It
 said, &ldquo;If you don't pay, then you're evil.  And if there are too
 many of you who are evil, then I'm just going to stop writing
 this.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 Well, clearly, that's not the way to make the public feel like sending
 you money.  You've got to make them love you, not fear you.</p>
 <p>
 <b>SPEAKER</b>: The details were that he required a certain percentage&mdash;I
 don't know the exact percentage, around 90% sounds correct&mdash;of
 people to send a certain amount of money, which, I believe,
 was a dollar or two dollars, or somewhere in that order of magnitude.
 You had to type in your name and your e-mail address and some other
 information to get to download it and if that percentage of people was
 not reached after the first chapter, he said that he would not release
 another chapter.  It was very antagonistic to the public downloading
 it.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  Isn't the scheme where there's no copyright but people are
 asked to make voluntary donations open to abuse by people
 plagiarizing?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  No.  That's not what I proposed.  Remember, I'm proposing
 that there should be copyright covering commercial distribution and
 permitting only verbatim redistribution noncommercially.  So anyone
 who modified it to put in a pointer to his website, instead of a
 pointer to the real author's website, would still be infringing the
 copyright and could be sued exactly as he could be sued today.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  I see.  So you're still imagining a world in which there is
 copyright?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  Yes.  As I've said, for those kinds of works.  I'm not
 saying that everything should be permitted.  I'm proposing to reduce
 copyright powers, not abolish them.</p>
 <p>
 <b>THORBURN</b>: I guess one question that occurred to me while you
 were speaking, Richard, and, again, now when you're responding here to
 this question is why you don't consider the ways in which the
 computer, itself, eliminates the middle men completely&mdash;in the
 way that Stephen King refused to do&mdash;and might establish a
 personal relationship.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  Well, they can and, in fact, this voluntary donation
 is one.</p>
 <p>
 <b>THORBURN</b>:  You think of that as not involving going through a
 publisher at all?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely not.  I hope it won't, you see, because
 the publishers exploit the authors terribly.  When you ask the
 publishers' representatives about this, they say, &ldquo;Well, yes, if
 an author or if a band doesn't want to go through us, they shouldn't
 be legally required to go through us.&rdquo; But, in fact, they're
 doing their utmost to set it up so that will not be feasible.  For
 instance, they're proposing restricted copying media formats and in
 order to publish in these formats, you'll have to go through the big
 publishers because they won't tell anyone else how to do it.  So
 they're hoping for a world where the players will play these formats,
 and in order to get anything that you can play on those players, it'll
 have to come through the publishers.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So, in fact, while there's no
 law against an author or a musician publishing directly, it won't be
 feasible.  There's also the lure of maybe hitting it rich.  They say,
 &ldquo;We'll publicize you and maybe you'll hit it as rich as the
 Beatles.&rdquo; Take your pick of some very successful group and, of
 course, only a tiny fraction of musicians are going to have that
 happen.  But they may be drawn by that into signing contracts that
 will lock them down forever.</p>
 <p>
 Publishers tend to be very bad at respecting their contracts with
 authors.  For instance, book contracts typically have said that if a
 book goes out of print, the rights revert to the author, and
 publishers have generally not been very good about living up to that
 clause.  They often have to be forced.  Well, what they're starting to
 do now is use electronic publication as an excuse to say that it's
 never going out of print; so they never have to give the rights back.
 Their idea is, when the author has no clout, get him to sign up and
 from then on, he has no power; it's only the publisher that has the
 power.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  Would it be good to have free licenses for various kinds of
 works that protect for every user the freedom to copy them in whatever
 is the appropriate way for that kind of work?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, people are working on this.  But for non-functional
 works, one thing doesn't substitute for another.  Let's look at a
 functional kind of work, say, a word processor.  Well, if somebody
 makes a free word processor, you can use that; you don't need the
 nonfree word processors.  But I wouldn't say that one free song
 substitutes for all the nonfree songs or that a one free novel
 substitutes for all the nonfree novels.  For those kinds of works,
 it's different.   So what I think we simply have to do is to recognize
 that these laws do not deserve to be respected.  It's not wrong to
 share with your neighbor, and if anyone tries to tell you that you
 cannot share with your neighbor, you should not listen to him.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  With regard to the functional works, how do you, in your
 own thinking, balance out the need for abolishing the copyright with
 the need for economic incentives in order to have these functional
 works developed?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, what we see is, first of all, that this
 economic incentive is a lot less necessary than people have been
 supposing.  Look at the free software movement where we have over
 100,000 part-time volunteers developing free software.  We also see
 that there are other ways to raise money for this which are not based
 on stopping the public from copying and modifying these works.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>That's
 the interesting lesson of the free software movement.  Aside from the
 fact that it gives you a way you can use a computer and keep your
 freedom to share and cooperate with other people, it also shows us
 that this negative assumption that people would never do these things
 unless they are given special powers to force people to pay them is
 simply wrong.  A lot of people will do these things.  Then if you look
 at, say, the writing of monographs which serve as textbooks in many
 fields of science except for the ones that are very basic, the authors
 are not making money out of that.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>We now have a free encyclopedia
 project which is, in fact, a commercial-free encyclopedia project, and
 it's making progress.  We had a project for a GNU encyclopedia but we
 merged it into the commercial project when they adopted our license.
