12 ms·

The Right to Read (1997)

379 points by boogies 6y ago

nivenkos 6y ago
I'd recommend reading the whole of Free Software, Free Society: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf (PDF)
- cashewchoo 6y ago
  I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college. I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. RMS has lots of enemies, and most of the stuff you read about him is fabricated. You start with a grain of truth, mix in a few half-truths, add a bold-faced lie, and you've got a great smear. I mean, he doesn't have the best human interface, but people take that, and use that as the basis of rumors to destroy him. Read about his departure from MIT/FSF. Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing.
    - gumby 6y ago
      > I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. The GP said, "I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does" He does have sexist problems and has as long as I've known him (late 70s). We have been on again / off again friends over the decades, but never enemies so no reason to fabricate anything. As you say he has other issues both good and bad; this comment is specifically about the one issue.
      - murgindrag 6y ago
        Great. You know him. So do I. Now, does your knowledge of him justify this headline: "Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world." But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power. And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward. And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.
        bitwize 6y ago
        EDIT: Former comment snipped. krapp has the correct take on this. RMS is a known defender of pedophilia, and what happened to him was not a smear campaign at all, but understandable revulsion to someone who is provably a very gross individual when he put his foot in his mouth (figuratively speaking).
        identity0 6y ago
        I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
    - judge2020 6y ago
      > Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing. Given that so few people do this (in general, not just in regards to RMS), A smear is just as bad for PR as a non-smear, so it makes sense that organizations would want to limit collateral damage ASAP.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      The rules have changed. We want the programming community to be a welcoming community for women, and part of the cost of that is we have to close it off to the creepier sort of nerd, which is well established and documented to describe Stallman. Fix your behavior or get out. Or find that organizations that hope for legitimacy want nothing to do with you.
      - murgindrag 6y ago
        If you want a programming community welcoming of minorities, you need to look to be inclusive. Signals change between cultures, and you want to look at what people DO, not whether they feel "creepy" to you. Median Indians, Africans, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans all feel "creepy" to American women (at least until they learn the differences in body language, communication patterns, and so on). Indeed, they feel creepy to each other. For that matter, lawyers, engineers, and marketing people all feel "creepy" to each other until they build those cultural bridges.
      - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        The community was very welcoming to all people, until the SJW moved in and started to tell others to get out.
        bitwize 6y ago
        No. Read krapp's posts. Stallman was for years provably a defender of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children. He does not deserve to be a leader in our community.
        Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        While i do not agree with RMS fringe opinion on that matter, he was no defender of abuse. I am not going to discuss the details of the meaning of the words "sexual abuse of children" with you, because for what i have to say it is irrelevant how much you want to bend and weaken this once meaningful phrase. This is going to be about your willingness to relentlessly exaggerate to fuel your own cause: it has made you the one harassing people based on their opinion. And we don't like your kind of people here. Tell me, why don't you go and fight someone whose actions endanger women and children? Maybe go after the rich friends of sleazy playboy Epstein, who was very charming with the ladies and ran a criminal brothel. Or go after the prophet who married girls as young as seven and wrote about that in a holy book followed dogmatically by a major religion. Or go and protest actual child labor and marriage in Nigeria. And when i mean "go" and don't mean "talk more" i mean please go. And take your agenda with you. Your "more welcoming to women" is nothing but some self-absorbed narcissism, you are like a chauvinistic minstrel knight, who is claiming to make the road safe for the weak sex by the might of your sword, yet does nothing but bicker and bitch about your chosen enemy, the "creepy nerd who voiced opinions you don't agree with" - oh what heroic deeds you do. Such macho behavior would not even impresses some giggling girls of first