Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong? (slashdot.org)
- Reference: 0180654976
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1952231/richard-stallman-was-asked-is-software-piracy-wrong
- Source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-stallman-critiques-ai-connected-cars-smartphones-and-drm
This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...
"I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now [3]is an injustice ."
Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong....
"Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty."
And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
"Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil."
[1] https://youtu.be/YDxPJs1EPS4
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/25/1930244/richard-stallman-critiques-ai-connected-cars-smartphones-and-drm
[3] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.en.html
Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:3, Insightful)
We all thought piracy was OK when we were teenagers or young adults and didn't have any money. Eventually you mature enough to realize that if you're going to create a movie that costs $100 million, it cost that much because all those people listed at the end of the movie need to eat and need to buy gas, and need to save up for their kids' university education. If you followed the free software model for movies, then some rich guy who really, really wants to watch a movie has to pony up the $100 million to make a movie, and then he has to give the finished product away to everyone else. Most of us are smart enough to see that's going to result in zero movies being made. There are other alternatives... you could use a gofundme or kickstarter model... everyone has to pay up front and when we reach our goal of $100 million, then the movie gets made. After it's been made, is it then free for everyone else to copy? Doesn't that create the same problem? Shouldn't the 10 million people who put in $10 each get half their money back if another 10 million people watch it after it's made? Personally, I think yes. So I don't think anyone should get to see it for free. Everyone should have to pay an ever-decreasing amount out to the people who already paid.
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expected profits are too high
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Nah, it's not the realisation about the cost at all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the cost.
It's about convenience. If $15 a month saves me hours searching for and downloading pirated films, it's money well spent.
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Piracy is more convenient. I use the TV calendar site to track shows I'm interested in, and Greasemonkey to inject some Javascript that adds links directly to The Pirate Bay searches for each episode. After a few clicks I have a DRM free file that just works, and I can use Kodi rather than some crappy app that is little more than a wrapper around a broken website.
I wouldn't mind buying Bluray discs, except that they keep trying to stop me ripping them into a more convenient format. So I just buy other merch
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
A few problems with that:
1. You've got to spend extra time setting it all up.
2. Then your setup may break at any point when they introduce more anti-piracy measures.
3. You can't just sit down after a hard day, press one button and make it work immediately.
4. Limited content.
5. Quality issues.
6. Unnecessary faff.
7. One day you may end up in legal trouble.
8. Probably many more other problems which I can't even be bothered thinking about.
At some point you wake up to a realisation that sure - you can make it wo
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To each his own. I want to have a movie and music collection, whether on hard drives or on physical media. If I can buy it, I do (maybe not all the time though), but I am not going to continuously pay for the same thing.
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It's been working for many, many years now. I find it low maintenance.
As for limited content, there is more than is on streaming. Quality is the same or better.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Friends tell me that there is the occasional setup and configuration overhead. But once done, itâ(TM)s as easy as one or two clicks to be watching. The biggest problem exists on any platform-what is actually worth watching?
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The problem with that logic is that any given $15 a month streaming service in 2026 only has about 1/4 of the content that you want to watch.
In order to be able to watch all of the shows that I like to watch, I'd need:
Apple TV+
Disney+ and Hulu
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Paramount+
Peacock
and HBO Max (or whatever it called now)
So, that's 7 different premium streaming services, all charging around $15 a month each if you want to watch them without ads.
Suddenly, piracy looks like the easier option. One site, ALL of the
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> Nah, it's not the realisation about the cost at all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the cost.
> It's about convenience. If $15 a month saves me hours searching for and downloading pirated films, it's money well spent.
The convenience is because piracy is illegal.
If it was legal then you could easily combine everything in a single easy to search service that would be cheaper and more convenient than any individual service.
