[I am so sleepy I am having trouble deciding weather to stand or sit. I guess that means I should stand.]
Although my main topic today is not free software, I better say something about it at the beginning, because I don't know how much you know about it. Free software was "svoboden software". Means software that respects the user's freedom. Free software is about freedom and community. The freedom to do what you want to do on your own computer and the freedom to cooperate with other people when you choose to. Proprietary software, that is non free software, is distributed in a scheme that keeps users divided and helpless. The developer has power over all the users and that's what makes it evil. That power. That power is what denies the users their freedom. It keeps the users divided and helpless. Divided, because because every user is forbidden to share with anyone else and helpless because users don't have the source code. So they can't change the program, they can't even verify independently what it is really doing. There are many non-free programs that has malicious features. Features that the users would remove if they could, but they can't. Sometimes these features are secret. We don't know about all of them, we just find about some cases. For instance many non-free programs spy on the user. One non-free program that you might have heard of, that spies on the user is called Windows XP. When the user (I hope you wouldn't use a program like that) of Windows XP searches in her own files for a word, Windows XP sends a message saying what the word was. And when Windows XP asks for an upgrade it reports to Microsoft all the software installed on that computer. Its sends that information encrypted. It required careful investigation to determine that it was sending that list of software. They didn't want people to know this. And malicious features can get much worse in spy-ware, but the basis for all of them is the fact that the users are divided and helpless. With free software even if we imagine that the developer is somehow malicious they couldn't get away with it, because the users would simply remove that features. With free software the users are in control, the users determine how the software will develop. Free software develops under the democratic control of all its users. Free software art of human knowledge. There are four essential freedoms which define free software. A program is free software if you, the user have these four freedoms. Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish. Freedom one is the freedom to help yourself, that's the freedom to study the source code and then change it to do what you wish. Freedom two is the freedom to help your neighbor, the freedom to distribute copies to others and freedom three is the freedom to help your community - the freedom to publish modified versions so other can benefit from your contribution. You are never required to do this. You can make a change and just use it yourself, but you are free to publish it as well and many people do and the result is - many people are contributing to the improvement of free software. Free software is not an economic issue. Yes, it has secondary economic consequences, but when really important things, such as freedom and community, are at stake, economics is a secondary. But you'll be glad to hear that the economic consequences is to reduce the concentration of wealth. Proprietary software is a very powerful system for concentration of wealth as you can observe by the fact that the richest person in the world was, for a while the head of a proprietary software company. That's because its concentrating wealth - what's that doing - that's bad for almost everyone. Free software does not eliminate business but it removes this tool for concentrating wealth and that is good for society as well. But I think it is less important than freedom and community. You will find both large and small businesses involved with free software mostly, most of them are involved as users, because they are not in the software field at all, but they use computers and free software is very useful for them. But if we look just at the computer field you'd also find large and small companies involved in developing free software. With free software the developer can't make you pay for permission. Not permission for anything because you are free - you don't have to beg for permission. However, lots of users want support and so what software companies tend to do in the free software world, is sell support. And that's a legitimate activity because it is not based on first keeping people divided and helpless. If a thousand people want support each one has its own question and what they pay for is for you to answer their questions. That's legitimate and in this business nobody is being forced to promise not to help anybody else. They are just doing things for each other.
I started the free software movement in 1983 and in January 1984 I began developing a free software operating system called GNU. Now, many of you have seen articles about this operating system but they probably call it by the wrong name. You have probably seen articles called Linux, but that is misknow. Linux is actually one part of this operating system. Its what's known as the kernel which is the program that allocates the computer's resources to all the other programs that you run. An entire operating system contains hundreds or may be by now thousands of programs and that's what GNU set out to be. Linux was actually the last essential piece that was added to the system in 1992 producing the GNU plus Linux combination. That was the first free operating system for modern computers and thus in 1992 was the first time it became possible to use a computer in freedom, ever since the 1970s. So that minimal goal was achieved and the system began to catch on. People heard that it was powerful and that it was very reliable that it would run for months without crashes. And it was also available at a low price which is a secondary issue when freedom is its stake but it is convenient for many people. So we got millions of users and people started inviting me to give more speeches and in these speeches people would sometimes ask me at the end, "Do these ideas extend to anything other than software". After I'd show them the arguments that I do not have time for it today why software must be free, why it is unethical to make a program non free. Well often they would ask the question in a deliberately stupid way. They would say, "What about computers?", "What about cars?", "What about chairs? Should they be free too?". Well, what would that mean? Remember free is defined by these four fundamental freedoms to use it as you wish, change it as you wish, copy and distribute the copies and publish modified versions. Well with physical objects you generally are free to use them as you wish and you are free to change them too to the extend it is possible. Lots of people modify their cars, lots of people modify chairs too. Like you might to re-upholster the chair. And if it is an wooden chair and you are really cold one day, you could chop it up and burn it. And no-one is going to try to forbid you to make any changes in that chair. What about copying. Well, that's a meaningless question. There are no copiers for physical objects. May be in the future with nano-technology, we will have the ability to copy any physical object. If so this freedom will become a meaningful issue and questions like the freedom to copy food would become tremendously important to society. Agribusiness companies will try to starve poor people to death by restricting their freedom to copy food. Right now we see the pharmaceutical companies condemning millions of poor people around the world to death by forbidding the cheap manufactory of life saving drugs in these poor countries. They are so concerned with their profits that they will kill millions. So I am sure that agribusiness companies will behave no better in 50 or 100 years if it becomes possible to copy food. In fact in some cases in a very limited way is possible to copy food, because some of these food objects make seeds and you can plant them and more food objects would grow. And the agribusiness companies are trying to prohibit this around the world. They don't care if this farmers die. But mostly you can't copy physical objects, so the question doesn't arise. The question should chairs or cars be free, well they are as free as they possibly could be given today's technology. But the question does make sense if you are asking about other kinds of works, because works ever made of information can be copied and can be changed. So the question of the freedom to copy and modify other kinds of works does make sense and that's what I am about to speak about to try to answer that question.
