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 GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <h2>Copyright versus Community in the Age of Computer Networks (2000)</h2>
 
 <div class="infobox"><p>
 This is a transcription from an audio recording, prepared by Douglas
 Carnall, July 2000.
 </p></div>
 <hr class="thin" />
 
 <p><em> Mr Stallman arrives a few minutes after the appointed hour of
 commencement of his talk to address a hushed and respectful audience.
 He speaks with great precision and almost no hesitation in a
 pronounced Boston accent.</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: This is made for someone who wears a
 strangler.</p>
 
 <p><em>[indicates clip-on microphone for lecture theatre amplification
 system]</em></p>
 
 <p>I don't wear stranglers, so there is no place for it to go.</p>
 
 <p><em>[clips it to his T-shirt]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>Me</strong>: Are you OK with the recording?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Yes!  <em>[testy]</em> How many people have
 to ask me?</p>
 
 <p>Well, I'm supposed to speak today</p>
 
 <p><em>[long pause]</em></p>
 
 <p>about copyright versus community.  This is too loud.</p>
 
 <p><em>[indicates clip-on microphone]</em></p>
 
 <p>What can I do?</p>
 
 <p>Let's see&hellip; there's no volume control&hellip;</p>
 
 <p><em>[finds volume control on radio microphone box]</em></p>
 
 <p>this seems better</p>
 
 <p>OK.  Copyright versus community in the age of computer networks.
 The principles of ethics can't change.  They are the same for all
 situations, but to apply them to any question or situation you have to
 look at the facts of the situation to compare alternatives, you have
 to see what their consequences are, a change in technology never
 changes the principles of ethics, but a change in technology can alter
 the consequences of the same choices, so it can make a difference for
 the outcome of the question, and that has happened in the area of
 copyright law.  We have a situation where changes in technology have
 affected the ethical factors that weigh on decisions about copyright
 law and change the right policy for society.</p>
 <p>Laws that in the past may have been a good idea, now are harmful
 because they are in a different context.  But to explain this, I
 should go back to the beginning to the ancient world where books were
 made by writing them out by hand.  That was the only way to do it, and
 anybody who could read could also write a copy of a book.  To be sure
 a slave who spent all day writing copies could probably do it somewhat
 better than someone who didn't ordinarily do that but it didn't make a
 tremendous difference.  Essentially, anyone who could read, could copy
 books, about as well as they could be copied in any fashion.</p>
 <p>In the ancient world, there wasn't the sharp distinction between
 authorship and copying that there tends to be today.</p>
 
 <p>There was a continuum.  On the one hand you might have somebody,
 say, writing a play.  Then you might have, on the other extreme, just
 somebody making copies of books, but in between you might have say,
 somebody, who say, copies part of a book, but writes some words of his
 own, or writing a commentary, and this was very common, and definitely
 respected.  Other people would copy some bits from one book, and then
 some bits from another book, and write something of their own words,
 and then copy from another book, quoting passages of various lengths
 from many different works, and then writing some other works to talk
 about them more, or relate them.  And there are many ancient
 works&mdash;now lost&mdash;in which part of them survived in these
 quotations in other books that became more popular than the book that
 the original quote <em>[came from]</em>.</p>
 
 <p>There was a spectrum between writing an original work, and copying.
 There were many books that were partly copied, but mixed with original
 writing.  I don't believe there was any idea of copyright in the
 ancient world and it would have been rather difficult to enforce one,
 because books could be copied by anyone who could read anywhere,
 anyone who could get some writing materials, and a feather to write
 with.  So, that was a rather clear simple situation.</p>
 
 <p>Later on, printing was developed and printing changed the situation
 greatly.  It provided a much more efficient way to make copies of
 books, provided that they were all identical.  And it required
 specialised, fairly expensive equipment that an ordinary reader would
 not have.  So in effect it created a situation in which copies could
 only feasibly be made by specialised businesses, of which the number
 was not that large.  There might have been hundreds of printing
 presses in a country and hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions
 of actually people who could read.  So the decrease in the number of
 places in which copies could be made was tremendous.</p>
 
 <p>Now the idea of copyright developed along with the printing press.
 I think that there may be&hellip; I think I remember reading that
 Venice, which was a major centre of printing in the 1500s also had a
 kind of copyright but I can't find that: I couldn't find that
 reference again.  But the system of copyright fitted in naturally with
 the printing press because it became rare for ordinary readers to make
 copies.  It still happen.  People who were very poor or very rich had
 handmade copies of books.  The very rich people did this to show off
 their wealth: they had beautiful illuminated wealth to show that they
 could afford this.  And poor people still sometimes copied books by
 hand because they couldn't afford printed copies.  As the song goes
 &ldquo;Time ain't money when all you got is time.&rdquo; 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So some poor
 people copied books with a pen.  But for the most part the books were
 all made on printing presses by publishers and copyright as a system
 fitted in very well with the technical system.  For one thing it was
 painless for readers, because the readers weren't going to make copies
 anyway, except for the very rich ones who could presumably legitimise
 it, or the very poor ones who were making just individual copies and
 no one was going to go after them with lawyers.  And the system was
 fairly easy to enforce again because there were only a small number of
 places where it had to be enforced: only the printing presses, and
 because of this it didn't require, it didn't involve, a struggle
 against the public.  You didn't find just about everybody trying to
 copy books and being threatened with arrest for doing it.</p>
 
 <p>And in fact, in addition to not restricting the reader's directly,
 it didn't cause much of a problem for readers, because it might have
 added a small fraction to the price of books but it didn't double the
 price, so that small extra addition to the price was a very small
 burden for the readers.  The actions restricted by copyright were
 actions that you couldn't do, as an ordinary reader, and therefore, it
 didn't cause a problem.  And because of this there was no need for
 harsh punishments to convince readers to tolerate it and to obey.</p>
 