Not totally but mostly wrong (Score:2)
When I was young or a young adult, both the young and the old were copying music and videos (reel-to-reel or cassette tapes, VHS cassettes) for personal use among friends and the wider family all day long. Actually, in many jurisdictions, like the one where I grew up right in the middle of capitalist Europe, it was perfectly legal, too. And what do you know – movies and music records and concerts kept coming in nonetheless. Because, by tendency, many of those who were the biggest sharers were also the
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> When I was young or a young adult, both the young and the old were copying music and videos (reel-to-reel or cassette tapes, VHS cassettes) for personal use among friends and the wider family all day long. Actually, in many jurisdictions, like the one where I grew up right in the middle of capitalist Europe, it was perfectly legal, too. And what do you know – movies and music records and concerts kept coming in nonetheless. Because, by tendency, many of those who were the biggest sharers were also the biggest buyers. There also were sensible flat surcharges on tapes and cassettes and recording equipment which were distributed among artists.
> Anyway, I also seriously question today's movie industry. Can any movie be worth hundreds of millions of dollars? Are hundreds of millions of dollars, the least of which, by the way, find their way to the ground personnel in such productions, well spent in making a movie, of all things? I, for one, don't think so.
No it wasn't legal at any time. It was just not enforced heavily as people were still buying records and it required physical interaction to make EACH copy. However when digital copying became possible, record industry became really scared. ;) Regarding costs, yes, they are overblown. In part due to inflation too. But making those lifelike visual effects takes time and effort and that needs money to pay for expertise and resources. Plus actor payments also have been inflated to the high orbit...
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It definitely not only used to be legal in parts of Western Europe, it even still is. According to Section 15 of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), for example, in general, only the author of a work has the right to reproduce their work, but private copies are literally excepted according to Section 53 UrhG. And private use specifically includes distributing private copies to friends or family members. This is even still valid for digital copies, but has been restricted insofar as circumventing digital copy p
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[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
You're conflating (Score:2)
1) Doing something you know is wrong
2) Doing something wrong but you believe its right
We've all done 1 wrt copying media but most of us also do pay for some stuff too because we know musicians etc have to eat.
Stallman OTOH fits in category 2. He doesn't seem to believe anyone should financially benefit from their intellectual property unless others voluntarily decide to donate to it. I'm afraid the world and human nature simply doesn't work like that.
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The copying music thing is something I've seen argued in the past as well. Even back in that day, when one copied a song that one had already bought - be it on a gramophone record or a cassette, the question is - did that person buy the songs, or the media? Given the price difference b/w blank cassettes and cassettes of various albums, obviously the former. Once one bought the former, was s/he at liberty to copy it to a media that was more convenient?
Remember, in those days, we didn't have MP3s, editab
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What you describe makes perfect sense if costs represented effort and everybody got paid what they deserve. That's not the case for a lot of things, especially movies, so I don't think your example is great.
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"if you're going to create a movie that costs $100 million"
Just don't do that then.
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Are $100-million projects too rich for your blood? You must be very envious of wealthy people/institutions, forbidding them to do expensive things. Can governments finance expensive projects, and only free-markets forbidden? Who would build the telescope arrays, who would build super-computers, who would build particle colliders, who would build steamships ? If you say no individual/LLC can build extraordinary/expensive systems then your Marxist/collectivist views may saf
but when piracy works better then shit DRM? (Score:2)
but when piracy works better then shit DRM?
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> Most of us are smart enough to see that's going to result in zero movies being made
This. 100%. It's a bit like people who don't get vaccinated (without a very good reason). A few of them and it's no problem, we (and they) still benefit from herd immunity. But if everyone acted as selfishly, then we'd be back in Victorian times with a third of children dying before they reach five years old. To say that he'll only watch a film if he gets it for free by copying it from someone else is such a dick move. It's not like saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway so no one is losing out", because
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Why not just ask Stallman for specs of his toilet, food, chair etc, and make a copy of them for yourself using your own time and resources? Then the analogy would work.
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The problem inst copyright it is the cartel pricing and nearly forever terms around a lot of classes of works.
