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 <title>RMS on Radio New Zealand -
 GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <div class="article reduced-width">
 <h2>RMS on Radio New Zealand</h2>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p>Transcript (by Jim Cheetham) of an interview between Kim Hill (presenter)
 and Richard Stallman in October 2009; originally published on
 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20111114203543/http://nb.inode.co.nz/articles/rmsrnz2/index.html">
 <cite>iNode: Nota Bene</cite></a>.</p>
 </div>
 
 <div class="toc">
 <h3 class="no-display">Interesting sections</h3>
 <ul class="columns no-bullet">
 <li><a href="#t0">[00:00] Introduction</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t1">[00:40] Surveillance</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t2">[00:19] Terrorism and 9/11</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t3">[04:30] Barack Obama</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t4">[06:23] Airline Security</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t5">[08:02] Digital Surveillance</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t6">[10:26] Systematic Surveillance</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t7">[12:20] Taxi surveillance</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t8">[14:25] Matters of Principle&mdash;cellphones</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t9">[15:33] Free Software and Freedom</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t10">[17:24] Free Trade treaties</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t11">[20:08] Cars, microwaves and planes</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t12">[21:05] Copying books</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t13">[25:31] E-books &amp; supporting artists</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t14">[28:42] Micropayments</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t15">[30:47] A simplistic political philosophy?</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t16">[32:51] Income</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t17">[33:48] Digital handcuffs&mdash;Amazon Kindle</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t18">[36:13] Buying books</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t19">[37:16] Social networking</a></li>
 <li><a href="#t20">[38:08] The
 <abbr title="Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement">ACTA</abbr></a></li>
 </ul>
 <hr class="no-display" />
 </div>
 
 <dl>
 <dt id="t0">[00:00]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>We spoke to Richard Stallman a while ago last year about his
 campaign for Free Software.  He's a hero, of course, of the movement;
 launched the Free Software Foundation, campaigns against software
 patents and extensions of copyright laws.  His battle is, as he told
 us last year, against what he calls extreme capitalism.  His GNU
 operating system with Linux was the first Free operating system that
 could run on a PC.  Richard Stallman says &ldquo;it's all about
 freedom,&rdquo; a cause which goes beyond software; and we could talk
 about the others he's identified, surveillance and censorship, because
 he joins me now, hello.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t1">[00:40]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>Hello</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Let us talk about surveillance and censorship.  I've been looking
 at your personal website and you're talking about fingerprinting of
 air travelers, for example, which is something you're very hot
 about.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes, I urge people to refuse to go to the US where they would be
 mistreated that way.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Why is that mistreatment, do you think?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Because it's too much information to collect about people who
 aren't criminals.  And by the way for the same reason I will not ever
 go to Japan again unless they changed that policy, which makes me sad,
 but one must&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt id="t2">[01:19]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>It's not justifiable in order to make sure that terrorists aren't
 getting on the plane?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>There's no need.  Basically terrorism, and by the way we don't
 really know who was behind the September 11th attacks in the US, we
 don't know whether it was a bunch of Muslim fanatics, or it was a
 bunch of Christian fanatics and the White House.  We do know that Bush
 corrupted and sabotaged the investigation when he was unable to
 prevent it from happening.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>So, are you an advocate of the conspiracy theories surrounding
 9/11?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I can't say &hellip; first of all I think it's unfair&mdash;we
 know that the attack was a conspiracy.  All the theories are
 conspiracies.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Well, all right, the conspiracy theory for example, that has the
 Bush administration staging the 9/11 attack in order to justify&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I don't know.  The only way there could ever be proof of that is
 with a real investigation, but when you have a government not allowing
 a real investigation of a horrible crime then you've got to suspect
 that they're hiding something.  Now I can't know for certain what
 they're hiding, but I want a real investigation to be carried out with
 the power to subpoena anyone possibly concerned, including Bush, and