 <p>So copyright effectively was an industrial regulation.  It
 restricted publishers and writers but it didn't restrict the general
 public.  It was somewhat like charging a fee for going on a boat ride
 across the Atlantic.  You know, it's easy to collect the fee when
 people are getting on a boat for weeks or months.</p>
 
 <p>Well, as time went on, printing got more efficient.  Eventually
 even poor people didn't have to bother copying books by hand and the
 idea sort of got forgotten.  I think it's in the 1800s that
 essentially printing got cheap enough so that essentially everyone
 could afford printed books, so to some extent the idea of poor people
 copying books by hand was lost from memory.  I heard about this about
 ten years ago when I started talking about the subject to people.</p>
 
 <p>So originally in England copyright was partly intended as a measure
 of censorship.  People who wanted to publish books were required to
 get approval from the government but the idea began to change and it a
 different idea was expressed explicitly in the US constitution.  When
 the US constitution was written there was a proposal that authors
 should be entitled to a monopoly on copying their books.  This idea
 was rejected.  Instead, a different idea of the philosophy of
 copyright was put into the constitution.  The idea that a copyright
 system could be&hellip; well, the idea is that people have the natural
 right to copy things but copyright as an artificial restriction on
 copying can be authorised for the sake of promoting progress.</p>
 
 <p>So the system of copyright would have been the same more or less
 either way, but this was a statement about the purpose which is said
 to justify copyright.  It is explicitly justified as a means to
 promote progress, not as an entitlement for copyright owners.  So the
 system is meant to modify the behaviour of copyright owners so as to
 benefit the public.  The benefit consists of more books being written
 and published and this is intended to contribute to the progress of
 civilisation, to spreading ideas, and as a means to this end&hellip;
 in other words as a means to this end copyright exists.  So this also
 thought of as a bargain between the public and authors; that the
 public gives up its natural right to make copies of anything in
 exchange for the progress that is brought about indirectly, by
 encouraging more people to write.</p>
 
 <p>Now it may seem like an obscure question to ask &ldquo;What's the
 purpose of copyright?&rdquo; But the purpose of any activity is the
 most important thing for deciding when an activity needs to be changed
 and how.  If you forget about the purpose you are sure to get things
 wrong, so ever since that decision was made, the authors and
 especially the publishers most recently have been trying to
 misrepresent it and sweep it under the rug.  There has been a campaign
 for decades to try to spread the idea that was rejected in the US
 constitution.  The idea that copyright exists as an entitlement for
 copyright owners.  And you can that expressed in almost everything
 they say about it starting and ending with the word
 &ldquo;pirate&rdquo; which is used to give the impression that making
 an unauthorised copy is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship and
 kidnapping or killing the people on board.</p>
 
 <p>So if you look at the statements being made by publishers you find
 lots of implicit assumptions of this sort which you have to drag into
 the open and then start questioning.</p>
 
 <h3>Recent events and problems</h3>
 <p><em>[brightens]</em></p>
 
 <p>Anyway, as long as the age of the printing press continued,
 copyright was painless, easy to enforce, and probably a good idea.
 But the age of the printing press began changing a few decades ago
 when things like Xerox machines and tape recorders started to be
 available, and more recently as computer networks have come into use
 the situation has changed drastically.  We are now in a situation
 technologically more like the ancient world, where anybody who could
 read something could also make a copy of it that was essentially as
 good as the best copies anyone could make.</p>
 
 <p><em>[murmuring in the audience]</em></p>
 
 <p>A situation now where once again, ordinary readers can make copies
 themselves.  It doesn't have to be done through centralised mass
 production, as in the printing press.  Now this change in technology
 changes the situation in which copyright law operates.  The idea of
 the bargain was that the public trades away its natural right to make
 copies, and in exchange gets a benefit.  Well, a bargain could be a
 good one or a bad one.  It depends on the worth of what you are giving
 up.  And the worth of what you are getting.  In the age of the
 printing press the public traded away a freedom that it was unable to
 use.</p>
 
 <p>It's like finding a way of selling shit: what have you got to lose?
 You've got it on hand anyway, if you get something for it, it can
 hardly be a bad deal.</p>
 
 <p><em>[faint laughter]</em></p>
 
 <p>It's like accepting money for promising not to travel to another
 star.  You're not going to do it anyway</p>
 
 <p><em>[hearty laughter]</em></p>
 
 <p>at least not in our lifetime so you might as well, if someone's
 going to pay you to promise not to travel to another star, you might
 as well take the deal.  But if I presented you with a starship, then
 you might not think that deal was such a good deal any more.  When the
 thing you used to sell because it was useless, you discover a use for
 it, then you have to reconsider the desirability of those old deals
 that used to be advantageous.  Typically in a such a situation you
 decide that &ldquo;I'm not going to sell all of this any more; I'm
 going to keep some of it and use it.&rdquo; 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So if you were giving up a
 freedom that you couldn't exercise and now you can exercise it, you
 probably want to start retaining the right to exercise it at least
 partially.  You might still trade part of the freedom: and there are
 many alternatives of different bargains which trade parts of the
 freedom and keep other parts.  So, precisely what you want to do
 requires thought, but in any case you want to reconsider the old
 bargain, and you probably want to sell less of what you sold in the
 past.</p>
 
 <p>But the publishers are trying to do exactly the opposite.  At
 exactly the time when the public's interest is to keep part of the
 freedom to use it, the publishers are passing laws which make us give
 up more freedom.  You see copyright was never intended to be an
 absolute monopoly on all the uses of a copyright work.  It covered
 some uses and not others, but in recent times the publishers have been
 pushing to extend it further and further.  Ending up most recently
 with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US which
 they are also trying to turn into a treaty through the World
 Intellectual Property Organisation which is essentially an
 organisation representing the owners of copyrights and patents and
 which works to try to increase their power, and pretends to be doing
 so in the name of humanity rather than in the name of these particular
 companies.</p>
 