Why should I still have to pay 3.99 more if I want it in HD for a movie made in 1969? None of that long tail revenue was figured into the cost / revenue analysis when the picture was made. Many, maybe most of the people involved directly are 6 feet under.
Heck even to think we should refund the people who watched it 40 years ago, many of them are not even alive. They got what they paid for / agreed t
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
My favorite movie was made in 1968 - 2001, space odyssey. The latest 4K transfer made a few years ago by Christopher Nolan was a massive improvement over the previous transfers. It cost money. Many of the original analog films were significantly degraded. I saw one in 70mm in San Francisco not long ago, and it was very hard to watch due to all the damage. I'm glad that I was able to buy the 4k UHD blu ray discount. I also have DVD and HD BD disc versions, from their respective eras. Digital tech wasn't ther
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IMO, the bigger objection is paying it to new "owners" who had nothing to do w/ the production of a movie. Like say a movie was made back in the 70s, which I'd like to watch. I'd have no issues paying to watch it, if it went to the people who originally made it and warned a living from it. But if the media house they worked for got acquired by a bigger studio, and over time, those people have retired or died, then I don't quite get why I have to pay another entity for them, when they had no involvement i
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I too used to believe that pirating content was wrong... back when I could order almost any movie or TV show from Netflix and have the DVD of it delivered to me the next day.
Now that all of the good TV shows and movies are buried behind 7 different premium streaming services that all cost around $15 a month to subscribe to if you want to watch them without ads... well... let's just say that my feelings about pirating content and moderated somewhat.
Re: Teenager in a 72 year old's body (Score:2)
Thereâ(TM)s a few problems with your proposition.
First is, a lionâ(TM)s share of that cost goes to layers of rent seeking, entrenched âoeproduction and distributionâ outfits that add little value.
Second, for the zillions of creative and technical credits, itâ(TM)s not like those folks entire income depends on their contribution to that particular production.
I would agree that the people who do actual work on a production deserve adequate compensation. But the current model is broken
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Other thing about him is that in his student days at MIT, people used to share logins and not have passwords to anything, so that anything anyone created was accessible by anybody and everybody. Which was fine in a campus environment, and at a time when the only people connected to any internet were students. That was before virus authors and other malware creators were rampant
But somehow, he expects the same level of openness when the internet exploded, and started getting used by normal people, not ju
He avoided answering directly.... (Score:2)
I agree with him about DRM. I have some songs that are legal, yet iTunes now Music won't play. The music program Apple bought years ago that I used, would play any song file. Yup, hate that.
Coming up next (Score:2)
72 year old male arrested on suspicion of piracy and wire fraud after a warrant was executed at his home. (they always throw in wire fraud as a bonus, regardless of the actual crime).
Yes - until copyright terms are fair (Score:2)
Until the length of the copyright PRIVILEGE that we the people *give* to CREATORS to encourage CREATION are fair, and not a RIDICULOUS 95 years,
All Piracy is fair
Stallman is right about this (Score:5, Insightful)
We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.
Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a [1]criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be [2]fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. [3]The Statute of Anne [american.edu] was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.
That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.
Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.
But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506
[2] https://freepubliclibrary.org/
[3] https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/1277/
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> if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions?
The obvious answer is campaign contributions.
Another answer is that the nature of their activity is novel. As such it's arguable that the creation of the training corpus is fair use. The models themselves don't include the works in question and they don't reproduce them verbatim. You can train a model at home which will do it, but only by absurd overtraining, and by including basically nothing else. None of them are redistributing models like that. A derivative work has to include sufficiently recognizable
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"The models themselves don't include the works in question and they don't reproduce them verbatim." - Well according to NYT they do [1]https://nytco-assets.nytimes.c... [nytimes.com]
[1] https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/Lawsuit-Document-dkt-1-68-Ex-J.pdf
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They had to use a huge piece of the article as the prompt, and their own examples show that it still generated text that wasn't in the articles.
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Agree, but it still proves the point that OpenAI used NYT articles to train their model. At least that's my understanding.