Now, proprietary programs usually are restricted by contract law, but other kinds of works are normally restricted only by copyright low. So if anything stops you from changing or copying a work normally it is copyright law. In addition software is unusual because it has source code and object code. In order to be able to effectively change software you've got to have the source code and so part of free software is that the source code is available. However, other kinds of works generally don't have this distinction. In general with other kinds of works if you get the perform of the work that the end user might use is the only form. Now it is not 100% true. A book might have a textual form with markup and then it might have the form that has been formatted and the markup is not there and it looks nice but the words are still visible, the same words are equally visible in both forms. There is nothing, there is no tremendously important information that you don't see in a formatted book. The markup is just sort of secondary - it is not what is really important in the book. So because of this, the question of weather other sorts of works are free is just of a matter of what copyright law says. So the question of weather other works in some sense should be free is a question of what copyright law ought to say.
Now, changes in technology can not affect the basic principals of ethics, because basic principles of ethics are too deep to be touched by something as superficial as the new technology. But when we apply these principles to a specific issue, we look at the consequences of the various choices and the consequences can be altered by technological change. In general the consequences can be altered by a change in the context. The technological context today is not the same as it was fifty years ago. So a policy that was good fifty years ago could be harmful today because it has different affect and this is what has happened to copyright law. To understand this we need to look at the history of copyright law and the history of its technological context which is copying technology.
Copying of works started in the ancient world. It was done with a pen and ink. Someone would read a book and write the same words or try to write the same words. This technology had certain consequences. First of all it did not required specialized training - anyone who knew how to read the book could also copy it about as well as anybody else could. Second there was no economy of scale - to make ten copies took ten times as long as making one copy. Third, it was not limited to making identical copies. In fact, in the ancient world in between writing a book and copying a book there were intermediate activities that were respected and useful. For instance you could start copying a book and then write some new text and then continue copying it and then write some more new text. This was writing a commentary and it was respected and useful. You could also write some new text and then copy a part of the book and then write some more new text and copy a part of some other book and continue. This was writing a compendium and it was also respected and useful. In fact there were ancient works that are lost but large or small parts of them survived because they were copied into compendia that had better luck.
Now, as far as I can tell there were no idea of copyright in the ancient world. If you had a copy of a book you had the right to copy it and anyone who wanted to copy a book would do so, but the technology of the ancient world was replaced by a more efficient technology - the printing press. The printing press made coping more efficient but not uniformly. Instead, some kinds of copying became more efficient while other kinds were not affected at all, because the printing press had inherit economy of scale. It took a lot of work to set the type. Once you have set the type you could very quickly make many identical copies. So the printing press was only suited to making many identical copies. Furthermore the printing press was expensive equipment - the press itself and the letters were expensive and most people who knew how to read did not have printing presses, nor knew how to use one. And as a result we got a centralized system of copying where copies had been made at particular places and then transported to all the people who wanted them. For the early centuries of printing it did not completely replace hand copying. Hand copies is continue to be made either for very rich people to show how rich they were, or by poor people, people who could not afford printed copy but had the time to write a copy. Copyright began in the age of the printing press. The earliest reference to copyright that I have seen is from Italy in the fifteen hundreds. Apparently it was possible to ask one of the local princes to give you a monopoly on copying something. And you did not have to be the author of it necessarily but it started to be a sort of custom that if the prince liked and you wrote a book he would give you a monopoly on copying it. Princess in those days used to give their favorites monopolies on all sorts of things. It was one of the latest that they recruited their support so as to remain in power handout monopolies to whoever was supporting them.
Copyright in the modern world is to a large extend by influenced copyright in England which started out in the late fifteen hundreds as a monopoly given to publishers, a perpetual monopoly. And this was partially a system of censorship as well. However, in the seventeen hundreds it was reformed and copyrights were given, for the first time, as a matter of legal requirements to authors and for a limited time only. When the US constitution was written there was a suggestion that authors should be entitled to copyrights. This suggestion was rejected, although to hear the publishers speak, you would never guess that, but you can see it by looking in the US constitution which says that cumber should have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by reserving to authors and inventors, for a limited time, the exclusive use of their respective writings and inventions.
So this indicates a few decisions that were made. One was, it did not required a copyright system, in merely authorized one optionally. Second, its stated clearly what the purpose was. The purpose was to promote progress, a public benefit, so it is explicitly stated - the copyright, in the US at least, does not exist for the sake of the authors let alone for the sake of the publishers. It exists for the sake of the public benefit and so copyright was described as a, a bargain, a deal between the public and authors. The public gave up certain freedoms, and in exchange got certain benefits, the benefits of more writing, which meant not only more books available in bookstores but also more conversation about social issues which helps society, or used to help society decide how to deal with public issues. So, this was a tremendous step forward.