 make those people testify under oath and show them no deference that
 everyone else wouldn't get.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Putting 9/11 aside then because we haven't got time here to go
 into the various theories about what could possibly have caused 9/11,
 there is undoubtedly a thing called terrorism.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes, but it's a minor problem.  More people died in the US in
 September 2001 from car accidents than from a terrorist attack, and
 that continues month after month, but we don't have a Global War on
 Accidents, so basically politicians used a real danger, but not the
 world's biggest danger, as an excuse for what they want to do, which
 is &hellip; and remember that these governments are much more
 dangerous, it's quite clear that Bush's invasion of Iraq was far more
 destructive than anything non state-sponsored terrorists have been
 able to do&mdash;that's assuming that those terrorists in September
 2001 were not state-sponsored, which we don't know&mdash;but the
 point is, what Bush did by invading Iraq, using those attacks as an
 excuse, was tremendously worse and we must remember than governments
 gone amok can do far more damage than anybody not state-sponsored.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>After all, governments have a lot more men under arms and they don't
 have to hide the fact that they have men under arms, so they're in a
 much bigger position to do damage, so we must be concerned about
 letting them have too much power.  A world in which the police can
 easily do whatever they'd like to do is a world in which the police
 are a threat.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t3">[04:30]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>Last time we spoke, and we were talking about the issue of Free
 Software, but specifically in relation to that you doubted that
 President Bush's successor, who we now know is Barack Obama, would be
 pretty much any different from Bush.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>He's a little different, but I have to say he's small change.  On
 human rights issues he's not very different.  He's still in favor of
 keeping people in prison, without charges, indefinitely, and you can't
 get much worse than that in terms of human rights.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Well except he's addressing Guantanamo Bay.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well that's just one of the places where it's done, it's done also
 in Bagram in Afghanistan, and I really don't see why it would be
 better to move those people to Bagram.  What has to be done is charge
 them or release them.  They're entitled to that.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Yeah, they may be entitled to that but he's also democratically
 elected President who&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>That doesn't mean he's entitled to violate human rights.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>No, but would the American people be in favor of the release of
 those&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I don't know.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>&hellip; that's got to be a consideration.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>No it's not, if they're not that just makes them responsible.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I know you're&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I don't think I can excuse massive violations of human rights by
 saying that the public is maddened and supports it.  Especially, why
 are they so maddened?  Because of a constant propaganda campaign
 telling you &ldquo;Be terrified of terrorists, throw
 away your human rights and everyone else's because you're so scared of
 these terrorists.&rdquo;  It's disproportionate, we have to keep these
 dangers in their proportion, there isn't a campaign saying &ldquo;be
 terrified of getting in a car&rdquo; but maybe there ought to be.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t4">[06:23]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>Most airline security, getting back to the fingerprinting issue,
 you've said is just for show.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>A lot of it is, not all of it is, I'm very glad that they have
 reinforced the cabin doors so that hijackers can't get at the pilots,
 OK, that's a sensible measure.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>But are you?  I would have thought that you would have said
 &ldquo;why would they spend money reinforcing the cabin doors because
 hijackers are a minor issue.&rdquo;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I'm not against spending a little bit of money.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>You're saying that that issue isn't an infringement of human
 rights.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>OK, and I don't mind spending some money for safety, I even make
 some compromises you know on issues of rights, I'm not saying police
 shouldn't be able to get a search warrant, but they should have to go
 to a Judge, to present probable cause, to keep them in check because
 police are very dangerous when they run amok, as people discovered a
 few months ago in London, when the police did run amok, and they
 killed somebody who was trying to walk home past a protest, and he
 couldn't get home because the police were just deliberately blocking
 the streets, and then they hit him.  And then they lied about it too,
 which they typically do.  Whenever the police attack someone they lie
 about him, they lie about what they did, and they lie about what he
 was doing, to make it sound that they were justified in mistreating
