Richard Stallman is giving a free talk (what else?) on the Friday before SXSW (south by southwest) opens. The guy doing the introduction has just larded on the justified praise, and then said: “And after having Richard live in my house for a week, I can say that he’s a world class pain in the ass.” Big laugh from everyone, including Stallman.

Stallman talks without notes with the deliberateness of someone sure that his content alone will hold an audience.

He says that free software has several dimensions of freedom and benefits:

0. Freedom to run the program
1. Freedom to help yourself by changing the program to suit your needs
2. Freedom to help your neighbor by distributing the sofware
3. Freedom to help your community so others can benefit from your contribution

(Ah, zero-based lists. As far as I can see, all this does is make people add one when they tell someone how many bullets were on the list.)

“The same copyright laws that were unobbjectionable 40 years ago if they existed today would have serious problems.” He goes through several hundred years of technology and copyright law showing that laws that used to protect our interests now serve corporate interests. It goes for too long and it covers too much. We’re used to buying books, checking out from the library, lending them to a friend and re-reading them. Publishers want to take all of these rights away from us.

A first step: Shorten copyright on books to ten years. For software, maybe copyright should be for three years, with all the source code on escrow so it could then be released into the public domain.

There’s not reason copyright should be the same for all types of work. He sees three types of work:

1. Functional works that you used to do a job: manuals, reference works, recipes. All should be free. It’s important to society that people should be able to improve it.

2. “Documentaries that represent the thoughts of certain parties”: Memoirs, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell. To change these is to misrepresent someone’s thoughts. We should permit verbatim non-commercial copying.

3. Artistic and aesthetic works. On the one hand, the work has integrity and shouldn’t be modified. But then there’s the folk process. And Shakespeare took plots from other plays. But Stallman doesn’t know the answer to this one. “This is a hard problem.”

WRT Internet music company: “We should simply legalize it now.” We’d all be better off. The recording industry treats musicians like dirt. He feels bad when he buys a CD because he knows the musicians won’t see any of the money. Musicians really only get publicity out of their recording contracts. Internet music sharing is a better way to get publicity. Stallman would like digital cash so there could be a tip box for bands.

Zippy quote: “Those arrogant [recording industry] companies that think they can imnpose restrictions on us deserve to be punished. They deserve to cease to exist.”

Categories: Uncategorized dw