 In January, they switched to the GNU Free Documentation License for
 all the articles in their encyclopedia.  So we said, &ldquo;Well,
 let's join forces with them and urge people to contribute to
 them.&rdquo; It's called &ldquo;Nupedia,&rdquo; and you can find a
 link to it, if you look at http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia.  So here
 we've extended the community development of a free base of useful
 knowledge from software to encyclopedia.  I'm pretty confident now
 that in all these areas of functional work, we don't need that
 economic incentive to the point where we have to mess up the use of
 these works.</p>
 <p>
 <b>THORBURN</b>:  Well, what about the other two categories?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: For the other two classes of work, I don't know.  I
 don't know whether people will write some day novels without worrying
 about whether they make money from it.  In a post-scarcity society, I
 guess they would.  Maybe what we need to do in order to reach the
 post-scarcity society is to get rid of the corporate control over the
 economy and the laws.  So, in effect, it's a chicken-or-the-egg
 problem, you know.  Which do we do first?  How do we get the world
 where people don't have to desperately get money except by removing
 the control by business?  And how can we remove the control by
 business except&mdash;Anyway, I don't know, but that's why I'm
 trying to propose first a compromise copyright system and, second, the
 voluntary payment supported by a compromise copyright system as a way
 to provide a revenue stream to the people who write those works.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  How would you really expect to implement this compromise
 copyright system under the chokehold of corporate interests on
 American politicians due to their campaign-finance system?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  It beats me.  I wish I knew.  It's a terribly hard
 problem.  If I knew how to solve that problem, I would solve it and
 nothing in the world could make me prouder.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:.  How do you fight the corporate control?  Because when you
 look at these sums of money going into corporate lobbying in the court
 case, it is tremendous.  I think the DECS case that you're talking
 about is costing something like a million-and-a-half dollars on the
 defense side.  Lord knows what it's costing on the corporate side.  Do
 you have any idea how to deal with these huge sums of money?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  I have a suggestion.  If I were to suggest totally
 boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion.  They
 might consider it too radical.  So I would like to make a slightly
 different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end,
 and that is, don't go to a movie unless you have some substantial
 reason to think it's good.  Now this will lead in practice to almost
 the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies.  In extension,
 it's almost the same but, in intention, it's very different.  Now I've
 noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to
 do with whether they think the movies are good.  So if you change
 that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason
 to think it's good, you'll take away a lot of their money.</p>
 <p>
 <b>THORBURN</b>: One way to understand all of this discourse today, I
 think, is to recognize that whenever radical, potentially transforming
 technologies appear in society, there's a struggle over who controls
 them.  We today are repeating what has happened in the past.  So from
 this angle, there may not be a reason for despair, or even pessimism,
 about what may occur in the longer run.  But, in the shorter term,
 struggles over the control of text and images, over all forms of
 information are likely to be painful and extensive.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>For example, as a
 teacher of media, my access to images has been restricted in recent
 years in a way that had never been in place before.  If I write an
 essay in which I want to use still images, even from films, they are
 much harder to get permission to use, and the prices charged to use
 those still images are much higher&mdash;even when I make arguments
 about intellectual inquiry and the legal category of &ldquo;fair
 use.&rdquo; So I think, in this moment of extended transformation, the
 longer-term prospects may, in fact, not be as disturbing as what's
 happening in the shorter term.  But in any case, we need to understand
 the whole of our contemporary experience as a renewed version of a
 struggle over the control of technological resources that is a
 recurring principle of Western society.</p>
 <p>
 It's also essential to understand that the history of older
 technologies is itself a complicated matter.  The impact of the
 printing press in Spain, for example, is radically different from its
 impact in England or in France.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>: One of the things that bothers me when I hear
 discussions of copyright is that often they start off with, &ldquo;We
 want a 180-degree change.  We want to do away with any sorts of
 control.&rdquo; It seems to me that part of what lay under the three
 categories that were suggested is an acknowledgement that there is
 some wisdom to copyright.  Some of the critics of the way copyright is
 going now believe that, in fact, it ought to be backed up and function
 much more like patent and trademarks in terms of its duration.  I
 wonder if our speaker would comment on that as a strategy.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  I agree that shortening the time span of copyright is a
 good idea.  There is absolutely no need in terms of encouraging
 publication for a possibility of copyrights' lasting as much as 150
 years, which, in some cases, it can under present law.  Now the
 companies were saying that a 75-year copyright on a work made for hire
 was not long enough to make possible the production of their works.