semester gender studies, and it will surly not impress the honorable ladies of the community, who wrote code that sent people to space, power aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and the internet, who followed for generations in the footsteps of women like Rear Admiral Dr Grace "Grandma Cobol" Hopper. They neither need, nor want your twitter drama style vigilante protectionism. Oh and on your way out, take that "smearing people for great justice" and "the accused should prove innocence" garbage you spouted in your comments here out with you. You overstepped, you are far out of line, and your opinions don't speak well for the community, so by your own logic, get out! Am i being clear? You are done, you are canceled, you f'd up and are not welcome anymore. So say, how does it feel, when people go after you for some stupid thing you said? Again, i am not defending rms opinion about a topic of your choice, my point is: every community the SJW enter with their agenda of what they say will bring positive change long term turns into a toxic swamp of social drama. They are a splinter group of totalitarian socialists, believing to mold the people into ideal humans by means of social pressure, and are willing to harasse or even terrorize people, while demanding every aspect of society must follow their orthodox philosophy, because only then they can get rid of all the degenerates. I sure don't want those radicals as leadership, either. I see them as a danger to the very foundations of democracy and freedom. But they are very successful because they imagine themselves as the righteous guardians of morality and grant immediate feelings of power and social cohesion when they vigilante mob someone. So tell me, who should lead the community? Because for me it looks a lot like it is soon going to be a duma selected to match quotas of race, age, gender and sexuality, but limited to a strict and orthodox set of believes not about the communal subject matter, but about everything else. This duma will be plagued by constant infighting, bickering, and their tries to socially assassinated each other, like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. They will focus not on source-code but on code-of-conduct, not on merit in the subject-matter but on the flaws of the person. They will establish no inclusive infrastructure, but systematic precedence for canceling access, denying bug reports and even merge requests because of things like arbitrary twitter drama. For this astonishing communal work they will be paid by the corporations that wish for nothing more then to embrace and expand the community, throwing around buzzwords like welcoming, diverse and inclusive to justify such involvement. How is it a welcoming community that tells people that their technological and intellectual commitment is not welcome, because their opinion on an unrelated matter in a different context is not in line? These very corporations already try to rebrand "free and open source" as the feature-incomplete version of "enterprise edition" and their next step is to exploit: participating in such communities will become a job requirement: you want to be a programmer? work for free, prove you not only have technical skill but can stay in line in behavior and opinion, and then we will maybe see about some gig work. It is young adults, barely legal, who are most vulnerable to such promises and they will comply willingly.
    - LukeShu 6y ago
      Your replies seem to be focused in the reaction to his defense of Minsky. Without defending what he said, you're right, it's disgusting how that was reported on compared to what he actually said. However, (according to Bradley Kuhn, who was a FSF board member at the time) his removal from the FSF was a long time coming even without that incident, though that wasn't obvious from the outside. Bradley Kuhn was able to write the sentence "In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years" with each word linked to a separate post from RMS, spread from 2016 to 2019. Perhaps it's just my reading of them, but your comments give the sense that his defense of Minsky was the only wrong thing he said. That's its own half-truth on your part, there's plenty more that he's been saying for years. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
nine_k 6y ago
I read it back when it was published, and thought: "this logic is incontrovertible, but assumptions are way dark; what is the probability he's right?" In less than a decade, I was convinced RMS had been right. This is why I look very warily at anything based in a third-party cloud, because later RMS warned about its downsides, too, way earlier than the general crowd started to realize them. Before 23 years have passed, I'd like to remind about another gloom-and-doom warning, by Cory Doctorow in 2012: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
- murgindrag 6y ago