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My understanding was that they were trying to prove it was an original or derivative work because of its ability to reproduce the story. We already knew they were training on their articles.
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We knew, but OpenAI denies all allegations :D
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It certainly wouldn't be intelligent for them to admit to anything, due to how our courts work.
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> Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense [cornell.edu] vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.
> I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal [freepubliclibrary.org], just as rms is saying.
> Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.
> Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.
Copyright law was created to ensure that someone could actually make a living creating new works. In the past you could achieve that objective by focusing on commercial publication because distribution was so difficult (your legalization of noncommerical infringement would have ruined that).
Libraries are an edge case that were allowed to exist because whatever you think of the law they worked out for everyone.
But now with the internet publication is trivial, so laws need to adapt. I don't think end-users sh
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And how will that impact FOSS? You have to remember copyleft depends on copyright to work.
If non-commercial infringement is allowed, that removes GPL from power. Because I can say make an improvement to a piece of GPL software, and as long as I don't make it commercial I can release my changed software without releasing the source code.
So I take Linux. I add my closed source driver to it, and only provide you a Linux kernel binary with my driver built in. I distribute it freely. I would not be violating the
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That kind of copyright law doesn't stand up to unlimited digital copies. Me waiting for a song to come on the radio so I could copy it to a cassette didn't deprive anyone of sales. Copying one CD at a time doesn't meaningfully impact anything. But when anyone can have any piece of software, any piece of media, instantly for free? Who is going to write software or make media in those conditions? With peer-to-peer tech, nobody even has to pay hosting costs. Copyright terms are far, far too long, and DRM is e
Stallman has always been a nut (Score:3)
People have always overlooked the fact Stallman is a nut because he also advocated for linux and did a pretty good job of it in the early days. But then I think he did a lot to sideline himself by appearing too extreme. When someone can see themselves in you, you can lead by example. But, people stopped seeing anything they had in common with Stallman.
The fact he always tries to coin juvenile little catch phrases doesn't help his case any: "internet of stings", "forbidden sharing", etc. Of course, the whole sexual misconduct thing stuck a fork in him, but he was already done.
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> The fact he always tries to coin juvenile little catch phrases doesn't help his case any: "internet of stings", "forbidden sharing", etc.
It's an attempt at framing. "Piracy" was coined intentionally, because it frames as evil theft, not copying. "Forbidden sharing" brings to mind those years where kids weren't allowed to trade lunches at school because a principal decided it was an allergy risk.
Could just be Stallman has less luck than Doctorow - "enshittification" seems to have caught on rather nicely.
Not everyone can live off appearance fees. (Score:3)
Some people have to work for a living and wouldn't appreciate it if they couldn't get paid for their efforts. I know the air is thin atop an ivory tower, but if he thinks programmers can all just work for free, he is nuts.
I agree with him on one thing (Score:2)
It's not piracy. Piracy is when you take something from others, and probably scream "YARRRR!!" and swing a cutlass around, maybe with a peg leg and a parrot on the shoulder. "Forbidden sharing" is a far more apt name. Other people still have their software. I'm not saying its harmless - it does have the potential to rob people of an income. It also has the potential of boosting people's income, if you trial it and like it, and then go and buy it. So yeah there are definitely both positive and negative aspec
Copying != Sharing (Score:1)
Richard Stallman is clearly a man of at least average intelligence and hence is aware that copying and sharing are entirely different things. "Sharing", means that there is only one copy of the resource and I am simply giving you a share of my resource, whether that's lending you something or giving you half my pie.
Copying means there are now two of them and you and I have one each.
It's called COPYright not SHAREright for a reason, which is also why the whole libraries comparison is irrelevant.
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"Sharing", means that there is only one copy of the resource
Bollocks. You can share knowledge and ideas.
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That's because words can have several meanings. (The OED says that "share" can also mean "To cut the fleece off an animal".)
But share as in "sharing an idea" is not the meaning that we are talking about HERE is it?