 him in the first place, it's standard practice, they're like an armed
 gang.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t5">[08:02]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>If you don't agree with surveillance, is there any way that you
 would accept that it might be quite a handy thing, CCTV&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Wait a second, your view of surveillance is oversimplifying
 things, what I see happening with computers is they make possible a
 form of total surveillance which wasn't feasible in the past, even
 governments like Romania under Ceau&#x0219;escu, or East Germany with
 the Stasi, they did a lot of surveillance but it took a lot of people
 working on it and even then it was limited what they could actually
 watch and record because it was so hard.  Now, we're entering a kind
 of surveillance society that has never been seen before&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>You're talking about digital surveillance.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes, but as people do more things using digital technology it
 becomes easy to keep a record of everything everyone has done, things
 that weren't done in the past and still aren't done with other media,
 there's no record of who sends a letter to who for all letters, it
 just isn't done.  But there are records in many countries of who sends
 an email to whom and those records can be saved for years and we don't
 know that they'll ever be disposed of.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>If you think that governments are not to be trusted, which is a
 legitimate position of course, and if you think that the police are
 not to be trusted, again a legitimate position, why can't you feel
 happier about digital surveillance and CCTV surveillance given that it
 may well give the people more protection.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Oh, I'm all in favor of the right to make and record videos, such
 as when you're on the street or when you're watching a protest or
 whatever, I'm concerned about systematic surveillance.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>What is that, systematic surveillance?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well suppose the police set up a camera that always watches the
 street, and connects it to a face recognition program and make a
 database of everyone who passes, that's systematic surveillance.  Now
 if you walk down the street and maybe you see somebody you know and
 you recognize him, that's not systematic surveillance, that's a whole
 bunch of people knowing something, there's nothing wrong with that,
 that's just what life is.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t6">[10:26]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>What makes systematic surveillance more sinister to you?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Because we know that there's a tendency for many different
 governments to treat dissenters as terrorists, and investigate them
 using laws that were set up supposedly to help them prevent terrorism.
 We know also that they tend to sabotage political activities, and this
 is dangerous.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>What's wrong with being investigated?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well, it depends if the government's investigating you because
 you're a political dissident, there are a lot of things they could do
 to harass you.  One thing I remember was in England, a busload of
 protesters, they were on they way to a protest, the police stopped
 their bus and drove them away from the protest, and they cited a law
 that had been passed to supposedly prevent terrorism.  Well this is
 sabotaging political activity.  And then another thing that happens I
 know in England, is people have been prosecuted for copies of texts
 that they have, you know reading is sometimes illegal, it's really
 dangerous.  What we see is a global tendency for governments to bring
 out the worst side of themselves with terrorism as the excuse, so we
 must be on guard against that, that's potentially a much bigger danger
 than the terrorists it's supposed to protect us from.  I don't have to
 say that they don't exist, or that they're no danger at all.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>No, the difficulty is being on guard against the danger that
 you've cited, without giving quarter to&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt id="t7">[12:20]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>Ah, no I don't see it's any problem at all.  Police have lots of
 things they can do to investigate people and it's more all the time
 and whenever there's a specific reason to suspect particular people
 they can basically get permission to search whatever.  So OK, that's
 necessary, but beyond that we've got to be careful not to go, and the
 digital surveillance society goes far beyond that, there's a tendency
 to keep records of everything, check everything.  In New York City for
 instance a taxi driver told me he had been required to install a
 camera which transmits by radio people's faces to the police where
 they run face recognition over it.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>I don't think that should be
 allowed.  I don't mind if they have a system that records people's
 faces and keeps it for a week in case somebody attacks the taxi
 driver, that's not going to do anything to us if we don't attack taxi
 drivers.  We can make use of surveillance technology in ways that
 don't threaten people's rights but we've got to make sure we use them
 in those ways.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>How come you can justify people being treated as if they're going