  RMS has always been prophetic. He's got the biggest Cassandra syndrome of anyone I've known. He's 100% right most of the time (at least evaluated a decade or two later), and most people have always thought that he sounds like a nutcase. He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    Yes, it's amazing. He was using systems with Free bootloaders and bios etc. before Librem Purism was a thing at all, and has continually been on the bleeding edge of privacy and freedom. The problem is, of course, that he's socially Quite Something, and that makes people have a natural level of disbelief that is the polar opposite of, say, the effect that a good cult leader, con man, grifter, or salesman has in terms of convincing people. He has like a -10 to Charisma, except he's actually really engaging and interesting, like a street preacher with 150 IQ. The change he has affected in the world is phenomenal. It will continue to be a thing long after he's gone. Would be that people would walk around with his bearded visage on their shirts instead of Che and Marx.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/RMS-Face-of-freedom-by-hexdsl/11887846.NL9AC.XYZ https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/RMS-Face-of-freedom-by-h.... :D
  - 6y ago
ve55 6y ago
I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lose Internet, it is there if I stop paying for various subscriptions, and it is there even if companies receive takedown notices, or otherwise just remove content for arbitrary reasons with no transparency or warning. It's sad how difficult it is becoming for users to actually own any of their own files. We don't own our music, we use spotify. We don't own our videos, we use Youtube. We don't even own the things we write ourselves, we use Twitter, Medium, Facebook, Discord, and more, and as of more recently, we sometimes do not even own hardware that we purchase ourselves (far too many examples)! youtube-dl being taken down today due to DMCA is a great showcase in how user-hostile the end-game here may actually be: you cannot own anything yourself, and must only access it on the terms of many very large parties (corporations, governments, laws, IP, etc), whose interests are not only not aligned with yours, but often completely inversed. You never know when your favorite content on the Internet may completely disappear. Youtube videos get taken down, github repositories and all of their forks get removed, sometimes personal accounts for services such as Facebook or Google are deleted permanently and with no recourse, and sometimes even entire websites and services go dark, whether they shut down, are deplatformed, or get DMCA'd. While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users, I will continue to do so myself until I'm not longer able to.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.
  - est31 6y ago
    That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matters-why-were-fighting-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...
CapitalistCartr 6y ago
Not counting the kid's books, I have about 1600 books in the house, and every time I read another kindle-style invidious story about forced changes after purchase, I buy more paper. I actually prefer reading on a screen, and someday, it'll be safe to do so.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  DRM-free books should be a suitable replacement, no?
- gen220 6y ago
  There's plenty of websites where you can download drm-free pdfs/mobis of most of the world's texts (at least I can attest for English, I'm less familiar with other languages). I also usually buy paper books. If you buy the book, you shouldn't feel particularly guilty for "acquiring" the pdf/mobi. :)
- oriesdan 6y ago
  Do you know wikisource? [1] It contains hundreds of thousands of public domain books that you can read online or download. You can even download the whole collection as a zimfile [2], readable with kiwix [3]. Obviously all without DRM/phone home spywares/forced updates/remote control. [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages [3] https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/
HaoZeke 6y ago
Am I the only one surprised to see that the article thinks researchers are paid royalties for their articles? That's actually way better than the system now
ggm 6y ago
No mention of the kindle 1984 incident..
- iso1210 6y ago
  This was written over 20 years ago, and predicted things like the kindle. The tech community nowadays seems to consider Stallman as at best an object of pity, which is a shame. His only failing in his predictions seems to have been not realising just how many other ways we will be attacked beyond simple copyright
  - ggm 6y ago
    sorry. let me re-phrase: no mention of the kindle 1984 incident.. in the comment threads here in HN.
miki123211 6y ago
In my opinion, a good compromise between DRM and just giving everyone an epub file is watermarking. For me at least, watermarks do the job much better. I can consume the content in any way I choose, but I can't share it. DRM is usually breakable, and you can do whatever you wish with the content after you break it. With watermarks, however, you never know whether you've fully removed them or not, so you're actually afraid of sharing your content, even if you're technically able to do so. The only problem with watermarking is that it doesn't really work with the streaming model, as not giving you access when the subscription expires is the whole point.

