12 ms·

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage righ

by apricot 12y ago

Richard Stallman spent the last 30 years telling us this would happen. As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights. As soon as tractors contain computer code, you don't own them anymore, you are granted a license to use them. When will it stop? More and more everyday objects are incorporating software and firmware in many different forms. I remember reading Stallman's short story "The Right to Read" in the 1990s. I found it alarmist and completely unrealistic. I read it today and am forced to recognize that Stallman was exactly right.

fweespeech 12y ago
Some of us just don't buy DRM books and make copies for personal archival purposes.
sker 12y ago
What happens when we have computers implanted in our brains? Do I no longer own my brain?
- jellicle 12y ago
  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/
- aeturnum 12y ago
  "Metabolic control. Enhanced sensory perception. Improved reflexes and muscle capacity. Vastly increased data processing speed and capacity. All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9. We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. " - Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script
  - simplemath 12y ago
    Such a great movie.
    - aeturnum 12y ago
      Shirow's vision of a post-digital society is extremely forward looking for 1990. Many of the themes he was interested in 25 years ago are only starting to come into focus now, which is pretty legit for a pop scifi author.
      - simplemath 12y ago
        I cannot think of an anime film particularly that is as prescient as Ghost in the Shell. For my money, the best non Miyazaki piece of art the genre ever produced.
- LLWM 12y ago
  What happened to australopithicus? You'll be free to starve with a meat-based brain as everyone with implants outcompetes you at everything if you'd prefer.
- arca_vorago 12y ago
  I think the brain reading writing argument is a really good example that should be used in discussion of this topic more often and more in depth. It shows even a layman how this issues can have a real ompact.
- dropit_sphere 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQC62FUgqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQC62FUgqw
andrepd 12y ago
Alarming is the proper way to describe it. I remember how I thought it would never happen that I would buy a book and have it deleted remotely from my device when it so pleased the bookstore. But it happened. Then I thought absurd how anyone could seriously believe that the NSA was massively spying on its citizens and performing surveillance "carpet bombing". But then lo, Snowden happened. Time and time again it happened. And invariably, Stallman was right all along.
userbinator 12y ago
When will it stop? Once most of the population realises the situation we've gotten ourselves into, perhaps things might change for the better. However, it's looking more and more like we're increasingly willing to sacrifice individual ownership rights and freedom for convenience or other things like security... The closest we've gotten to a sort of "copyright revolution" might've been in the last decade when file sharing grew explosively and many people started thinking about the issue, but then the efforts of governments and corporations seem to have effectively suppressed that by leading consumers into using more convenient but less free systems.
aeturnum 12y ago
> As soon as books become computer files...When will it stop? IANAL, but legally, this has nothing to do with software. You can force buyers to agree to a license agreement to legally read your book. The right to first sale applies to copyright and trademark - it does not allow you to ignore license agreements. Obviously it's easier to enforce on software because you can execute DRM code on a device. Blaming this on software or computers misses the underlying mechanism and focuses on the wrong thing. It is, and always has been, an issue of what we allow and don't allow in our legal system. It will stop when people want it to stop.
api 12y ago
This is getting meta and no longer directly responsive to the article, which I don't wholly disagree with. A tractor and a book are different situations. Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circumvent... DRM, streaming, proprietary reading platforms like Kindle, etc. Stallman is absolutely right and was a visionary for seeing this when he did, but he doesn't get the full breadth of the problem. In his world, the creators of things starve. People can't have freedom because they want "free," which means slavery for the producers of content. (Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.) Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work. What we need is some kind of open digital rights tracking system that does not rely on hardware locks and that lets certain bits of information behave like physical objects with physical characteristics. It's a hard problem, but hard problems get solved. I used to think cryptocurrency was impractical in practice. Maybe something can be done with homomorphic encryption. Too bad nobody is working on this because everyone still thinks we can make everything "free" and (magic happens here) and the creators of things can somehow still eat.
- lisper 12y ago
  Stallman is not a tenured academic. He's the president of a non-profit (the FSF). He makes his living from people's voluntary donations and (I presume) speaking fees.
  - api 12y ago
    Doesn't he have an office at MIT in the Gates building? In any case, it doesn't impact what I said. His gig is nice if you can get it, but I don't think the FSF can afford to pay everyone who works on GNU code.
  - mikegerwitz 12y ago