 to attack taxi drivers&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>But you see there the point is, those are not looked at unless
 there's a crime to investigate and then they get erased if it's done
 right, but the way it's actually being done in New York City is
 they're sent to the police, and the police keep track of who goes
 where, and that's what scares me.  Having all the information about
 what you do available to the police for years in the past whenever
 they want to look.  Well part of what I do about this is I don't buy
 things with credit cards unless it's something where they demand to
 know who I am anyway, I don't use a credit card or any digital method,
 I use cash, and that way Big Brother's not making a database of every
 place I've been, that I bought anything in, what I bought.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t8">[14:25]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>As a matter of principle, rather than&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>As a matter of principle.  It's not an issue of convenience.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>You don't do quite a lot of things actually.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yeah, I don't carry a cellphone because I really don't want to be
 telling Big Brother where I am all the time, every place I go.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Is that why?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes, that's why. Well now there's another reason.  Today,
 cellphones are powerful computers and there's no way to run one
 without proprietary software.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I thought that would be your main reason.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Actually there is one you can get, although they're not producing
 it anymore, it didn't work all that well, it's Mark One.  So that's
 another issue, but that didn't exist, that issue wasn't there when
 cellphones first came out, people didn't install programs in them,
 they were just fixed appliances, but they have always raised the issue
 that they're constantly saying where you are, and I just don't want to
 participate in a system like that, I think people shouldn't.  It would
 be very convenient for me to have a cellphone, I'm not one of those
 people who would, who says &ldquo;I resent the fact that people can
 call me,&rdquo; it's convenient when people can call me, but I'm not
 going to do it that way.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t9">[15:33]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>It's interesting that your battle for Free Software and the issues
 of freedom that you identify intersect.  They didn't start out being
 the same&mdash;or did they?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well they didn't start out being the same.  Pervasive digital
 surveillance wasn't a big problem twenty-seven years ago.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>But the people who were in charge were still the people who were
 in charge, the people who you identified as the people you didn't want
 to see&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well actually they're not the same people.  Proprietary software's
 mostly controlled by various private entities that are developers,
 maybe Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Amazon, they're all
 distributing proprietary software.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I would have thought you'd identify them all as forces of extreme
 capitalism.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well I'm sorry, when I say extreme capitalism I'm talking about a
 philosophy, and that philosophy says &ldquo;the market should control
 everything, everything should be for sale, and business should be
 allowed to dominate politics and get the laws it wants,&rdquo; which
 is very different from mere capitalism, which says &ldquo;within a
 society which we set up to protect peoples rights and so on, there are
 lots of things that people should be free to do, and make businesses
 to do them, as they wish.&rdquo;  That difference is why today's form
 of capitalism is running wild and why we see free exploitation
 treaties which basically undermine democracy and turn it in to a
 sham.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>What are you talking about there?</dd>
 
 <dt id="t10">[17:24]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well, the so-called Free Trade treaties, which I don't like to
 call that, they're designed to transfer power from our governments to
 companies.  They all do this in one way, which is they let companies
 threaten to move to another country, or move their operations; and so
 any time the people are demanding that a government protect the
 environment, or the public health, or the general standard of living,
 or anything else that's more important than just who's going to buy
 and sell what, companies can say &ldquo;we're against this, and if you
 do this we'll just move our operations elsewhere&rdquo; and the
 politicians now have a wonderful excuse for why they're not going to
 do it.  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>Of course it was they who decided to adopt that treaty in the
 first place which they shouldn't have done.  But then a lot of these
 treaties go beyond that, and they explicitly deny democracy.  Now the
 US had a law that said it wouldn't sell tuna&mdash;you weren't
 allowed to sell tuna in the US if it had been caught in a way that
 endangered dolphins.  Well that law had to be scrapped because of the
 World Trade Organization, that's just one example.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Because it was regarded as a trade barrier.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Exactly.  Then NAFTA, which is between the US, Canada and Mexico,