Now, around nineteen hundred printing press has became a lot more efficient. Printed copies of books became a lot cheaper and even poor people stopped copying books by hand. But this did not altered the fundamental nature of copyright. It was an industrial regulation. And that's very important. You see, it was an industrial regulation because it restricted publishers, it didn't restrict ordinary readers. During the eighteen hundreds nobody ever tried to enforce copyright against poor people who copied books by hand. Because it was understood as an industrial regulation. And this had three important consequences. First of all, copyright was fairly painless - it was easy to enforce, and it was arguably beneficial, for the public. It was fairly painless because the general public was not restricted by it. If you weren't a publisher, copyright didn't stopped you from doing anything. So why would you complain? Second, it was easy to enforce because it only had to be enforced against publishers and it was easy to find whoever was publishing the book - just go look looking to see who is selling copings and see where they came from. It was not necessary to invade every person's house or every person's computer, to enforce copyright.
[If you are carrying a personal tracking and surveillance device, please switch it off - they already tracked you here, they already know you are listening to me. So it is not necessary to keep them informed minute by minute while you are sitting and listening to me and it would be polite to everyone else to switch it off.]
So, copyright was fairly painless, easy to enforce and arguably beneficial because the public was trade away freedoms, that it could not exercise anyway. So it lost nothing. And in exchange got those public benefits of more writing. But the age of the printing press is giving way to the age of the computer networks. This advance in copying technology makes copying more efficient, just as the printing press made copying more efficient and just like the printing press it does not do so uniformly. The printing press made some kinds of copying more efficient - mass production of identical copies. Digital technology also has a non uniform effect - the opposite - it makes all the rest of copying more efficient and brings us back there for a to a situation more like the ancient world where the tremendous efficiency of mass production is gone. Not completely gone. Its true that making thousands of identical CDs is cheaper than making CDs one at the time but making CDs one at a time is cheap enough. So there is no longer a great obstacle to making copies one by one - its easy and millions of people do it.
The benefits of digital information technology are that it makes it easy to copying and manipulate information. The publishers do not want this to be easy for you. They want to monopolize the benefits of digital information technology and dribble them out to you solely under their control. In the age of the printing press, the public traded away certain freedoms under copyright law, freedoms which the public couldn't exercise anyway. So this is why it was effectively an industrial regulation why it was painless, easy to enforce and arguably beneficial, but with computers today we can all exercise those freedoms. These freedoms had become very useful to hundreds and millions of people and they want to use these freedoms, to exercise these freedoms. What do you do if you had been producing a certain by product that is useless to you so you have been in a habit of selling it to someone else and then you discover a way to use it yourself? What do you do? Its obvious - you keep it, or you keep part of it. May be you do not need at all, may be you still want to sell the part of it but you keep the part that you want to use and that's what the public generally wants to do in regard to the freedom to copy. In the age of the printing press, copyright was effectively an industrial regulation because it only restricted publishers, but today the same words in copyright law restrict everyone. They are restrictions now on ordinary citizens which means copyright is no longer effectively an industrial regulation. And therefore it is no longer painless to the public, it is no longer easy to enforce, and it is no longer arguably beneficial. It is no longer painless for the general public because it is now being used to restrict every citizen, to stop these citizens from doing things like sharing music on the Internet which they want to do. It is no longer easy to enforce, because enforcing copyright now requires invading everyone's house and everyone's computer. And harsh threads are being made against individuals who have done nothing but share with each other. We find in the US college students being suited for more money then they are likely to see in their whole lives. This is really harsh. Of course it is not as harsh as what we have seen the proprietary software developers do in some countries where they have threatened people with being raped. And it is no longer arguably beneficial because the freedoms that people are giving up now are valuable and people want to keep them, not sell them. So, what should we do?
Obviously, we should revise the deal that we have made. We should arrange to keep part of these freedoms. Exactly how much that's.. I will get to. But the point is clearly we should keep part of these freedoms, all of us to exercise it. And perhaps trade away just part of the freedom instead of all of it. And so democratic governments, if we had democratic governments would be changing copyright law to reduce the power of copyright, to legalize the copying that citizens want to do. But in fact what we see is just the opposite. What we see is around the world governments are making copyright law more strict, giving publishers more power taking away part of the freedom that the citizens used to retain and this is a sign of the sickness of democracy. It is a sign that businesses have more power than the citizens and in this particular area the business that lobby that for changes are the publishers - book publishers, record companies, movie companies - they all want more power and so what we see is that copyright law is being made more strict then ever. Copyright power is extended to an unprecedented degree. One dimension that's being extended is the length of time. Copyright in the US used to last for twenty eight years renewable ones a few decades ago and it was extended over and over and over. The last extension was in 1998 - copyright was extended by twenty years. Not just for new works, but even for old works. And this is supposed to provide further incentive for writing, but I just don't see how dead authors are going to write more books in the nineteen twenties because they know that their grand-grand children will get twenty more years of copyright lasting somewhere in the twenty first century. If they had a time machine available - I wish they would tell us.
Now, theoretically speaking twenty more years of copyright on new works might perhaps provide an additional incentive. Copyright on works made by companies formally lasted seventy five years. They extended it to ninety five years. Any business that wants to claim this is going to make a difference ought to substantiate its claims by presenting its projecting balance sheets for seventy six years in the future. Of course they can't do that. They don't even project ten years ahead. So it was all nonsense - it was simply a way to grab additional power. They had a monopoly, the monopoly was supposed to go away, they didn't wanted it to go away, so they contributed campaign fund to the legislators and they got the law they wanted. It is as simple as that. Laws in the United States are for sale.