 <p>Now, what are the consequences when copyright starts restricting
 activities that ordinary readers can do.  Well, for one thing it's no
 longer an industrial regulation.  It becomes an imposition on the
 public.  For another, because of this, you find the public's starting
 to object to it You know, when it is stopping ordinary people from
 doing things that are natural in their lives you find ordinary people
 refusing to obey.  Which means that copyright is no longer easy to
 enforce and that's why you see harsher and harsher punishments being
 adopted by governments that are basically serving the publishers
 rather than the public.</p>
 
 <p>Also, you have to question whether a copyright system is still
 beneficial.  Basically, the thing that we have been paying is now
 valuable for us.  Maybe the deal is a bad deal now.  So all the things
 that made technology fit in well with the technology of the printing
 press make it fit badly with digital information technology.  So,
 instead of like, charging the fee to cross the Atlantic in a boat,
 it's like charging a fee to cross a street.  It's a big nuisance,
 because people cross the street all along the street, and making them
 pay is a pain in the neck.</p>
 
 <h3>New kinds of copyright</h3>
 
 <p>Now what are some of the changes we might want to make in copyright
 law in order to adapt it to the situation that the public finds itself
 in?  Well the extreme change might be to abolish copyright law but
 that isn't the only possible choice.  There are various situations in
 which we could reduce the power of copyright without abolishing it
 entirely because there are various different actions that can be done
 with a copyright and there are various situations in which you might
 do them, and each of those is an independent question.  Should
 copyright cover this or not?  In addition, there is a question of
 &ldquo;How long?&rdquo;  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Copyright used to be much shorter in its
 period or duration, and it's been extended over and over again in the
 past fifty years or so and in fact in now appears that the owners of
 copyrights are planning to keep on extending copyrights so that they
 will never expire again.  The US constitution says that
 &ldquo;copyright must exist for a limited time&rdquo; but the
 publishers have found a way around this: every twenty years they make
 copyright twenty years longer, and this way, no copyright will ever
 expire again.  Now a thousand years from now, copyright might last for
 1200 years, just basically enough so that copyright on Mickey Mouse
 can not expire.</p>
 
 <p>Because that's why, people believe that US Congress passed a law to
 extend copyright for twenty years.  Disney was paying them, and paying
 the President too, with campaign funds of course, to make it lawful.
 See, if they just gave them cash it would be a crime, but contributing
 indirectly to campaigns is legal and that's what they do: to buy the
 legislators.  So they passed the Sonny Bono copyright act.  Now this
 is interesting: Sonny Bono was a congressman and a member of the
 Church of Scientology, which uses copyrights to suppress knowledge of
 its activities.  So they have their pet congressman and they pushed
 very hard for increased copyright powers.</p>
 
 <p>Anyway, we were fortunate that Sonny Bono died but in his name they
 passed the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act of 1998 I believe.  It's being
 challenged by the way, on the grounds that, there is a legal case that
 people hope to go to the Supreme Court and have the extension of old
 copyrights tossed out.  In any case, there are all these different
 situations and questions where we could reduce the scope of
 copyright.</p>
 
 <p>So what are some of them?  Well, first of all there are various
 different contexts for copying.  There is commercial sale of copies in
 the stores at one extreme and at the other there is privately making a
 copy for your friend once in a while, and in between there are other
 things, like, there's broadcasting on TV or the radio, there's posting
 it on the website, there's handing it out to all the people in an
 organisation, and some of these things could be done either
 commercially or non-commercially.  You know, you could imagine a
 company handing out copies to its staff or you could imagine a school
 doing it, or some private, non-profit organisation doing it.
 Different situations, and we don't have to treat them all the same.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So one way in we could reclaim the&hellip; in general though, the
 activities that are the most private are those that are most crucial
 to our freedom and our way of life, whereas the most public and
 commercial are those that are most useful for providing some sort of
 income for authors so it's a natural situation for a compromise in
 which the limits of copyright are put somewhere in the middle so that
 a substantial part of the activity still is covered and provides an
 income for authors, while the activities that are most directly
 relevant to peoples' private lives become free again.  And this is the
 sort of thing that I propose doing with copyright for things such as
 novels and biographies and memoires and essays and so on.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>That at the
 very minimum, people should always have a right to share a copy with a
 friend.  It's when governments have to prevent that kind of activity
 that they have to start intruding into everyone's lives and using
 harsh punishments.  The only way basically to stop people in their
 private lives from sharing is with a police state, but public
 commercial activities can be regulated much more easily and much more
 painlessly.</p>
 
 <p>Now, where we should draw these lines depends, I believe, on the
 kind of work.  Different works serve different purposes for their
 users.  Until today we've had a copyright system that treats almost
 everything exactly alike except for music: there are a lot of legal
 exceptions for music.  But there's no reason why we have to elevate
 simplicity above the practical consequences.  We can treat different
 kinds of works differently.  I propose a classification broadly into
 three kinds of works: functional works, works that express personal
 position, and works that are fundamentally aesthetic.</p>
 
 <p>Functional works include: computer software; recipes; textbooks;
 dictionaries and other reference works; anything that you use to get
 jobs done.  For functional works I believe that people need very broad
 freedom, including the freedom to publish modified versions.  So
 everything I am going to say tomorrow about computer software applies
 to other kinds of functional works in the same way.  So, this
 criterion of free&hellip; because it necessary to have the freedom to
 publish a modified version this means we have to almost completely get
 rid of copyright but the free software movement is showing that the
 progress that society wants that is supposedly the justification for
 society having copyright can happen in other ways.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>We don't have to
 give up these important freedoms to have progress.  Now the publishers
 are always asking us to presuppose that their there is no way to get
 progress without giving up our crucial freedoms and the most important
 thing I think about the free software movement is to show them that
 their pre-supposition is unjustified.</p>
 