 allows companies to sue the government if they believe some law
 reduces their profits; effectively saying the highest value in society
 is how much money a company can make, and anything that gets in the
 way of that, we owe them.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Of course, we're in favor of Free Trade here, Richard, because we
 rely on it&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well I'm not in favor of free trade beyond a certain point.  The
 people who are in favor of Free Trade say that it can make everyone
 more prosperous and that's true up to a point, and that point is where
 it starts subverting democracy.  But the point of these treaties is
 precisely to stretch free trade to the point where it does subvert
 democracy.  And you can see business think-tanks reporting how they
 expect in a few decades governments will have much less control over
 what goes on in the world and business will have more control.  What
 they're predicting is essentially that these treaties will march
 on.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t11">[20:08]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>One of the other things you don't do, is you don't drive a car, is
 that right?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>No, that's not true, I don't own a car.  I do have a driver's
 license.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>OK, one of the other things you don't do is you don't own a
 car.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yeah, well that's to save money.  I live in a city.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>No philosophy.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>No, I don't think it's wrong to own a car, it's good if we all
 drove somewhat less.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I thought that it was because of the proprietary software in
 cars.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Now that's an interesting issue.  I have appliances, I have a
 microwave oven which might have some proprietary software in it.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And you fly in planes.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yeah.  Well I don't own a plane though.  I don't boycott everybody
 who uses proprietary software.  If a company uses proprietary software
 I say that's too bad for them, but I'm not going to punish them by
 boycotting them, what I will try to do is explain to them why they
 deserve to have control over their computing rather than letting
 somebody else control their computing.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t12">[21:05]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>What are you going to tell the Library and Information Association
 Conference with regard to copyright and community?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well, I'm going to explain why copyright law today is an
 injustice, because it forbids sharing, and sharing is absolutely
 essential.  People must be free to share, so the New Zealand Copyright
 Law that was adopted about a year ago, and only one of several unjust
 things in it was temporarily withdrawn, that went in the wrong
 direction, but it was already too restrictive, people must be free to
 non-commercially share exact copies of any published work.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>So just let me &hellip; how would this work, for a moment?  I
 write a book, I spend, you know, five years of my life writing a
 book.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well who knows, maybe you do it in a month.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Maybe I don't do it in a month.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>The point is, you do it by choice.  People wrote books before
 there was copyright.  I think you're going about this backwards.  It's
 your choice whether to spend time writing, and the main reason most
 writers spend their time writing is because they have something they
 say they want to write and they hope people will appreciate it.  It's
 only a few who get enough money that it starts to corrupt their
 spirit.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Don't most societies want to, and they don't do it fantastically
 efficiently, but to some extent they try to encourage people to
 write.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Oh, I'm all in favor of encouraging people to write.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Now how would you encourage people to write?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well first of all remember that I'm not talking about abolishing
 copyright on artistic works, I'm saying that people must be free to
 non-commercially share them.  Commercial use would still be covered by
 copyright as it is now.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>If I can print off a whole book and pass it on, and they pass it
 on, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on, as an author I'm not going to
 sell many.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well that may be so, or may not be.  I've seen people claim that
 it's only works that are bestsellers that are likely to sell less,
 because remember if you're not a big hit and people pass along copies
 what they're doing is getting you more fans.  If you're not a
 bestseller then what you mainly want commercially is exposure, and
 this is a way you'll get more exposure, and without having to pay for
 it either, and without having to give control to a company that would