379 points by boogies 6y ago

I'd recommend reading the whole of Free Software, Free Society: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf (PDF)

cashewchoo 6y ago
I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college. I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. RMS has lots of enemies, and most of the stuff you read about him is fabricated. You start with a grain of truth, mix in a few half-truths, add a bold-faced lie, and you've got a great smear. I mean, he doesn't have the best human interface, but people take that, and use that as the basis of rumors to destroy him. Read about his departure from MIT/FSF. Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people. The GP said, "I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does" He does have sexist problems and has as long as I've known him (late 70s). We have been on again / off again friends over the decades, but never enemies so no reason to fabricate anything. As you say he has other issues both good and bad; this comment is specifically about the one issue.
    - murgindrag 6y ago
      Great. You know him. So do I. Now, does your knowledge of him justify this headline: "Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world." But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power. And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward. And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.
      - bitwize 6y ago
        EDIT: Former comment snipped. krapp has the correct take on this. RMS is a known defender of pedophilia, and what happened to him was not a smear campaign at all, but understandable revulsion to someone who is provably a very gross individual when he put his foot in his mouth (figuratively speaking).
        identity0 6y ago
        I can't tell if you're for or against the Stallman smear campaign. You can't possibly say that "We live in a post-truth world" and actually think that's a good thing, right? EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
  - judge2020 6y ago
    > Compare what he wrote to what he was accused of writing. Given that so few people do this (in general, not just in regards to RMS), A smear is just as bad for PR as a non-smear, so it makes sense that organizations would want to limit collateral damage ASAP.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    The rules have changed. We want the programming community to be a welcoming community for women, and part of the cost of that is we have to close it off to the creepier sort of nerd, which is well established and documented to describe Stallman. Fix your behavior or get out. Or find that organizations that hope for legitimacy want nothing to do with you.
    - murgindrag 6y ago
      If you want a programming community welcoming of minorities, you need to look to be inclusive. Signals change between cultures, and you want to look at what people DO, not whether they feel "creepy" to you. Median Indians, Africans, Chinese, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans all feel "creepy" to American women (at least until they learn the differences in body language, communication patterns, and so on). Indeed, they feel creepy to each other. For that matter, lawyers, engineers, and marketing people all feel "creepy" to each other until they build those cultural bridges.
    - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
      The community was very welcoming to all people, until the SJW moved in and started to tell others to get out.
      - bitwize 6y ago
        No. Read krapp's posts. Stallman was for years provably a defender of pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children. He does not deserve to be a leader in our community.
        Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        While i do not agree with RMS fringe opinion on that matter, he was no defender of abuse. I am not going to discuss the details of the meaning of the words "sexual abuse of children" with you, because for what i have to say it is irrelevant how much you want to bend and weaken this once meaningful phrase. This is going to be about your willingness to relentlessly exaggerate to fuel your own cause: it has made you the one harassing people based on their opinion. And we don't like your kind of people here. Tell me, why don't you go and fight someone whose actions endanger women and children? Maybe go after the rich friends of sleazy playboy Epstein, who was very charming with the ladies and ran a criminal brothel. Or go after the prophet who married girls as young as seven and wrote about that in a holy book followed dogmatically by a major religion. Or go and protest actual child labor and marriage in Nigeria. And when i mean "go" and don't mean "talk more" i mean please go. And take your agenda with you. Your "more welcoming to women" is nothing but some self-absorbed narcissism, you are like a chauvinistic minstrel knight, who is claiming to make the road safe for the weak sex by the might of your sword, yet does nothing but bicker and bitch about your chosen enemy, the "creepy nerd who voiced opinions you don't agree with" - oh what heroic deeds you do. Such macho behavior would not even impresses some giggling girls of first semester gender studies, and it will surly not impress the honorable ladies of the community, who wrote code that sent people to space, power aircraft carriers, nuclear plants and the internet, who followed for generations in the footsteps of women like Rear Admiral Dr Grace "Grandma Cobol" Hopper. They neither need, nor want your twitter drama style vigilante protectionism. Oh and on your way out, take that "smearing people for great justice" and "the accused should prove innocence" garbage you spouted in your comments here out with you. You overstepped, you are far out of line, and your opinions don't speak well for the community, so by your own logic, get out! Am i being clear? You are done, you are canceled, you f'd up and are not welcome anymore. So say, how does it feel, when people go after you for some stupid thing you said? Again, i am not defending rms opinion about a topic of your choice, my point is: every community the SJW enter with their agenda of what they say will bring positive change long term turns into a toxic swamp of social drama. They are a splinter group of totalitarian socialists, believing to mold the people into ideal humans by means of social pressure, and are willing to harasse or even terrorize people, while demanding every aspect of society must follow their orthodox philosophy, because only then they can get rid of all the degenerates. I sure don't want those radicals as leadership, either. I see them as a danger to the very foundations of democracy and freedom. But they are very successful because they imagine themselves as the righteous guardians of morality and grant immediate feelings of power and social cohesion when they vigilante mob someone. So tell me, who should lead the community? Because for me it looks a lot like it is soon going to be a duma selected to match quotas of race, age, gender and sexuality, but limited to a strict and orthodox set of believes not about the communal subject matter, but about everything else. This duma will be plagued by constant infighting, bickering, and their tries to socially assassinated each other, like a bunch of crabs in a barrel. They will focus not on source-code but on code-of-conduct, not on merit in the subject-matter but on the flaws of the person. They will establish no inclusive infrastructure, but systematic precedence for canceling access, denying bug reports and even merge requests because of things like arbitrary twitter drama. For this astonishing communal work they will be paid by the corporations that wish for nothing more then to embrace and expand the community, throwing around buzzwords like welcoming, diverse and inclusive to justify such involvement. How is it a welcoming community that tells people that their technological and intellectual commitment is not welcome, because their opinion on an unrelated matter in a different context is not in line? These very corporations already try to rebrand "free and open source" as the feature-incomplete version of "enterprise edition" and their next step is to exploit: participating in such communities will become a job requirement: you want to be a programmer? work for free, prove you not only have technical skill but can stay in line in behavior and opinion, and then we will maybe see about some gig work. It is young adults, barely legal, who are most vulnerable to such promises and they will comply willingly.
  - LukeShu 6y ago
    Your replies seem to be focused in the reaction to his defense of Minsky. Without defending what he said, you're right, it's disgusting how that was reported on compared to what he actually said. However, (according to Bradley Kuhn, who was a FSF board member at the time) his removal from the FSF was a long time coming even without that incident, though that wasn't obvious from the outside. Bradley Kuhn was able to write the sentence "In fact, RMS' views and statements posted on stallman.org about sexual morality escalated for the worse over the last few years" with each word linked to a separate post from RMS, spread from 2016 to 2019. Perhaps it's just my reading of them, but your comments give the sense that his defense of Minsky was the only wrong thing he said. That's its own half-truth on your part, there's plenty more that he's been saying for years. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