You may also wish to look up the word "equivocation".
Hardly anything worth copying anymore (Score:2)
I do not understand how or why this discussion is coming up now, this is not the 90s anymore and we have seen what the riaa and mpaa cronies have done for 30+ years, so it is a dead discussion.
But nowadays, I am honestly baffled what anyone would copy or share anymore, the overwhelming majority of shows and movies have gotten so terrible I would not even waste the download on them. And the actually good shows and movies, I had eventually bought multiple copies and different formats of over the years anyway,
Licensing Science (Score:2)
While I disagree with Stallman about sharing works that are creative, I strongly concur when it comes to paywalling science and scientific endeavour. To me, the idea that someone can license knowledge - even for a limited period - is a category error that leads to a breakdown of the covenant of science and scientific progress.
The Power of Entitlement (Score:2)
I am not fan of DRM. However, I love how people who cannot afford or don’t like the terms feel entitled to access of other’s work. Does it suck, sure but yeah, leveraging/using someone else’s work w/o compensation when they require it takes real moral licensing.
i wish there was a legal bundle it all service (Score:2)
imagine kodi or whatever, but legal. it shows you all available shows and movies, and interacts with whatever streaming network it is on. has lots of plans available, including a la carte and bundle the entire catalog of multiple streaming providers. all within a single app or website.
it is not convenient having to juggle within all multiple streaming apps / sites. i would pay for this convenience
No software is free (Score:2)
Even open source software costs something, a person's life spent to create it. The only way to have a just system with truly free software is to collectively pay developers to produce the software we want. Otherwise, you're just asking for free labor. Politically and economically, and as a software developer, I totally support a global effort to pay software developers to make the software everyone needs. Realistically, under the current economic mode of production, that means not all software is going to b
Interesting (Score:1)
"The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
I know what this means, do you?
LOL!
One problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
He advocates for ignoring copyright law, which is fine, but on the other hand, copyright law is the basis of how the GPL actually has meaning.
If he advocated for everything always being public domain, that's a consistent stance. However, it's a bit weird to say that people shouldn't respect copyright, unless it's respecting the copyright as it pertains to GPL software.
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> He advocates for ignoring copyright law,
Based on the summary he didn't advocate ignoring copyright law. In the link in the summary, he advocated changing copyright law. I didn't watch the video in the summary, but it's summarized in the summary.
Where are you quoting him that he advocated ignoring copyright law?
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Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it."
"The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."
So he doesn't like pirating closed source software, not because of the copyright but because no source is provided and in that scenario he demands source code.
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> He advocates for ignoring copyright law, which is fine, but on the other hand, copyright law is the basis of how the GPL actually has meaning.
Would we need the GPL if copyright law didn't exist?
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Interesting question. GPL forces people to share their modifications, and disallows tivoization (using technical means to prevent running modified software). It's a contract, but I'm not sure you could force people to enter into it without copyright.
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Anti-"TiVoization" is only there in GPL 3, which, other than GNU utilities, I'm not sure is used as a license by most FOSS projects. Linux uses GNU 2.0, although if the whole OS is re-written in Rust, I suspect it may end up using a more permissive license, such as MIT
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Arguably yes; Without it you'd see everything locked up behind various DRM, signed code only, and other schemes.
You'd have the source but it would be nearly useless because no manufacturer would make any contemporary hardware that can run code that has not been blessed. Good luck getting TSMC to fab your FOSS hardware on a useful process.
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For non-copyright scenario, that would be public domain, and we have that option already. Anyone can take any code they find and do whatever they want. Make a totally closed source solution that did come from linux, but refuse to acknowledge Linux had anything to do with it? Without copyright law, that's fine.
GPL wants to protect the original creative intent, to make sure that someone doesn't just close up your code and make something out of it without sharing your principles or throwing away credit for it
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You seem to misunderstand the GPL. There is little, if anything, to it about "protect the original creative intent", nor about "throwing away credit", nor about "preserve credit for contributors."