 take most of the profits anyway.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>So hang on, the only reason an author would want exposure would be
 to increase the sales of their next book.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Oh no, no no no no no.  Only the ones who've been morally
 corrupted and are no longer yearning to be read and appreciated,
 that's what they start out wanting, and a few, only a few get rich,
 and then those few who get rich, when people are paid to do something
 that they originally did from pleasure or a yearning, they tend to
 start wanting the money more, and the thing that they used to yearn to
 do, they want less.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>So if being read and appreciated is what authors want&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well they start out wanting.  Those who have got rich, some of
 them want to be rich.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Well we'll forget about those because you're implying they write
 bad books as a consequence.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>No I'm not saying that they're all bad, I'm not making a simple
 generalization like that, I say that their feelings have been
 corrupted, that doesn't necessarily mean their books are bad, I enjoy
 some of them.  The point is that that's not a typical author.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>But a typical author you seem to be condemning to even more
 penury.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Oh no I'm not, you're mistaken.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>If they cannot sell the book&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>You're mistaken, you're making a projection which people who know
 more about this disagree.  Cory Doctorow who has been a bestselling
 author puts all his works on the net and he doesn't even think he
 sells less.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>So people still go out and buy the hard copy from the shop?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes they do.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Even though people can pass his book from hand to hand
 willy-nilly.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t13">[25:31]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>They can do that anyway you know with printed books, that's the
 motive for e-books.  E-books are designed to stop you from doing
 things like lending the book to your friend or selling it to a used
 bookstore and borrowing it from a public library.  They're designed to
 turn public libraries into retail outlets.  And the reason they do
 this is they want to establish a pay-per-read universe.  They're
 following the twisted logic that says the most important thing is how
 much money people pay and everybody who reads had a debt, now owes
 money and he has to be made to pay.  I think this is entirely twisted
 and I'm against it, because the freedom to share must be respected.
 
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>But I have other proposals for ways to support artists.  And remember
 the current system mostly supports corporations, so I don't think it
 works very well.  And it makes a few authors quite rich, and those get
 treated with great deference by the corporations, and the rest
 basically get ground into the dust.  My proposals&mdash;I have two,
 and another that combines them&mdash;one proposal is support artists
 using taxes, it could either be a specific tax on Internet
 connectivity or general funds, it wouldn't be a tremendous amount of
 money by comparison with other government expenditures, and then you
 divide this among artists by measuring their popularity, but you don't
 divide it in linear proportion, 'cos if you did that a large portion
 of this money would go to making superstars richer and it's not
 needed, what I propose is take the cube root of the popularity.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>How do you assess their popularity?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>You could do it with polling.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>How polling?  Internet polling?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>All sorts of polling, there's public opinion polling and anything,
 use a sample, the point is you don't ask everybody, nobody's required
 to participate.  But you use a sample, and you use that to measure
 popularity.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I'm just holding that thought, popularity.  You're equating
 popularity with merit?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>No I'm not, but I'm saying you don't want bureaucrats to be
 deciding who gets these funds.  So this is one way, you could do it by
 polling, after all the current system bases it on popularity to some
 extent.  Take the cube root, so if A is a thousand times as popular as
 B, A will get ten times as much money as B, so this way it's the
 counterpart to a progressive income tax.  So this way, yes if you're
 tremendously successful you do get more, but you don't get
 tremendously more, and most of the money goes to support a large
 number of artists of mid-range popularity.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And tell me again, where does the money come from?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>It comes from taxes.  It comes from all of us.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>General taxes.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Could be general taxes, or a specific special tax.  Either way is
 OK.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t14">[28:42]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>Why don't you just ask people, if you're basing it on popularity,
