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