In fact, preserving credit is one of the things that made the old 4-clause BSD license incompatible with the GPL, due to the "advertising clause" (Ref. 4 clause BSD license: [1]https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-... [spdx.org]).
The GPL is about your personal freedoms. It attempts to ensure that you are free to use and modify whatever
[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html
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Bingo!
The GPL uses copyright law to preserve the right to share and prevent people from locking up free software behind paywalls.
If there was no copyright law, the GPL wouldn't be necessary.
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He also doesn't believe that sexual assault exists, at least not when it comes to minors.
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Actually, he changed his views on that late, once someone described to him how it left him/her (forgetting which) badly damaged. But it is bizarre that it had to be explained to him before he accepted that minors are not mature enough to know the consequences of consenting to sexual acts when they are still young
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He advocates sharing, and the GPL allows sharing.
He says to ignore laws that block sharing. That means ignoring some parts of copyright law. Some other parts of copyright law are fine. There's no contradiction.
(And if someone has a follow up question about sharing everything, no, he doesn't advocate for sharing everything. Some stuff is personal, for example. He's in favour of sharing generally useful technical information, such as the source code of software that has been given to you.)
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When you have software that has been released for free, of course the attitude SHOULD be that you share the stuff that is available for free. The problem is when it costs MONEY to develop software. Yep, the big commercial software costs money to make and maintain it, so why should it be free to copy?
There's a big difference between "I have so much money, everything I make I can give away for free!", and "put money in to the development process, put money into sales/marketing, put money into SUPPORT, now
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If you can't put terms that could interfere with sharing, then it's hard to imagine enforcing a copyleft mindset. You make a private modification and you want to share your privately modified edition as you see fit, then you opt not to share source code. If you can force them to only share if they also share their modification, then that's a restriction on sharing.
That's pretty much all copyright does, it lets the creator dictate the terms of when it may/may not be shared.
I suppose you could say something
His stance is perfectly consistent (Score:2)
He only uses copyright law to enforce that people cannot share binaries without also offering to provide the source code because of copyright. If copyright laws did not exist, most proprietary software would be but one source code leak away from becoming free software, and even if it never leaked, reverse engineering would see to it that everything gets freed anyway.
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We've been reverse engineering Windows for decades (which is already legal) and while it is quite impressive, it is far from complete.
Decompilation of games from the 90s has been a topic of interest, and only a few have been successfully done.
A lack of copyright law would by far not result in everything being 'copyleft' by default.
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The GPL only exploits copyright law. If copyright law went away, there'd be no reason for the GPL to exist.
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But that's incorrect. If copyright law went away, everything would be public domain, and so the 'no copyright law' choice would be to release to public domain, not to GPL.
GPL uses copyright to ensure:
- Contributors preserve credit for their work
- Any redistribution reciprocates the source code availability.
Absent copyright laws, people could take GPL software closed source and refuse to credit the actual authors.
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His views on this are well known, if one has read the dozens of essays he has written on the subject on gnu dot org. In one of them, he explained how Copyleft was invented to use Copyright laws against it i.e. to prevent something from being used in a Copyright. Of course, end result of that is the GPL license being incompatible w/ most other licenses, and is a part of the reason basic GNU utilities are getting re-written in Rust. So that they can be re-licensed under MIT or other more permissive license
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The views are well known, but inconsistent. Copyright and software ownership is evil, but I want the software *I* create to be handled the specific way I want, and I want some legal authority to enforce my rights over my software.
If he said "everything should be public domain", then it is consistent, but having his own set of restrictions that he thinks are correct is inconsistent with the view that restrictions on redistribution are bad.
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The intention of the GPL is to be a judo trick to subvert copyright law and use it against itself until it can be dismantled. The philosophy is as long as you have to live under this unjust system, let's use the legal tools it gives us to forward our cause as best we can.
Same way anarchist groups will have legal defense funds. Just because you don't believe in the system and want to dismantle it doesn't mean you get to entirely ignore it.