 why don't you just ask people just to send in the money?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well that's my other proposal.  If every player had a button to
 send a dollar I think people would do it often, after all the main
 reason we don't do it is how much trouble it is.  It's not that you or
 I would miss a dollar, I often would be glad to send a dollar to some
 artists, but how am I going to do it?  I need to use a credit card and
 identify myself and I need to find where to send it to them and that's
 a lot of work.  Well, this button, which I hope would be implemented
 in an anonymous way, would take away all the work, it would be totally
 painless to send a dollar, and then I think a lot of people would do
 it.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>What about getting rid of taxes entirely, and giving us all the
 power to direct&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I'm not against taxes.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I'm not suggesting you are, but I'm asking you why not?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Because we need to make sure that rich people pay their fair
 share, which is a bigger share than what poor people have to pay, to
 keep society going.  We need a welfare state, at least at our current
 level of technology and the way society works, we need a welfare
 state, and the rich shouldn't be exempt from funding it.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Does it not matter that your popularity contest for artists may
 let the rich completely off the hook?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well, I'm not sure it matters.  Supporting artists is desirable
 but it's not a matter of life and death in the same way that giving
 poor people food and shelter and medical care is, whether they're
 artists or not.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>I don't know, I think that if you look at society it's made up of
 all sorts of things that are contingent on one another for the health
 of the society.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t15">[30:47]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes, but I don't want to have one answer for every question in
 society.  I'm not a proponent of a very simplistic political
 philosophy, and I hope that that's visible.  There are such
 people.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Yes, I'm sure there are.  No, God no, I would never ever accuse
 you of being an advocate of a simplistic political philosophy :-)</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd><p>There are people who are totally opposed to copyright and
 criticize me for not going far enough, but what I say is that works
 whose use is to do practical jobs, these works must be Free in the
 sense of the Four Freedoms that define Free Software.  You've got to
 be free to republish them, to modify them, publish your modified
 versions, because this is what the users of the works need in their
 lives.  But of course there are lots of works that don't, that
 contribute to society in other ways, they're not functional practical
 works.</p>
 <p>Art for instance, the contribution of an artistic work is in the
 impact it makes on your mind, not in whatever practical job you might
 figure out how to do with it sometime.  And then there are works that
 state people's opinions and thoughts and what they've seen, which is a
 different way that works can contribute to society, and I have
 different recommendations for these.  But the freedom to
 non-commercially share, that must be respected, and that's why the new
 New Zealand Copyright Law and the old one were both unjust, and the
 purpose of the new one is, specifically the punishing people by
 disconnecting them from the Internet, the purpose of that is to stop
 people from sharing, and it's wrong to stop people from sharing, so
 even if they work out a different way of achieving this unjust goal,
 the goal is what's wrong, not only the nasty methods that are, because
 only draconian methods can stop people from sharing.
 </p></dd>
 
 <dt id="t16">[32:51]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>How do you make your income, if you don't mind me asking?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>From speeches; not all my speeches, a lot of them I give unpaid,
 and a lot of them I get paid.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And that's how you make your income?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Yes. I don't spend a lot of money.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And you wouldn't consider that being paid for something you should
 share happily?  It's a donation.</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I'd generally try to avoid having any admission charges.  Once in
 a while I do agree to give a speech at a conference where they're
 charged people to register but often I will ask them to let the public
 in to my speech.  So, in general I try to have it open to the public
 without charge because I want as many people as possible to come
 because I'm working for a cause, after all, and I want to do as much
 good as I can for this cause.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t17">[33:48]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>Do you think that you're winning?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>You know, gradually we are.  But of course we still have a lot of
 opposition, we still have a lot to fight.  You know, there's something
 else in the New Zealand Copyright Law that was adopted a year ago,
 which is unjust, and it prohibits in some cases the distribution of
 Free Software that can break digital handcuffs.  More and more