 <p>I can't say I'm sure that in all of these areas we can't produce
 progress without copyright restrictions stopping people, but what
 we've shown is that we've got a chance: it's not a ridiculous idea.
 It shouldn't be dismissed.  The public should not suppose that the
 only way to get progress is to have copyright but even for these kinds
 of works there can be some kinds of compromise copyright systems that
 are consistent with giving people the freedom to publish modified
 versions.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Look, for example, at the GNU free documentation license,
 which is used to make a book free.  It allows anyone to make and sell
 copies of a modified version, but it requires giving credit in certain
 ways to the original authors and publishers in a way that can give
 them a commercial advantage and thus I believe make it possible to
 have commercial publishing of free textbooks, and if this works people
 are just beginning to try it commercially.  The Free Software
 Foundation has been selling lots of copies of various free books for
 almost fifteen years now and it's been successful for us.  At this
 point though, commercial publishers are just beginning to try this
 particular approach, but I think that even for functional works where
 the freedom to publish modified works is essential, some kind of
 compromise copyright system can be worked out, which permits everyone
 that freedom.</p>
 
 <p>For other kinds of works, the ethical questions apply differently,
 because the works are used differently.  The second category of works
 is works that express someone's positions or views or experiences.
 For example, essays, offers to do business with people, statements of
 one's legal position, memoirs, anything that says, whose point is to
 say what you think or you want or what you like.  Book reviews and
 restaurant reviews are also in this category: it's expressing a
 personal opinion or position.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Now for these kinds of works, making a
 modified version is not a useful thing to do.  So I see no reason why
 people should need to have the freedom to publish modified versions of
 these works.  Verbatim copying is the only thing that people need to
 have the freedom to do and because of this we can consider the idea
 that the freedom to distribute copies should only apply in some
 situations, for example if it were limited to non-commercial
 distribution that would be OK I think.  Ordinary citizen's lives would
 no longer be restricted but publishers would still be covered by
 copyright for these things.</p>
 
 <p><em>[drinks water]</em></p>
 
 <p>Now, I used to think that maybe it would be good enough to allow
 people to privately redistribute copies occasionally.  I used to think
 that maybe it would be OK if all public redistribution were still
 restricted by copyright for these works but the experience with
 Napster has convinced me that that's not so.  And the reason is that
 it shows that lots and lots of people both want to publicly
 redistribute&mdash;publicly but not commercially
 redistribute&mdash;and it's very useful.  And if it's so useful, then
 it's wrong to stop people from doing it.  But it would still be
 acceptable I think, to restrict commercial redistribution of this
 work, because that would just be an industrial regulation and it
 wouldn't block the useful activities that people should be doing with
 these works.</p>
 
 <p>Oh, also, scientific papers.  Or scholarly papers in general fall
 into this category because publishing modified versions of them is not
 a good thing to do: it's falsifying the record so they should only be
 distributed verbatim, so scientific papers should be freely
 redistributable by anyone because we should be encouraging their
 redistribution, and I hope you will never agree to publish a
 scientific paper in a way that restricts verbatim redistribution on
 the net.  Tell the journal that you won't do that.</p>
 
 <p>Because scientific journals have become an obstacle to the
 dissemination of scientific results.  They used to be a necessary
 mechanism.  Now they are nothing but an obstruction, and those
 journals that restrict access and restrict
 redistribution <em>[emphasis]</em> must be abolished.  They are the
 enemies of the dissemination of knowledge; they are the enemies of
 science, and this practice must come to an end.</p>
 
 <p>Now there is a third category of works, which is aesthetic works,
 whose main use is to be appreciated; novels, plays, poems, drawings in
 many cases, typically and most music.  Typically it's made to be
 appreciated.  Now, they're not functional people don't have the need
 to modify and improve them, the way people have the need to do that
 with functional works.  So it's a difficult question: is it vital for
 people to have the freedom to publish modified versions of an
 aesthetic work.  On the one hand you have authors with a lot of ego
 attachment saying</p>
 
 <p><em>[English accent, dramatic gesture]</em></p>
 
 <p>&ldquo;Oh this is my creation.&rdquo;</p>
 
 <p><em>[Back to Boston]</em></p>
 
 <p>&ldquo;How dare anyone change a line of this?&rdquo; On the other
 hand you have the folk process which shows that a series of people
 sequentially modifying the work or maybe even in parallel and then
 comparing versions can produce something tremendously rich, and not
 only beautiful songs and short poems, but even long epics have been
 produced in this way, and there was a time back before the mystique of
 the artist as creator, semi-divine figure was so powerful when even
 great writers reworked stories that had been written by others.  Some
 of the plays of Shakespeare involve stories that were taken from other
 plays written often a few decades before.  If today's copyright laws
 had been in effect they would have called Shakespeare a quote pirate
 unquote for writing some of his great work and so of course you would
 have had the other authors saying</p>
 
 <p><em>[English accent]</em></p>
 
 <p>&ldquo;How dare he change one line of my creation.  He couldn't
 possibly make it better.&ldquo;</p>
 
 <p><em>[faint audience chuckle]</em></p>
 
 <p>You'll hear people ridiculing this idea in exactly those terms.
 Well, I am not sure what we should do about publishing modified
 versions of these aesthetic works.  One possibility is to do something
 like what is done in music, which is anyone's allowed to rearranged
 and play a piece of music, but they may have to pay for doing so, but
 they don't have to ask permission to perform it.  Perhaps for
 commercial publication of these works, either modified or unmodified,
 if they're making money they might have to pay some money, that's one
 possibility.  It's a difficult question what to do about publishing
 modified versions of these aesthetic works and I don't have an answer
 that I'm fully satisfied with.</p>
 
