2 August 2007 - 15:39RMS on copyright protection

I was reading the transcript that of a talk that RMS gave on copyright protection at U of Waterloo when I came across these 2 paragraphs:

THere are four essential freedoms that users should have: freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish (there are programs that don’t even give you that much freedom). Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code of the program and then change it to make it do what you wish, instead of what the developer chose to impose on you. Freedom 2 is the freedom to help your neighbor. That’s the freedom to distribute exact copies to others when you wish, up to and including republication. And freedom three is the freedom to contribute to your community. That’s the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, when you wish. Up to and including publication. With these four freedoms, the users are in control, both individually and collectively.

What about freedom two, the freedom to copy the object and hand out copies. Well, there are no copiers for physical objects, so that’s totally meaningless. In science fiction in some cases, people have imaginged the idea of duplicators for physical objects. Like you could imaging a car copier. Imagine that I - imagine I had a car, and I parked it somewhere. I wouldn’t mind if somebody walked up carrying his car copier and plugged one end into my car and out the drew a duplicate car - with a different lock, I hope - and then he could pick up his copier, unlock his car, and drive away, and I wouldn’t even notice because by car would be unchanged. Why not? However, as a realistic question, it doesn’t exist. And likewise for freedom three, the freedom to copy your modified versions and hand out copies. Well, to some extent you can modify a car, and people do, but there are no copiers to copy you modified car with. That’s not the way cars are made, anyway. They’re not made by copiers, nobody has a copier. So this question “should hardware be free” is a - is a silly wiseguy question.

RMS should probably know that you can copy cars and that cars are copied ferociously (more often than not in China which among other things has very weak laws protecting IP) and that is a pretty big problem (the knock-off industry makes billions of dollars every year copying everything from cars to Gucci sun-glasses to medecine). You obviously will not copy the car thru a device, but rather thru a business process and what you copu is not the car, but its design (another type of intelectual property that RMS doesn`t seem to care about). RMS seems pretty much out of tune with the real world, he seems stuck in a world long gone. I do understand that issues that the current connectivity (bittorrent and the like) poses to artists, publishers and etc… and I understand that DRM is pretty much a bad technology trying to set-up defenses against file sharing, but I don`t understand why some thesis pioneered at MIT in the 60`s should have any effect right now. RMS has its GNU, he should be happy about it and let the world turn. It does so anyway.

Open-source is currently being used today mostly to create resource-pools dedicated to commodity software which happens to be mostly infrastructure (operating systems, databases, ESBs, etc…), this is pretty much what open source has morphed into. It`s nothing near the ideals pioneered by some people in the 60`s (including RMS), more often than not it is all about corporate partnerships. Open source has stopped being led by ideological reasons (the famous free as in freedom) in order to be led by economic reasons (free as in beer).

I`m off to the holidays!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!