 I'd like to challenge those companies to present projected balance
 sheets for 75 years from now to back up that contention.  What they
 really wanted was just to be able to extend the copyrights on the old
 works, so that they can continue restricting the use of them.  But how
 you can encourage greater production of works in the 1920s by
 extending copyright today escapes me, unless they have a time machine
 somewhere.  Of course, in one of their movies, they had a time
 machine.  So maybe that's what affected their thinking.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>: Have you given thought to extending the concept of
 &ldquo;fair use,&rdquo; and are there any nuances there that you might
 care to lay out for us?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  Well, the idea of giving everyone permission for
 noncommercial verbatim copying of two kinds of works, certainly, may
 be thought of as extending what fair use is.  It's bigger than what's
 fair use currently. If your idea is that the public trades away
 certain freedoms to get more progress, then you can draw the line at
 various, different places.  Which freedoms does the public trade away
 and which freedoms does the public keep?</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  To extend the conversation for just a moment, in certain
 entertainment fields, we have the concept of a public presentation.
 So, for example, copyright does not prevent us from singing Christmas
 carols seasonally but it prevents the public performance.  And I'm
 wondering if it might be useful to think about instead of expanding
 fair use to unlimited, noncommercial, verbatim copying, to something
 less than that but more than the present concept of fair use.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  I used to think that that might be enough, and then Napster
 convinced me otherwise because Napster is used by its users for
 noncommercial, verbatim redistribution.  The Napster server, itself,
 is a commercial activity but the people who are actually putting
 things up are doing so noncommercially, and they could have done so
 on their websites just as easily.  The tremendous excitement about,
 interest in, and use of Napster shows that that's very useful.  So I'm
 convinced now that people should have the right to publicly
 noncommercially, redistributed, verbatim copies of everything.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>: One analogy that was recently suggested to me for the
 whole Napster question was the analogy of the public library.  I
 suppose some of you who have heard the Napster arguments have heard
 this analogy.  I'm wondering if you would comment on it.  The
 defenders of people who say Napster should continue and there
 shouldn't be restrictions on it sometimes say something like this:
 &ldquo;When folks go into the public library and borrow a book,
 they're not paying for it, and it can be borrowed dozens of times,
 hundreds of times, without any additional payment.  Why is Napster any
 different?&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  Well, it's not exactly the same.  But it should be pointed
 out that the publishers want to transform public libraries into
 pay-per-use, retail outlets.  So they're against public libraries.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  Can these ideas about copyright suggest any ideas for
 certain issues about patent law such as making cheap, generic drugs
 for use in Africa?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: No, there's absolutely no similarity.  The issues of
 patents are totally different from the issues of copyrights.  The idea
 that they have something to do with each other is one of the
 unfortunate consequences of using the term &ldquo;intellectual
 property&rdquo; and encouraging people to try to lump these issues
 together because, as you've heard, I've been talking about issues in
 which the price of a copy is not the crucial thing.  But what's the
 crucial issue about making AIDS drugs for Africa?  It's the price,
 nothing but the price.</p>
 <p>
 Now the issue I've been talking about arises because digital
 information technology gives every user the ability to make copies.