 <p><strong>Audience member 1 (AM1)</strong>, question, inaudible</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Let me repeat the question because he said it
 so fast you couldn't possibly have understood it.  He said &ldquo;What
 kind of category should computer games go in?&rdquo; Well, I would say
 that the game engine is functional and the game scenario is
 aesthetic.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM1</strong>: Graphics?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Those are part of the scenario probably.  The
 specific pictures are part of the scenario; they are aesthetic,
 whereas the software for displaying the scenes is functional.  So I
 would say that if they combine the aesthetic and the functional into
 one seamless thing then the software should be treated as functional,
 but if they're willing to separate the engine and the scenario then it
 would be legitimate to say, well the engine is functional but the
 scenario is aesthetic.</p>
 
 <h3>Copyright: possible solutions</h3>
 
 <p>Now, how long should copyright last?  Well, nowadays the tendency
 in publishing is for books to go out of copyright faster and faster.
 Today in the US most books that are published are out of print within
 three years.  They've been remaindered and they're gone.  So it's
 clear that there's not real need for copyright to last for say 95
 years: it's ridiculous.  In fact, it's clear that ten year copyright
 would be sufficient to keep the activity of publishing going.  But it
 should be ten years from date of publication, but it would make sense
 to allow an additional period before publication which could even be
 longer than ten years which as you see, as long as the book has not
 been published the copyright on it is not restricting the public.
 It's basically just giving the author to have it published eventually
 but I think that once the book is published copyright should run for
 some ten years or so, then that's it.</p>
 
 <p>Now, I once proposed this in a panel where the other people were
 all writers.  And one of them said: &ldquo;Ten year copyright?  Why
 that's ridiculous!  Anything more than five years is
 intolerable.&rdquo; He was an award-winning science fiction writer who
 was complaining about the difficulty of retrouving, of pulling back,
 this is funny, French words are leaking into my English, of, of
 regaining the rights from the publisher who'd let his books go out of
 print for practical purposes but was dragging his heels about obeying
 the contract, which says that when the book is out of print the rights
 revert to the author.</p>
 
 <p>The publishers treat authors terribly you have to realise.  They're
 always demanding more power in the name of the authors and they will
 bring along a few very famous very successful writers who have so much
 clout that they can get contracts that treat them very well to testify
 saying that the power is really for their sake.  Meanwhile most
 writers who are not famous and are not rich and have no particular
 clout are being treated horribly by the publishing industry, and it's
 even worse in music.  I recommend all of you to read Courtney Love's
 article: it's in Salon magazine right?</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM2</strong> (Audience member 2) Yes</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: She started out by calling the record
 companies quote pirates unquotes because of the way they treat the
 musicians.  In any case we can shorten copyright more or less.  We
 could try various lengths, we could see, we could find out empirically
 what length of copyright is needed to keep publication vigourous.  I
 would say that since almost books are out of print by ten years,
 clearly ten years should be long enough.  But it doesn't have to be
 the same for every kind of work.  For example, maybe some aspects of
 copyright for movies should last for longer, like the rights to sell
 all the paraphernalia with the pictures and characters on them.  You
 know, that's so crassly commercial it hardly matters if that is
 limited to one company in most cases.  Maybe the copyright on the
 movies themselves, maybe that's legitimate for that to last twenty
 years.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Meanwhile for software, I suspect that a three year copyright
 would be enough.  You see if each version of the programme remains
 copyrighted for three years after its release well, unless the company
 is in real bad trouble they should have a new version before those
 three years are up and there will be a lot of people who will want to
 use the newer version, so if older versions are all becoming free
 software automatically, the company would still have a business with
 the newer version.  Now this is a compromise as I see it, because it
 is a system in which not all software is free, but it might be an
 acceptable compromise, after all, if we had to wait three years in
 some cases for programs to become free&hellip; well, that's no
 disaster.  To be using three years old software is not a disaster.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM3</strong>: Don't you think this is a system that would
 favour feature creep?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: <em>[airily]</em> Ah that's OK.  That's a
 minor side issue, compared with these issues of freedom encouraging,
 every system encourages some artificial distortions in what people,
 and our present system certainly encourages various kinds of
 artificial distortions in activity that is covered by copyright so if
 a changed system also encourages a few of these secondary distortions
 it's not a big deal I would say.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM4</strong>: The problem with this change in the copyright
 laws for three would be that you wouldn't get the sources.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Right.  There would have also to be a
 condition, a law that to sell copies of the software to the public the
 source code must be deposited somewhere so that three years later it
 can be released.  So it could be deposited say, with the library of
 congress in the US, and I think other countries have similar
 institutions where copies of published books get placed, and they
 could also received the source code and after three years, publish it.
 And of course, if the source code didn't correspond to the executable
 that would be fraud, and in fact if it really corresponds then they
 ought to be able to check that very easily when the work is published
 initially so you're publishing the source code and somebody there says
 alright &ldquo;dot slash configure dot slash make&rdquo; and sees if
 produces the same executables and uh.</p>
 
 <p>So you're right, just eliminating copyright would not make software
 free.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM5</strong>: Um libre</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Right.  That's the only sense I use the term.
 It wouldn't do that because the source code might not be available or
 they might try to use contracts to restrict the users instead.  So
 making software free is not as simple as ending copyright on software:
 it's a more complex situation than that.  In fact, if copyright were
 simply abolished from software then we would no longer be able to use
 copyleft to protect the free status of a program but meanwhile the
 software privateers could use other methods&mdash;contracts or
 withholding the source to make software proprietary.  So what would
 mean is, if we release a free program some greedy bastard could make a
 modified version and publish just the binaries and make people sign
 non-disclosure agreements for them.  We would no longer have a way to
 stop them.  So if we wanted to change the law that all software that
 was published had to be free we would have to do it in some more
 complex way, not just by turning copyright for software.</p>
 