You might have heard some of the scandals connected with representatives on delay. One of them is that its assistants were shopping around votes, laws in exchange for campaign contributions and they even wrote it down. So in 1998 this law was passed extending copyright by twenty years and around 2018 they are going to try to do it again because the US constitution says copyright has to last for a limited time, but the movie companies have said that they want perpetual copyright. Well, in order to get a perpetual copyright they have to amend the constitution and that is difficult so they came up with a way to get the same result without admitting it - perpetual copyright on the installment's plan. Every 20 years they extend the copyright for 20 more years. So if you look at any particular work today, supposedly there is some date at which that work will go into the public domain, but don't hold your breath, because by the time you get to that date copyright will have been extended to another date, 20 years later, and by the time you get there it will be extended again and this way they hope nothing will ever fall into the public domain again. That's their goal.
Another dimension of copyright is what activities it covers. In the age of the printing press copyright was never intended to cover all uses of a published copyrighted work. Copyright was the exception within a space of free unregulated use But now the publishers are trying to get total power over all use of works. In 1998 in the US, it was the first place they got it, they passed a law called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" which effectively authorized publishers to write their own copyright law by implementing it in some kind of player or reader program. Whatever restrictions they implemented in these players or readers affectively take the force of law because it is illegal to distribute anything that bypasses those restrictions. And thus in the US, the free software that can view the video the on a DVD has been censored. Under this law it's illegal. It's illegal to distribute it, it's illegal even to tell people where to get it by making a link to some site that distributes it. So the US now has censorship.
The format of videos on DVD was initially a secret. This was a plan to force all the makers of DVD players to include the same restrictions. The organization that maintain the secret, which worked for the movie companies, would not disclose the secret to any electronics company unless the company promised to impose the restrictions that were required. And thus all the DVD players has these restrictions and there have been essentially no progress in DVD players ever since they first came out.
This format was a secret but a few people in Europe figured it out and then they wrote a free program to do the job. And now that program is censored in the United States. Most of these people were anonymous but one of them is known. His name is Ion Johansen and he lives in Norway. At the time he was 16 years old and he was put on trial by the Norwegian government at the requests of Washington. But the court ruled that what he did was not illegal. Now the Norwegian government is trying to make it illegal. In fact many governments have made it illegal. The European Union has adopted a directive that says it has to be illegal to commercially distribute such software. You see when there is something wrong in the United States, the US government does not try to solve the problem. Instead it tries to impose the problem on the rest of the world. The US government is actively pressuring other countries to prohibit this programs too. The US government regularly pressures other countries to take away their citizen's freedom and not just in this area. A few months ago I visited Monaco and I was told that their latest king had decided to establish many kinds of civil liberties and then the US government said, "You are showing too much respect for the rights of the accused - take some away!" So they did. The US government is the greatest enemy of human rights in the world today. There are other governments that regularly deny their citizens more human rights than the US governments does, but they have less influence on the rest of the world. And one specific little area of this is copyright policy where your freedom to use your computer as you wish to view the movie on a DVD or access other restricted, encrypted media, are being taken away.
Last December I was in Spain and I was hosted by the government of a region - the Bask region of Spain and my host gave me some things to promote their awareness of their region and one was a record of music by a musician I've heard of but I've never heard his music so I wanted to listen to it and I saw on the cover it said - copy control and then it said - this record can be played in Windows and Macintosh systems, meaning that it can't be played on a free operating system because the software to play it is prohibited, because it's not a CD, it's not a compact disk, it's a corrupt disk! It's something that looks like a CD and some CD players will play it, but not all, because it doesn't follow the standard and in fact it can't legally be called a compact disk in many countries in Europe. That's why it actually says on the cover that it is not normal. Once I saw that I didn't open it, I gave it back to my host and I said, "Here you see the face of the enemy. Please take this back to the store because they shouldn't keep your money! Don't buy corrupt disks!". I think it's essential for people to spend some of their time standing in front of record stores handing out papers saying, "Don't buy corrupt disks!" and explaining why. This way we can fight back against this attempt to restrict us! Let me read to you what this record companies are doing. I want to read to you what EMI said to its customers. "If you plan to continue protesting about future audio or video releases with copy protection - forget! Copy protection is a reality and within a matter of months more of all audio/video worldwide are copy protected and this is a good thing for the music industry. In order to make this happen we will do anything within our power whatever you like it or not!" This is a translation from German. I am told that the original German was much nastier but that is impossible to do just as to it in English.
Meanwhile, books are not immune to this problem too. A few years ago there was a massive campaign to convince people to stop buying paper-books and buy e-books instead. This campaign, I am certain, was carefully orchestrated. How do I know? I was sitting in an airplane in Brazil and I pulled out the in-flight magazine which was half Portuguese and half English and it had a prominent article talking about how great e-books are going to be. And they wouldn't have done that if they hadn't been paid to print that. So somebody was going around paying to put articles in favor of e-books whatever they can get it. Why do the publishers want us to stop reading paper books and read e-books? Well, with paper books we have certain freedoms, still, freedoms, that we've enjoyed for a long time: the freedom to buy a book from a used book-store, the freedom to lend it to a friend, the freedom to buy a book anonymously by paying cache, the freedom to borrow a book from the public library, and the freedom to keep the book for years or decades and read it again and may be even pass it on to our children who might read it again. All these freedoms would be taken away if we switch to e-books. The publishers would love to take these freedoms away, but that's hard, you see, there are millions of people who read books and they might get angry. Democracy is very sick but when millions of people get angry, democracy might function. So the publishers can't really pass a law, taking away these freedoms for printed books so they came up with a two stage plan to get the same result. The first stage was to take away these freedoms for e-books which was easy because there were no e-books and there were no readers to get angry and the second stage was - convince people to switch from paper books to e-books and at the same time they'd loose their freedom. The hope was that e-books would be so sexy and attractive that people wouldn't think about the change in their freedom until it was too late. E-books were a failure, commercially. Why, I don't know. I wish I could believe it was because people valued their freedom too much but I don't think so. I suspect it was some other reason - some aspect of convenience and I am sure they are going to try again. There is still a preassure campaign, trying to promote e-books.
