[ Thanks to Fra. 219 for
this link. ]
Though it starts out with RMS explaining why he wouldn’t permit
the Forum in which he was speaking to be webcast, the bulk of this
transcript deals with what the title says: copyright and
globalization, with a nod to Courtney Love, micropayments, the
Grateful Dead, and Stephen King.
ObFutileAttemptAtExcerpt:
“Well, what does that mean? Should you be free to copy
it and change it? Well, as for changing it, if you buy the
microphone, nobody is going to stop you from changing it. And as
for copying it, nobody has a microphone copier. Outside of “Star
Trek,” those things don’t exist. Maybe some day there?ll be
nanotechnological analyzers and assemblers, and it really will be
possible to copy a physical object, and then these issues of
whether you’re free to do that will start being really important.
We’ll see agribusiness companies trying to stop people from copying
food, and that will become a major political issue, if that
technological capability will ever exist. I don?t know if it will;
it’s just speculation at this point.But for other kinds of information, you can raise the issue
because any kind of information that can be stored on a computer,
conceivably, can be copied and modified. So the ethical issues of
free software, the issues of a user’s right to copy and modify
software, are the same as such questions for other kinds of
published information. Now I’m not talking about private
information, say, personal information, which is never meant to be
available to the public at all. I’m talking about the rights you
should have if you get copies of published things where there?s no
attempt to keep them secret.In order to explain my ideas on the subject, I’d like to review
the history of the distribution of information and of copyright. In
the ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and
anybody who knew how to read and write could copy a book about as
efficiently as anybody else. Now somebody who did it all day would
probably learn to be somewhat better at it, but there was not a
tremendous difference. And because the copies were made one at a
time, there was no great economy of scale. Making ten copies took
ten times as long as making one copy. There was also nothing
forcing centralization; a book could be copied anywhere.”