nine_k 6y ago

I read it back when it was published, and thought: "this logic is incontrovertible, but assumptions are way dark; what is the probability he's right?" In less than a decade, I was convinced RMS had been right. This is why I look very warily at anything based in a third-party cloud, because later RMS warned about its downsides, too, way earlier than the general crowd started to realize them. Before 23 years have passed, I'd like to remind about another gloom-and-doom warning, by Cory Doctorow in 2012: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

murgindrag 6y ago
RMS has always been prophetic. He's got the biggest Cassandra syndrome of anyone I've known. He's 100% right most of the time (at least evaluated a decade or two later), and most people have always thought that he sounds like a nutcase. He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.
- core-questions 6y ago
  Yes, it's amazing. He was using systems with Free bootloaders and bios etc. before Librem Purism was a thing at all, and has continually been on the bleeding edge of privacy and freedom. The problem is, of course, that he's socially Quite Something, and that makes people have a natural level of disbelief that is the polar opposite of, say, the effect that a good cult leader, con man, grifter, or salesman has in terms of convincing people. He has like a -10 to Charisma, except he's actually really engaging and interesting, like a street preacher with 150 IQ. The change he has affected in the world is phenomenal. It will continue to be a thing long after he's gone. Would be that people would walk around with his bearded visage on their shirts instead of Che and Marx.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/RMS-Face-of-freedom-by-hexdsl/11887846.NL9AC.XYZ https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/RMS-Face-of-freedom-by-h.... :D
- 6y ago