I got a message from an organization... People put me on mailing lists and I got a message from one of them on trying to trying to encourage people to make e-books instead of printed books, last week. We are going to have to fight that battle again.
So this is what's happening. Copyright is being made more strict and restrictive. The freedoms that citizens used to have are being taken away. But what would our governments do if they were democratic. Well, one thing they would do is, what they would do basically is they would reduce copyright power.
[I just realized I made a mistake - I left my alarm clock in the hotel room. So I better ask if someone could go back there and get it. It's a black plastic thing that folds and it is probably near to my bed. Let me double check. Yes it is not here, so... I am rather sleepy.]
So we should reduce copyright power in all these different dimensions - we should reduce how long it lasts, and we should reduce how broad the power is. As for the length of time one thing we can see is that the publication cycle is getting faster and faster. Nowerdays in the US the typical book is remaindered within two years and it is out of print within three years.. so I don't believe that many decades of copyright can be necessary. Let's reduce copyright to last for 10 years starting from the date of publication. That should be plenty. Now that might be more than necessary and if so a few years later we can see if we want to reduce it further. But I think that 10 years is a good first step. It's still quite a bit longer than the publication period. This proposal, however, is controversial. Once I was sitting in a panel with some authors and I made this proposal and the award-winning author sitting next to me said, "Ten years is impossible, intolerable.. Anything more than five years is outrageous!". Now, you might be surprised that an author would say that. I was surprised. I assumed, naively, that authors were in favor of longer copyright. But no! You see it turns out that the same publishers who are taking away our freedom in the name of those authors and artists are grinding those same authors and artists into the ground with their heals all the time! This author had a clause in his contract, which is more of a standard, in the US at least, that when the book goes out of print the rights revert to him and he can use the book as he wants, but as often happens the publisher had let the book effectively go out of print but was refusing to admit it, refusing to recognize it. And as result he was not allowed to use his own book as he wanted to and it wasn't available. He wanted people at least to be able to read his book.
So after we have reduced it to ten years we could think again three years later about may be reducing it to five years.
The other dimension is what activities are restricted by copyright. And here, I think it is crucial to recognize that we don't have to treat all the works alike. Different works are used by society in different ways and the most beneficial amount of copyright power, the most beneficial for society that is, for certain kind of work, might be different to some other kind of work. We don't have to treat them all the same. The publishers want us to assume that they have to be treated the same. They want us to imagine that it is impossible to make distinctions but actually that is exactly what judges are for - to make distinctions. Laws are full of distinctions. That's why they exist - to make distinctions. And applying these distinctions is not so hard. And sometimes there are distinctions that we have to make even though there is no one obvious right place to draw the line. Consider for instance the law against driving while drunk. Now there is no one place to draw the line between drunk and sober because it is a continuum. There can't be any one right place to draw that line but it has to be a line somewhere. So we draw one that's arbitrary. It does the job, mainly, that people who are drunk and driving, get arrested and people who are sober - don't.
So I've distinguished three broad categories of works, based on how they are useful, not based on the media, that's the first kind of distinction everyone thinks of. Well, I guess we could make distinctions for different kinds of media, but I think that's not a crucial difference. The difference that's important is the difference in use. These categories are: first, works that serve a practical purpose, second, works that serve to say what certain people think, and third - works of art and entertainment. Now these are used in different ways. The works of practical use, you use them to do a job. The works that say what certain people think, you use to get, to find out what they think and the works of art and entertainment you use just for the sensation of using it. So there are different kinds of use that need to make in different rules appropriate. So I will get them one by one.
First, works of practical use, these are also called functional works. These include programs, recipes for cooking, educational works such as manuals and textbooks and reference works, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias and may be other things as well. All of these works should be free. That's my conclusion. The same arguments that apply to software apply to all the works that you use to do a practical job. If you are trying to do the job today and the work the way it is, is not right for you - you need freedom to change it and you need that freedom today. And further, there are probably other people who want to do the same job you are doing so you got to be free to publish the modified version so they can all have that modified version too. So, for this category these works should all be free - user should be free to use them, to copy them, to distribute the copies, including commercially and to change them and to publish the modified versions, including commercially, because commercial publication is useful for these works.
Now you might ask, if we did not have a copyright system arranging for income to the authors, would these works be developed? That's like asking if airplanes would be able to fly. It is no longer an uncertainty. First the free software community has proved that lots of these works will be developed in one area - software. And now we also have Wikipedia, the greatest encyclopedia ever, the free encyclopedia. And Wikipedia was developed in just a few years. In less than three years it was the biggest encyclopedia ever developed and it was done entirely by volunteers. Everyone is invited to contribute to Wikipedia. In the late '90s I began writing and speaking about the need for a free encyclopedia. I wrote that it might take 20 years to develop, but people shouldn't feel bad about that, shouldn't be discouraged by that, because it would be useful forever, for as long as humanity lasts. Well, I was wrong - it didn't take 20 years, 3 years was enough.
And we are starting to see also free textbooks. Wikipedia is now developed in dictionaries too. There have been already a few free dictionaries. For instance in one part of Belgium the local language is a dialect related to French called Wallon and the first time there was a generally available dictionary of Walloon it was a free dictionary, in the '90s.
So it's clear now that we can develop all these kinds of functional works the same way we develop free software. We don't need to restrict the use of these works just to make sure they exist.