 Well, there's nothing giving us all the ability to make copies of
 medicines.  I don't have the ability to copy some medicine that I've
 got.  In fact, nobody does; that's not how they're made.  Those
 medicines can only be made in expensive factories and they are made in
 expensive centralized factories, whether they're generic drugs or
 imported from the U.S.  Either way, they're going to be made in a
 small number of factories, and the issues are simply how much do they
 cost and are they available at a price that people in Africa can
 afford.</p>
 <p>
 So that's a tremendously important issue, but it's a totally different
 issue.  There's just one area where an issue arises with patents that
 is actually similar to these issues of freedom to copy, and that is in
 the area of agriculture.  Because there are certain patented things
 that can be copies, more or less&mdash;namely, living things.  They
 copy themselves when they reproduce.  It's not necessarily exact
 copying; they re-shuffle the genes.  But the fact is, farmers for
 millennia have been making use of this capacity of the living things
 they grow to copy themselves.  Farming is, basically, copying the
 things that you grew and you keep copying them every year.  When plant
 and animal varieties get patented, when genes are patented and used in
 them, the result is that farmers are being prohibited from doing
 this.</p>
 <p>
 There is a farmer in Canada who had a patented variety growing on his
 field and he said, &ldquo;I didn't do that deliberately.  The pollen
 blew, and the wind in those genes got into my stock of plants.&rdquo;
 And he was told that that doesn't matter; he has to destroy them
 anyway.  It was an extreme example of how much government can side
 with a monopolist.</p>
 <p>
 So I believe that, following the same principles that I apply to
 copying things on your computer, farmers should have an unquestioned
 right to save their seeds and breed their livestock.  Maybe you could
 have patents covering seed companies, but they shouldn't cover
 farmers.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  There's more to making a model successful than just the
 licensing.  Can you speak to that?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Absolutely.  Well, you know, I don't know the
 answers.  But part of what I believe is crucial for developing free,
 functional information is idealism.  People have to recognize that
 it's important for this information to be free, that when the
 information is free, you can make full use of it.  When it's
 restricted, you can't.  You have to recognize that the nonfree
 information is an attempt to divide them and keep them helpless and
 keep them down.  Then they can get the idea, &ldquo;Let's work
 together to produce the information we want to use, so that it's not
 under the control of some powerful person who can dictate to us what
 we can do.&rdquo;</p>
 <p>
 This tremendously boosts it.  But I don't know how much it will work
 in various different areas, but I think that in the area of education,
 when you're looking for textbooks, I think I see a way it can be done.
 There are a lot of teachers in the world, teachers who are not at
 prestigious universities&mdash;maybe they're in high-school; maybe
 they're in college&mdash;where they don't write and publish a lot of
 things and there's not a tremendous demand for them.  But a lot of
 them are smart.  A lot of them know their subjects well and they could
 write textbooks about lots of subjects and share them with the world
 and receive a tremendous amount of appreciation from the people who
 will have learned from them.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>: That's what I proposed.  But the funny thing is, I do
 know the history of education.  That's what I do&mdash;educational,
 electronic media projects.  I couldn't find an example.  Do you know
 of one?</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  No, I don't.  I started proposing this free encyclopedia
 and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would
 probably take a decade to get things rolling.  Now we already have an
 encyclopedia that is rolling.  So things are going faster than I
 hoped.  I think what's needed is for a few people to start writing
 some free textbooks.  Write one about whatever is your favorite
 subject or write a fraction of one.  Write a few chapters of one and
 challenge other people to write the rest.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  Actually what I was looking for is something even more than
 that.  What's important in your kind of structure is somebody that
 creates an infrastructure to which everybody else can contribute.
 There isn't a K through 12 infrastructure out there in any place for a
 contribution for materials.</p>
 <p>
 I can get information from lots of places but it's not released under
 free licenses, so I can't use it to make a free textbook.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>:  Actually, copyright doesn't cover the facts.  It only
 covers the way it's written.  So you can learn a field from anywhere
 and then write a textbook, and you can make that textbook free, if you
 want.</p>
 <p>
 <b>QUESTION</b>:  But I can't write by myself all the textbooks that a
 student needs going through school.</p>
 <p>
 <b>STALLMAN</b>: Well, it's true.  And I didn't write a whole, free
 operating system, either.  I wrote some pieces and invited other
 people to join me by writing other pieces.  So I set an example.  I
 said, &ldquo;I'm going in this direction.  Join me and we'll get
 there.&rdquo; And enough people joined in that we got there.  So if
 you think in terms of, how am I going to get this whole gigantic job
 done, it can be daunting.  So the point is, don't look at it that way.
 Think in terms of taking a step and realizing that after you've taken
 a step, other people will take more steps and, together, it will get
 the job done eventually.</p>
 <p>
 Assuming that humanity doesn't wipe itself out, the work we do today
 to produce the free educational infrastructure, the free learning
 resource for the world, that will be useful for as long as humanity
 exists.  If it takes 20 years to get it done, so what?  So don't think
 in terms of the size of the whole job.  Think in terms of the piece
 that you're going to do.  That will show people it can be done, and so
 others will do other pieces.</p>
 
 <hr class="no-display" />
 <div class="edu-note c"><p id="fsfs">This speech is published in
 <a href="https://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/"><cite>Free
 Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard
 M. Stallman</cite></a>.</p></div>
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