 <p>So, overall I would recommend we look at the various kinds of works
 and the various different kinds of uses and then look for a new place
 to draw the line: one that gives the public the most important
 freedoms for making use of each new kind of work while when possible
 retaining some kind of fairly painless kind of copyright for general
 public that is still of benefit to authors.  In this way we can adapt
 the copyright system to the circumstances where we find it we find
 ourselves and have a system that doesn't require putting people in
 prison for years because they shared with their friends, but still
 does in various ways encourage people to write more.  We can also I
 believe look for other ways of encouraging writing other ways of
 facilitating authors making money.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>For example, suppose that verbatim
 redistribution of a work is permitted and suppose that the work comes
 with something, so that when you are playing with it or reading it,
 there is a box on the side that says &ldquo;click here to send one
 dollar to the authors or the musicians or whatever&rdquo; I think that
 in the wealthier parts of the world a lot of people will send it
 because people often really love the authors and musicians that made
 the things that they like to read and listen to.  And the interesting
 thing is that the royalty that they get now is such a small fraction
 that if you pay twenty dollars for something they're probably not
 getting more than one anyway.</p>
 
 <p>So this will be a far more efficient system.  And the interesting
 thing will be that when people redistribute these copies they will be
 helping the author.  Essentially advertising them, spreading around
 these reasons to send them a dollar.  Now right now the biggest reason
 why more people don't just send some money to the authors is that it's
 a pain in the neck to do it.  What are you going to do?  Write a
 cheque?  Then who are you going to mail the cheque to?  You'd have to
 dig up their address, which might not be easy.  But with a convenient
 internet payment system which makes it efficient to pay someone one
 dollar, then we could put this into all the copies, and then I think
 you'd find the mechanism starting to work well.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>It may take five of
 ten years for the ideas to spread around, because it's a cultural
 thing, you know, at first people might find it a little surprising but
 once it gets normal people would become accustomed to sending the
 money, and it wouldn't be a lot of money compared to what it costs to
 buy books today.</p>
 
 <p><em>[drinks]</em></p>
 
 <p>So I think that in this way, for the works of expression, and maybe
 aesthetic works, maybe this could a successful method.  But it won't
 work for the functional works, and the reason for that is that as one
 person after another makes a modified version and publishes it, who
 should the boxes point to, and how much money should they send, and
 you know, it's easy to do this when the work was published just once,
 by a certain author, or certain group of authors, and they can just
 agree together what they're going to do and click on the box, if
 no-one is publishing modified versions then every copy will contain
 the same box with the same URL directing money to the same people but
 when you have different version which have been worked on by different
 people there's no simple automatic way of working out who ought to get
 what fraction of what users donate for this version or that version.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>It's philosophically hard to decide how important each contribution
 is, and all the obvious ways of trying to measure it
 are <em>[emphasis]</em> obviously
 <em>[/emphasis]</em> wrong in some cases, they're obviously closing
 their eyes to some important part of the facts so I think that this
 kind of solution is probably not feasible when everybody is free to
 publish modified versions.  But for those kinds of works where it is
 not crucial to have the freedom to publish modified versions then this
 solution can be applied very simply once we have the convenient
 internet payment system to base it on.</p>
 
 <p>With regard to the aesthetic works.  If there is a system where
 those who commercially redistribute or maybe even those who are
 publishing a modified version might have to negotiate the sharing of
 the payments with the original developers and then this kind of scheme
 could be extended to those works too even if modified versions are
 permitted there could be some standard formula which could be in some
 cases renegotiated, so I think in some cases probably possible even
 with a system of permitting in some way publishing modified versions
 of the aesthetic works it may be possible still to have this kind of
 voluntary payment system.</p>
 
 <p>Now I believe there a people who are trying to set up such
 voluntary payment systems.  I heard of something called the street
 performer's protocol.  I don't know the details of it.  And I believe
 there is something called GreenWitch.com <em>[transcriber's note: URL
 uncertain]</em> I believe the people there are trying to set up
 something more or less like this.  I think that what they are hoping
 to do is collect a bunch of payments that you make to various
 different people, and eventually charge your credit card once it gets
 to be big enough so that it's efficient.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Whether those kind of
 systems work smoothly enough in practice that they'll get going is not
 clear, and whether they will become adopted widely enough for them to
 become a normal cultural practice is not clear.  It may be that in
 order for these voluntary payments to truly catch on we need to have
 some kind of&hellip; you need to see the idea everywhere in order
 to&hellip; &ldquo;Yeah, I outta pay&ldquo; once in a while.  We'll
 see.</p>
 
 <p>There is evidence ideas like this are not unreasonable.  If you
 look at for example public radio in the US, which is mostly supported
 by donations from listeners, you have I believe, millions of people
 donating, I'm not sure how many exactly but there are many public
 radio stations which are supported by their listeners and they seem to
 be finding it easier to get donations as time goes on.  Ten years ago
 they would have maybe six weeks of the year when they were spending
 most of their time asking people &ldquo;Please send some money, don't
 you think we're important enough&rdquo; and so on 24 hours a day, and
 now a lot of them have found that they can raise the contributions by
 sending people mail who sent them donations in the past, and they
 don't have to spend their airtime drumming up the donations.</p>
 
 <p>Fundamentally, the stated purpose of copyright: to encourage
 righting is a worthwhile purpose, but we have to look at ways of ways
 to achieve it that are not so harsh, and not so constricting of the
 use of the works whose developments we have encouraged and I believe
 that digital technology is providing us with solutions to the problem
 as well as creating a context where we need to solve the problem.  So
 that's the end of this talk, and are there questions?</p>
 