What about the second category - the works whose use is to say what certain people think? This includes memoirs, autobiographies, essays of opinion, scientific papers, which report what certain scientists saw when they did a certain thing, authors to buy and sell and probably other things as well. Since the use of these works is to say what certain people thought modified versions of them are not useful. They are just likely to misrepresent something. So there is no reason why people need the freedom to modify these works. As a result it's possible to adopt a compromised copyright system where copyright covers commercial use and modification, but everyone is free non-commercially to distribute exact copies of the works. This compromised copyright system would continue to provide an income for the authors, more or less the same as today, but it would give people the essential freedom that must never be taken away and that is the freedom to share. With this change copyright would once again be an industrial regulation. Once again more painless, easy to enforce and arguably beneficial.
The 3rd category of works is the works of art and entertainment which includes fiction, and includes music. It does not include all movies, because some movies present factual information. They may be in this category or that category, but a lot of movies are fiction and they are in this category. For works of art and entertainment modification raises a complicated issue. On the one hand there is the argument that the work can have an artistic integrity and that modifying it could destroy that integrity and I agree that this is sometimes true. On the other side there is the [fault] process, where successive modifications of a work can produce something very rich. Meanwhile, there is also, if we look all the authors whose are known authors. Consider Shakespeare. Some Shakespeare's plays used stories that were copied by other plays that had been published a few decades before. If today's copyright law had existed then those plays would have been illegal. They would not had been presented or published and if Shakespeare's had complained (I don't know if Shakespeare would ever have complained about such a thing) but if he had complained the copyright holders would have said, "You just want to make a cheap ripoff of my play. This would be worthless. It would destroy the integrity." And that's all we would have heard so we'd probably believe it. Because Shakespeare was able to present those plays and they were subsequentially published we can now judge them and say they are among the masterpieces of human literature and that they are probably superior than the plays that the stores came from. But we would never know that if we have never seen those plays. We would listen to the copyright holders saying, "This would be a cheap ripoff" and we probably believe it, and we be wrong! But one thing is clear - it is not urgent to publish a modified version of an artistic work today because it is not needed for a practical job. It serves the progress of art but it's not essential to do it now. So we could have copyright last for 10 years and during those 10 years copyright would cover commercial use and modification but then after 10 years all the artists would be free to make modified versions of the work. And this way the compromised copyright system would provide income to these authors or composers, or musicians, to the extend that copyright does its role and then afterwards the modification could start making future works of art that are recycling to the old ones.
So that's what I recommend as the way copyright law should be changed and that is my answer to the question how should these ideas of free software extend to other kinds of works. For the works of practical use the ideas extend completely. Those works must be free. For the other kinds of works I don't go that far. A compromised copyright system could serve a useful purpose in supporting the writers and promoting writing, while at the same time pulling back enough to respect the most essential freedom, which is the freedom to non-commercially share.
There are a few kinds of works which are controversial today which raises specific issues worth mention it. For instance - millions of people share music on the Internet and this has become a battle ground today. Sharing music on the Internet is perfectly legitimate and must be legalized. It's an outrage for any government to forbit its citizens to share. Legalizing music sharing on the Internet might cause a few super-star musicians to make less money, but in general it will not hurt the musicians because in general the musicians don't make money from selling their records anyway. You might not realize this. You have probably heard the propaganda campaign saying that if you share music you should be ashamed because you are not supporting the musicians. Well if you buy their CD you should be ashamed because you are not supporting the musicians. There are a few exceptions. Long established super-stars who have come to the end of their first contract which usually covers 5 or 7 records. Once they reach the end of that contract, if they are famous then, they can negotiate a second contract which doesn't exploit them and then they really will get some money when people buy their records. But they are just a few. Most musicians are not suppers-tars or even if they are super-stars, they haven't got seven records done yet. So there are in their first contract and this first contract treats them like dirt. Nominally speaking a certain fraction of the price of the CD is royalties for the musicians, but they never see it, because the production and publicity expenses are treated as if they were an advance to the musicians. The musicians never got that money but is labeled as an advance. And the royalty part of the price doesn't go to the musicians, it goes to.. it just moves from one account of the record company to another, to repay the publicity and production expenses. Very few records sell enough copies that the musicians actually start to get any money. Some records go platinum and they don't start paying any money to the musicians. So the way the musicians make money is from their concerts and from selling records at their concerts. After all the publicity is useful to them. These publicity expenses were spend on publicizing their music, that means more people may go to their concerts, so they will make more money, but not directly, not because you bought their record in a store. But this is not the only way to give these musicians publicity. Sharing their music gives them publicity. When one music lover says, "Listen to this! Copy it - you'll love it." That's giving the musicians publicity too, it also means more people will go to their concerts. So, we should legalize music sharing, not just because it's everyone fundamental right to share, but even also for the health of music. See right now music is being crashed and poisoned by the high industrial complex, by the music factories. They call themselves "the music industry" and what does that mean. These are factories. They are taking tremendous quantities of money, and they squeeze it into the shape of music and it is all crap, but people here are advertised, promoted so much that they listen to it. Some people. Music would be healthy if we got rid of this and those arrogant record companies that say the things like the one that I read to you - they deserve to seize to exist. There is nothing wrong with making records and selling them and I think it would be good if we had a copyright system that really make this record companies support musicians, because now they don't. But today's arrogant major record companies deserve only one thing and that is - to seize to exist. So if we legalize music sharing, most musicians won't loose anything. They'd get their publicity.. first of all the record sells would probably continue to happen but anyway musicians would be able to get their publicity through sharing instead of through exploit their record contracts that don't give them any money. So aside from the super-stars and the record companies, we all would be better of. But we might want to go even further.