 products are designed with digital handcuffs, that is features to stop
 the user from doing things.  So nowadays when I hear about a new
 product or a new service my first thought is &ldquo;what's malicious
 in that? How is it designed to restrict what you can
 do?&rdquo;  And these products are very malicious, for instance there
 is the Amazon Kindle, it's an e-book reader, and they call it the
 Kindle to express what it's designed to do to our books&nbsp;[<a href="#f1">1</a>].</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>That's not true :-)</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>But it does express what it will do with our books.  The point is
 this product does surveillance, it forces the user to identify herself
 to buy a book, and Amazon has a list, knows exactly what everybody has
 bought.  Then it is also designed to restrict the user, to stop people
 from sharing, from lending books to their friends, from selling them
 to a used bookstore, and various things that with printed books we can
 lawfully do.  Even worse, it has a back door, that is Amazon can send
 commands remotely and do things to you, we found out about this a few
 months ago.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Do what to you?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well Amazon sent a command to all the Kindles, ordering them to
 erase all copies of a particular book, namely <cite>1984</cite> by
 George Orwell.  Somebody said that they had burned up the year's
 supply of irony by choosing that book.  So now we know Amazon can
 remotely erase your books.  Now Amazon, after doing this, promised it
 would never do that again, but our freedom to keep a book for as long
 as we want, and read it as many times as we want, should not be
 dependent on any company's goodwill.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Where do you get your books from?</dd>
 
 <dt id="t18">[36:13]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>I buy books from bookstores, yes I go to a store and I say
 &ldquo;I want that one.&rdquo;</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And you hand money over for it?  Even though you think that that's
 not particularly a good system?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>Well I didn't say that's a bad system.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>Well aren't you handing money over to the corporates rather than
 the author?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>To a large extent yes, but I'm not going to refuse to buy just
 because of that, with books actually typically some of the authors do
 get some money.  With academic textbooks they generally don't.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>As a matter of interest we've been talking about freedoms,
 surveillance and digital monitoring, does the extraordinary rise of
 social networking&hellip;</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I buy CDs of music as well even though in that case I know the
 musicians are not going to get paid, so I'd rather send them some
 money.</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>OK. And do you?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>I wish I could, I don't have a way, so I try to convince people to
 set up the system to make it easy.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t19">[37:16]<br />
 KH</dt>
 <dd>I'm sure they're sending us their addresses as you speak.  Very
 briefly, the rise of social networking, is that a concern in terms of
 privacy for you?</dd>
 
 <dt>RMS</dt>
 <dd>It is, and I don't use those sites, it's more because I don't have
 time, I'm busy doing other things.  I don't think social network sites
 are necessarily bad but they lead people into foolish activities.  So
 I think an ethical social network site should warn people, and every
 time you connect to it it should warn you, &ldquo;anything you post
 here might get known to the public no matter how you set up settings
 about supposed privacy.  So if you don't want it published, you
 shouldn't say it here.&rdquo;</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>That's a nice warning.  Thank you, it's very nice to talk to you
 Richard Stallman.</dd>
 
 <dt id="t20">[38:08]<br />
 RMS</dt>
 <dd>We didn't even mention ACTA, the secret treaty that New Zealand is
 negotiating to restrict its citizens, and they won't; they tell
 publishers what's in the text that they're working on, but they won't
 tell the public.  So the point is that the; many governments,
 including of course the US are conspiring in secret to impose new
 restrictions on us relating to copyright and part of their latest
 propaganda is they call sharing &ldquo;counterfeiting.&rdquo;  
 <span class="gnun-split"></span>But the
 point is that this treaty will have provisions to restrict the public,
 we think, but they won't tell us.  This is called Policy Laundering,
 this general practice; instead of democratically considering a law,
 which means the public gets to know what's being considered, gets to
 talk to the legislators, sees how they voted and so on, in secret they
 negotiate a treaty and then they come back and they say &ldquo;we
 can't change the treaty and we obviously can't refuse it, so we're all
 now, we've just arranged for our country to be stuck with this
 law.&rdquo;</dd>
 
 <dt>KH</dt>
 <dd>And we may well look at that law in a couple or three weeks
 time.</dd>
 </dl>
 
 <div class="column-limit"></div>
 <h3 class="footnote">Footnote</h3>
 <ol>
   <li id="f1">[2019] We call it <a
 href="/philosophy/why-call-it-the-swindle.html">the Swindle</a>
 because it's designed to swindle readers out of the traditional
 freedoms of readers of books.</li>
 </ol>
 </div>
 
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