 <h3>Questions and discussion</h3>
 <p>First of all, what time is the next talk?  What time is it now?</p>
 
 <p><strong>Me</strong>: The time is quarter past three.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Oh really?  So I'm late already?  Well I hope
 Melanie will permit me to accept a few questions.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong> (Audience member 6): Who will decide in which
 of your three categories will a work fit?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: I don't know.  I'm sure there are various
 ways of deciding.  You can probably tell a novel when you see one.  I
 suspect judges can tell a novel when they see one too.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM7</strong>: Any comment on encryption?  And the
 interaction of encryption devices with copyrighted materials?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, encryption is being used as a means of
 controlling the public.  The publishers are trying to impose various
 encryption systems on the public so that they can block the public
 from copying.  Now they call these things technological methods, but
 really they all rest on laws prohibiting people from by-passing them,
 and without those laws none of these methods would accomplish its
 purpose, so they are all based on direct government intervention to
 stop people from copying and I object to them very strongly, and I
 will not accept those media.  If as a practical matter the means to
 copy something are not available to me I won't buy it, and I hope you
 won't buy it either.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM8</strong>: In France we have a law that says that even
 if the media is protected you have the right to copy again for backup
 purpose</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Yes it used to be that way in the US as well
 until 2 years ago.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM8</strong>: Very often you sign an agreement that is
 illegal in France&hellip; the contract you are supposed to sign with a
 mouse&hellip;</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, maybe they're not.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM8</strong>: How can we get it challenged?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: <em>[rhetorically]</em> Well are you going to
 challenge them?  It costs money, it takes trouble, and not only that,
 how would you do it?  Well, you could either try to go to a court and
 say, &ldquo;They have no right to ask people to sign this contract
 because it is an invalid contract&rdquo; but that might be difficult
 if the distributor is in the US.  French law about what is a valid
 contract couldn't be used to stop them in the US.  On the other hand
 you could also say &ldquo;I signed this contract but it's not valid in
 France so I am publicly disobeying, and I challenge them to sue
 me.&rdquo; Now that you might consider doing, and if you're right and
 the laws are not valid in France then the case would get thrown out.
 I don't know.  Maybe that is a good idea to do, I don't know whether,
 what its effects politically would be.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>I know that there was just a
 couple of years ago a law was passed in Europe to prohibit some kind
 of private copying of music, and the record companies trotted out some
 famous very popular musicians to push for this law and they got it, so
 it's clear that they have a lot of influence here too, and it's
 possible that they will get more, just pass another law to change
 this.  We have to think about the political strategy for building the
 constituency to resist such changes and the actions we take should be
 designed to accomplish that.  Now, I'm no expert on how to accomplish
 that in Europe but that's what people should think about.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: What about protection of private
 correspondence?</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, if you're not <em>[emphasis]</em>
 publishing <em>[/emphasis]</em> it that's a completely different
 issue.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: No, but if I send an email to somebody,
 that's automatically under my copyright.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: <em>[forcefully]</em> That's entirely
 irrelevant actually.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: No, I don't accept that.  If they're going to
 publish it in a newspaper.  At the moment my redress is my
 copyright.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, you can't make him keep secret the
 contents and I'm not sure actually.  I mean to me, I think there's
 some injustice in that.  If you for example, send a letter to somebody
 threatening to sue him and then you tell him you can't tell anybody I
 did this because my threat is copyrighted, that's pretty obnoxious,
 and I'm not sure that it would even be upheld.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: Well, there are circumstances where I want to
 correspond with someone and keep my (and their) reply, entirely
 private.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well if you and they agree to keep it
 private, then that's a different matter entirely.  I'm sorry the two
 issues can not be linked, and I don't have time to consider that issue
 today.  There's another talk scheduled to start soon.  But I think it
 is a total mistake for copyright to apply to such situations.  The
 ethics of those situations are completely different from the ethics of
 published works and so they should be treated in an appropriate way,
 which is completely different.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: That's fair enough, but at the moment the
 only redress one has is copyright&hellip;</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: <em>[interrupts]</em> No you're wrong.  If
 people have agreed to keep something private then you have other
 redress.  In Europe there are privacy laws, and the other thing is,
 you don't have a right to force someone to keep secrets for you.  At
 most, you could force him to paraphrase it, because he has a right to
 tell people what you did.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: Yes, but I assuming that the two people at
 either end are both in reasonable agreement.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well then, don't say that copyright is your
 only recourse.  If he's in agreement he isn't going to give it to a
 newspaper is he?</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: No, er, you're sidestepping my question about
 interception.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Oh interception.  That's a totally
 different&hellip; <em>[heatedly]</em> no you didn't ask about
 interception.  This is the first time you mentioned
 interception&hellip;</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM6</strong>: No it's the second time.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM9</strong>: <em>[murmurs assent to AM6]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: <em>[still heated]</em> Well I didn't hear
 you before&hellip; it's totally silly&hellip; it's like trying
 to&hellip; oh how can I compare?&hellip; it's like trying to kill an
 elephant with a waffle iron I mean they have nothing to do with each
 other.</p>
 
 <p><em>[uninterpretable silence falls]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>AM10</strong>: Have you thought about
 changes <em>[inaudible, in trade secrets?]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Uh yes: Trade secrets has developed in a very
 ominous and menacing direction.  It used to be that trade secrecy
 meant that you wanted to keep something secret so you didn't tell
 anybody, and later on it was something that was done within a business
 telling just a few people something and they would agree to keep it
 secret.  But now, it's turning into something where the public in
 general is becoming conscripted into keeping secrets for business even
 if they have never agreed in any way to keep these secrets and that's
 a pressure.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>So those who pretend that trade secrecy is just carrying
 out some natural right of theirs; that's just not true any more.
 They're getting explicit government help in forcing other people to
 keep their secrets.  And we might want to consider whether
 non-disclosure agreements should in general be considered legitimate
 contracts because of the anti-social nature of trade secrecy it
 shouldn't be considered automatic that just because somebody has
 promised to keep a secret that that means it's binding.</p>
 