We might want to adopt systems that support music even more. So I have two ideas for ways to do that. One way is with a tax on blank media and on connection to the Internet and this tax money would be distributed to musicians and composers based on their popularity, without stopping people from sharing and without giving any share of these money to corporations, because they don't deserve it. And one crucial point is, when we distribute this money it should be based on popularity but not in linear proportion, because linear proportion means that the super star gets a lot more than the musician who is merely great and popular. So instead, we can use a mathematical function that looks like this [draws]. Where it first goes up fairly fast but then goes up more and more slowly so the super-star who's way down there will get more than the musician of medium popularity, but not so much more and this means with the same total amount of tax money, we would affectively support more musicians. Because that's the goal after all - to support musicians so that they can be a full time musicians and practice a lot and fully perfect their abilities and do music. That's the whole purpose of having any kind of anything like copyright on music, is to support the activity of music. This is the way to use that tax money to support the activity of music in an effective way. That's one idea.
Here is another idea. Imagine that everything that plays music, every box, every program has a button, a button you can push and the button says, "Send one leva to the band". And you push it if you want to or you don't. Why not? Of course there are some people who are poor and for them even one leva - they can't afford it. Well they won't. They won't send money and that's good - why should poor people be the ones who support the musicians. But those of you who are comfortable, you'd send one leva, you'd never miss it. Why would you hesitate? So may be once a month you might send one leva to some band that you are listening to. And that's probably more money than on the average people spend on music. So this would support musicians and of course right now what the people spend on music a lot of it just goes to corporations. If this system is 50% efficient, only 50% goes to the companies that transfer the money and 50% goes to the musicians, that's more money for the musicians than they are getting now. This would be a tremendous improvement on supporting musicians.
So that's, that's what I recommend. And instead of today's vicious nasty campaigns, that try to tell you that sharing is a theft. If you share they call you a pirate which is absurd. That's like saying helping your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship. Instead of that twisted and evil propaganda campaign we could have a publicity campaign that works with human nature, "Have you sent 1 lv to a band this month? If not why not do it? Don't you like the music? Show how you like the music. Send 1 lv." This campaign would make everyone feel good.
Another specific issue, area, where people supported by the publishers, are saying that copying is a disaster, is the area of movies. So let's look at the effect of legalizing movie sharing on the Internet which should be legalized. There is no legitimacy in forbidding people to share. But what would the effect be on making movies if we had a compromised copyright system that covers commercial use. Well showing the movies in a theater - that's a commercial activity so that would still be covered. Broadcasting them on television - that's a commercial activity - it'd still be covered. Using them on airplanes - it's a commercial activity it'd still be covered. So they'd still be getting a large fraction of their income and of course some people would still want to buy DVDs and that's a commercial sale so it's covered. So they wouldn't loose all their income, just a fraction of it, they keep a fraction of it. The next thing to realize is that when you see these large amounts of money, that it costs to make movies. Well, it is not that they have to spend that much money. They are going in a certain direction which is very expensive - with lots of special effects, but that's not the only way to make movie. And the next thing to realize is that even when they use lots of special effects, most of the expense is publicity, not making the movie at all. So if they only might have this much - they can do less publicity and they can even spend the same amount of money on making the movie and they'd still make a profit. In other words, they are going to claim that the sky is falling on them and they are exaggerating, you must be prepared to recognize that they are exaggerating and reject it.
[So that pretty much concludes my speech.. what time is it? OK I've got some time for some questions and by the way has someone picked up my alarm clock yet? Hello? Oh, you got it - good!]
[Stallman] ...happen with copyrights. If you write the program yourself, if you didn't copy, then you are not infringing any copyrights. Nobody else has a copyright on the code that you wrote, but there might be patents and in fact there surely are patents prohibiting the code that you wrote, unless your program is very small. Large programs combine thousands of different ideas - that's the work of developing software - combining lots of different ideas. Well, if a country is fullish enough to allow those ideas to be patented, the result is that anyone who develops a large program has surely infringed hundreds of patents. He can't know which ones they are - it's too much work to find out, but he could be sure that there must be hundreds of them. So software patents become alike land-mines for software developers. With each design decision chances are: [he makes a step] nothing happens. [more steps] Chances are this step doesn't step on the patent, and chances are this step doesn't step on the patent, and chances are this step doesn't step on the patent, but to cross the whole mine field, to develop the whole program, I've got to take thousand of steps and surely sometimes I'm going to step on a patent which could explode and destroy the project, but this analogy is not perfect. Once somebody steps on a land-mine it's not dangerous any more [Laughing].