ve55 6y ago

I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lose Internet, it is there if I stop paying for various subscriptions, and it is there even if companies receive takedown notices, or otherwise just remove content for arbitrary reasons with no transparency or warning. It's sad how difficult it is becoming for users to actually own any of their own files. We don't own our music, we use spotify. We don't own our videos, we use Youtube. We don't even own the things we write ourselves, we use Twitter, Medium, Facebook, Discord, and more, and as of more recently, we sometimes do not even own hardware that we purchase ourselves (far too many examples)! youtube-dl being taken down today due to DMCA is a great showcase in how user-hostile the end-game here may actually be: you cannot own anything yourself, and must only access it on the terms of many very large parties (corporations, governments, laws, IP, etc), whose interests are not only not aligned with yours, but often completely inversed. You never know when your favorite content on the Internet may completely disappear. Youtube videos get taken down, github repositories and all of their forks get removed, sometimes personal accounts for services such as Facebook or Google are deleted permanently and with no recourse, and sometimes even entire websites and services go dark, whether they shut down, are deplatformed, or get DMCA'd. While I won't be able to convince most of my friends or family to keep their own files for all of their valued content, since it can be a difficult hassle for nontechnical users, I will continue to do so myself until I'm not longer able to.

titanomachy 6y ago
You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it. Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.
- est31 6y ago
  That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matters-why-were-fighting-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...

CapitalistCartr 6y ago

Not counting the kid's books, I have about 1600 books in the house, and every time I read another kindle-style invidious story about forced changes after purchase, I buy more paper. I actually prefer reading on a screen, and someday, it'll be safe to do so.

saagarjha 6y ago
DRM-free books should be a suitable replacement, no?
gen220 6y ago
There's plenty of websites where you can download drm-free pdfs/mobis of most of the world's texts (at least I can attest for English, I'm less familiar with other languages). I also usually buy paper books. If you buy the book, you shouldn't feel particularly guilty for "acquiring" the pdf/mobi. :)
oriesdan 6y ago
Do you know wikisource? [1] It contains hundreds of thousands of public domain books that you can read online or download. You can even download the whole collection as a zimfile [2], readable with kiwix [3]. Obviously all without DRM/phone home spywares/forced updates/remote control. [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page [2] https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages [3] https://www.kiwix.org/en/ https://www.kiwix.org/en/

HaoZeke 6y ago

Am I the only one surprised to see that the article thinks researchers are paid royalties for their articles? That's actually way better than the system now

ggm 6y ago

No mention of the kindle 1984 incident..

iso1210 6y ago
This was written over 20 years ago, and predicted things like the kindle. The tech community nowadays seems to consider Stallman as at best an object of pity, which is a shame. His only failing in his predictions seems to have been not realising just how many other ways we will be attacked beyond simple copyright
- ggm 6y ago
  sorry. let me re-phrase: no mention of the kindle 1984 incident.. in the comment threads here in HN.

miki123211 6y ago

In my opinion, a good compromise between DRM and just giving everyone an epub file is watermarking. For me at least, watermarks do the job much better. I can consume the content in any way I choose, but I can't share it. DRM is usually breakable, and you can do whatever you wish with the content after you break it. With watermarks, however, you never know whether you've fully removed them or not, so you're actually afraid of sharing your content, even if you're technically able to do so. The only problem with watermarking is that it doesn't really work with the streaming model, as not giving you access when the subscription expires is the whole point.