 <p>Maybe in some cases it should be and in some cases it should not be.
 If there's a clear public benefit from knowing then maybe that should
 invalidate the contract, or maybe it should be valid when it is signed
 with customers or maybe between a business and a, maybe when a business
 supplies secrets to its suppliers that should be legitimate, but to its
 customers, no.</p>
 
 <p>There are various possibilities one can think of, but at the very
 start anybody who hasn't voluntarily agreed to keep the secrets should
 not be bound by trade secrecy.  That's the way it was until not long
 ago.  Maybe it still is that way in Europe, I'm not sure.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM11</strong>: Is is OK for a company to ask say its&hellip;</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: employees?</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM11</strong>: No no</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: suppliers?</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM11</strong>: yes, suppliers.  What if the customer is
 another supplier?</p>
 
 <p><em>[gap as minidisk changed]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Let's start by not encouraging it.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM12</strong>: I have a question regarding your opinion on
 the scientific work on journals and textbooks.  In my profession at
 least one official journal and textbook are available on-line, but
 they retain copyright, but there is free access to the resources
 provided they have internet access.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, that's good.  But there are many
 journals where it is not like that.  For example, the ACM journals you
 can't access unless you are a subscriber: they're blocked.  So I think
 journals should all start opening up access on the web.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM12</strong>: So what impact does that have on the
 significance of copyright on the public when you basically don't
 interfere with providing free access on the web.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Well, first of all, I disagree.  Mirror sites
 are essential, so the journal should only provide open access but they
 should also give everyone the freedom to set up mirror sites with
 verbatim copies of these papers.  If not then there is a danger that
 they will get lost.  Various kinds of calamities could cause them to
 be lost, you know, natural disasters, political disasters, technical
 disasters, bureaucratic disasters, fiscal disasters&hellip; All sorts
 of things could cause that one site to disappear.  So really what the
 scholarly community should logically be doing is carefully arranging
 to have a wide network of mirror sites making sure that every paper is
 available on every continent, from places near the ocean to places
 that are far inland and you know this is exactly the kind of thing
 that major libraries will feel is their mission if only they were not
 being stopped.</p>
 
 <p>So what should be done, is that these journals should go one step
 further.  In addition to saying everybody can access the site they
 should be saying, everyone can set up a mirror site.  Even if they
 said, you have to do the whole publication of this journal, together
 with our advertisements, now that would still at least do the job of
 making the availability redundant so that it's not in danger, and
 other institutions would set up mirror sites, and I predict that you
 would find ten years down the road, a very well organised unofficial
 system of co-ordinating the mirroring to make sure that nothing was
 getting left out.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>At this point the amount that it costs to set up
 the mirror site for years of a journal is so little that it doesn't
 require any special funding; nobody has to work very hard: just let
 librarians do it.  Anyway, oh there was some other thing that this
 raised and I can't remember what it is.  Oh well, I'll just have to
 let it go.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM13</strong>: The financing problem for the aesthetical
 works&hellip; do you think the dynamics could
 be&hellip; <em>[inaudible]</em> although I understand the problems
 of&hellip; I mean who's contributing?  And who will be rewarded?  Does
 the spirit of free software <em>[inaudible]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: I don't know.  It's certainly suggesting the
 idea to people.  We'll see.  I don't the answers, I don't know how
 we're going to get there, I'm trying to think about where we should
 get to.  I know know how we can get there.  The publishers are so
 powerful, and can get governments to do their bidding.  How we're
 going to build up the kind of world where the public refuses to
 tolerate this any more I don't know.  I think the first thing we have
 to do is to clearly reject the term pirate and the views that go with
 it.  Every time we hear that we have to speak out and say this is
 propaganda, it's not wrong for people to share these published works
 with each other, it's sharing with you friend, it's good.  And sharing
 with your friend is more important than how much money these companies
 get.  The society shouldn't be shaped for the sake of these companies.
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>
 We have to keep on&hellip; because you see the idea that they've
 spread&mdash;that anything that reduces their income is immoral and
 therefore people must be restricted in any way it takes to guarantee
 for them to be paid for everything&hellip; that is the fundamental
 thing that we have to start attacking directly.  People have mostly
 tried tactics of concentrating on secondary issues, you know, to when
 people, you know when the publishers demand increased power usually
 people saying it will cause some secondary kind of harm and arguing
 based on that but you rarely find anybody (except me) saying that the
 whole point of the change is wrong, that it's wrong to restrict it in
 that way, that it's legitimate for people to want to change copies and
 that they should be allowed to.  We have to have more of this.  We
 have to start cutting the root of their dominion not just hacking away
 at a few leaves.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM14</strong>: <em>[inaudible]</em> this is important is to
 concentrate on the donations system for music.</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: Yes.  Unfortunately though there are patents
 covering the technique that seems most likely to be usable.</p>
 
 <p><em>[laughs, cries of &ldquo;no&rdquo; from audience]</em></p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: So it may take ten years before we can do it.</p>
 
 <p><strong>AM15</strong>: We only take French laws</p>
 
 <p><strong>RMS</strong>: I don't know.  I think I'd better hand the
 floor over to Melanie whose talk was supposed to start at 3.  And uh
 so</p>
 
 <p>RMS stands in silence.  There is a pause before the outbreak of
 applause.  RMS turns to applaud the stuffed fabric gnu he placed on
 the overhead projector at the beginning of the talk.</p>
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