So software patents started in the US and the US government has been trying very hard to pressure other governments to adopt the same policy. That's because the US government is essentially the puppet of the multinational corporations and it's the multinational corporations, the mega-corporations that expect to benefit from software patents, because they own a lot of patents and they cross license each other so they are mostly safe and everyone else gets all the danger. So, the European Commission, several years ago, wrote a directive, which was carefully written so that it didn't appear to authorize software patents, but it really did. They published this directive as a Word file - really stupid thing to do - publishing anything as a Word file - you should never do that. Because they published it as a Word file, people could tell that most of the editing was done by a layer for the business software association. So then it was the European Parliament's turn to consider this and the European Parliament voted to amend the directive - not to allow software patents. The European Parliament adopted dozens of amendments, correcting various different loopholes that could have allowed software patents. So the European Parliament conclusively rejected software patents, but the European Parliament does not have much power. The system is designed so that the European Parliament plays a part, but it doesn't have much influence over the ultimate outcome. In other words the European Union is a sham democracy - it looks like democracy, but the people don't really have much power. The European Union is a system where bureaucrat can make decisions that the people can not change. If you want to preserve democracy do not enter the European Union. [Applause] I am all in favor of the idea of a democratic union of Europe. I think this would be a great thing if we had one. So, the European Parliament did this and then the directive went to the Council of Ministers. The Council of Ministers proposed to reject everything the Parliament had done and labeled that an uncontroversial item which didn't require debate and that went through last May (I think was). But that required ratification in another meeting and we convinced some countries to change their votes and in other counties Parliament voted to change the vote. For instance the Dutch Parliament voted to direct its government to oppose software patents and the government disobeyed Parliament. The government's representatives supported software patents in the Council of Ministers even thought the Parliament that supposedly is in charge of their country's policy, said not to do so. The German Parliament voted unanimously to oppose software patents. The German minister in the council of ministers supported them. What we have here is essentially mass illegality. This decision to reject the Parliament's vote, the European Parliament's vote and authorize software patents, was approved in March so now the European Parliament gets to vote on it one more time in July. However, to reject or change the directive on the second reading requires more than half the members of the European Parliament to vote to do so. In other words not just the majority of those voting, but the majority of the entire Parliament and it is going to be hard to convince enough members of Parliament to be present, because generally a lot of them don't show up.
So we, at this point are fighting this last battle where we might loose completely or we might not. There is a strong sentiment in the European Parliament for sustaining its previous decision and important parties like, I believe, the socialists and the conservatives are in favor of doing so, so may be we will win this battle. If we win this battle it's not final. If we loose it - it's final. So that's another reason why you shouldn't join the European Union. Are there more questions?
[Anonymous] You have said before that certain information works, such as dictionaries, textbooks and so on, should be free. Do you believe that the law should enforce that, that is the law should say - If I make a dictionary it should be free or do you think that free works will prevail over non free works as free software is likely to prevail over non free software?
I don't know and I could be happy in a world where we were using free dictionaries and encyclopedias whether it was legally required or not.
[Anonymous] Why do you think it's that: free software has taken not so long whereas free dictionaries and encyclopedias have taken so long...?
I think you're mistaken - it's just the opposite. Remember, we started developing the GNU operating system at the beginning of 1984, but it took almost a ??? before we had a system that could run and that was starting to take off and it still hasn't become the software used by most people. The progress on a free encyclopedia was much faster - it took just a few years to make it superior and the dictionary projects are now starting. So, as I see it things are going faster in these new areas.
[Mihail Stefanov, Free Newspaper] My question is that - if we don't win the battle with the European Union this could be our last battle - what do you mean?
[Stallman] If the European Parliament does not vote against software patents in July, the directive would be final. So that would be the last battle, that would be final defeat about software patents in the European Union.
[Kamen Tomov] I would like to ask you, how come a country like United States which is known as a country where people value their freedom, elect corrupted governments? This is my first question, my second is... I am a software developer so I would like to ask you how we are supposed to be awarded for our work?
[Stallman] Well first of all, how did the US democracy get so sick. It's because business money started to get more and more influence in political decisions and then the final attack on our freedom involved using the September 11 attacks as an excuse. So they took away our freedom in the name of protecting us. Bush, who stole the election both times and this... [Applause]. The first time Bush stoled the election, Greg Palast worked out how and he published this in a major London newspaper, but the newspapers in the US did not pick up the story. They didn't seem to want people in the US to be aware that their election had been stolen. The media in the US are fairly controlled, not by an explicit system of censorship of course. Instead, they are controlled because they are part of large business empires and these business empires know their interests, they tell the government what to do and they also decide what to publish, so people who run the minor media like me and my web site, were free to present this information about how the election was stolen but most people never see that and the mass media are controlled by the businesses that they work for. The effective result is that if the candidate business prefers do something extremely wrong it gets hashed up mostly, some people will talk about it but it doesn't show up in the mass media and anyone who tries to talk about it gets attacked. Meanwhile the candidates that business don't like, if they have any slight flu, it gets exaggerated and talked about constantly making even a small thing, or even a small doubt seem very large. Poll show that all the supporters of Bush and millions of people do support him even though they weren't the majority that most of them still believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and they still believe that he was working with Al Qaeda. Both of these had been established as false, but Bush never admits a mistake, so once these things were established as false, he would just talk about Saddam Husein and Al Qaeda in near by each other in every speech and this was enough to keep his supporters believing a false ???. So the media in the US do not effectively correct such false ??? even though when they are proved to be false. That was one question. Now, of course I am not the expert of this - Chomski explains much better - I recommend reading Chomski.
The second thing is how should programmers make a living. Well that's not how you said it - how should they be payed for their work which is a silly question because are you trying to say that programmers are not allowed to volunteer to do anything?! You are trying to say that they have to be payed for their work, they are not allowed to volunteer. Well that would be news to the million or so free software developers volunteers, that they are not suppose to do it. But, in fact it's a completely silly question because most programmers that are getting paid to program are working on private use software. Only a small fraction are working on software meant to be distributed at all. So if we replace all the proprietary distributed software with free software this will have no effect on the majority of programmers, they still be payed to develop software for use by a single client just as they are now.
[Anonymous] Mr Stallman can I suggest that we leave. It is quarter to twelve.
[Stallman] My flight is at 2:45 so I don't think we are in a terrible hurry, but we need time for you to collect stickers and perhaps buy some pins and key-rings. By the way if you want more information about free software take a look at www.gnu.org. There is a Free Software Foundation in Europe now called FSF-Europe. If you look at fsfeurope.org you can get more information about it and that's all folks [Applause].