    He does not get paid by the FSF, nor does he accept speaking fees (insofar as I am aware; I'm not sure if there are certain sponsors, but he insists that those be donated to the FSF, not himself); his time is donated. He received a MacArthur grant a while back, while he is able to live off of.
chacham15 12y ago
The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own part of it and lease the rest. This leads to the price of the object being higher than what you would actually pay if you were going to only lease it. In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them, we would still be fine because nobody would pay full price for a tractor every month, but rather only what would make sense economically.
- therandomguy 12y ago
  Price is set by the market. The lease cost will match the purchase price today. It will all be the same for the consumer.
  - metaphorm 12y ago
    [citation needed]
  - simplemath 12y ago
    The mythical "free market" uninfringed upon by bad actors, and other fairy tales.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- baddox 12y ago
  I don't think it's that either. I think it's that laws exist to protect "intellectual property," which leads to a lot of bizarre consequences that don't occur with laws protecting traditional physical property. A lease on a physical good like a car is not particularly strange. It's just a contract that allows the lessee to use a scarce physical item that belongs to the lessor under certain terms. If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it. This latter description shouldn't be described as an "attack on ownership" any more than renting a car from the airport is an attack on ownership. The real attack on ownership is the existence of IP laws. You own your hard drive, but only until the hard drive happens to arrange some bits in a particular order.
danans 12y ago
To me, this is particularly concerning in the case where the physical equipment outlasts the software support cycle. We (society) haven't worried about this so much with computers because the $/compute-power has declined so precipitously over the years. But it seems more important than ever that we have a way for individual users of software-controlled devices to move their "business logic" between standardized service vendors, whether that service is compute cycles in the cloud, or the physical work provided by a tractor. Also, if the equipment is ultimately being rented, and the user owns the configuration, then the farmer could just rent another tractor (maybe from a competing tractor rental vendor), load his configuration on it, and keep the farm running. Of course this is far from Stallman's vision of the everyman owning/modifying the code down to the bare metal, but it at least tries to shift the balance of control back toward the user.
mwfunk 12y ago
Yeah, I remember back before ebooks, we could all just Xerox the books we owned, bind them together, and sell or give away the copies to anyone we wanted to, and they could do the same. It was a lot more work than just copying a file, but everyone was perfectly fine with people doing it. Oh wait a minute, that's not at all what it was like. It's very easy to latch onto people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white, especially when they're older than you and can remember the "good old days" when everything was more civilized. These are all critical, important, vital issues that people should not let go of for one second and never stop thinking about. It's just unfortunate when people like RMS want to turn it into some grand good vs. evil narrative (frequently in which they see themselves in the hero/prophet role). It frames everyone with a differing or more nuanced opinion as someone who is not operating in good faith, which is just never good for anyone. I don't think there's a person alive today who has all the answers about this stuff. There may not even be a correct or true or proper answer given the ways in which we've framed the debate, only a pseudoinverse solution that makes everyone the least unhappy on the whole. But we're long past letting any one person with their very, very, very specific ideology define that debate. I worry like hell about all this stuff, but the people going around saying "See?!? RMS was right!!!" might be counterproductive. It twists the debate back into "you're either with RMS or you're against him", and whatever his other good qualities may be, that's a tough pill to swallow for just about everyone. He approaches everything in the most fundamentalist way possible, which I've come to see as a sign of intellectual conceit rather than conviction.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  I just realized that I'm basically saying that RMS himself does not function in good faith, and I think that's the root of my distrust of him. He's the kind of person who likes to assemble elaborate ideologies over time. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who is instinctively skeptical about his own perceptions. I really don't get the sense that he ever plays devil's advocate with himself or actively tries to come up with the best arguments against his own beliefs in order to strengthen them. If he had ever written anything in which he talked about how his views have evolved or changed over the course of his life, that would be one thing. But I don't think he's changed his mind about anything over the past 30 years, outside of becoming even more fundamentalist. I don't trust people who never change their minds about anything, especially those who think changing their mind is a sign of weakness. If they are widely known for declaring those who disagree with them as being evil or otherwise morally and ethically questionable, I not only don't trust them but start to think of them as toxic distractions to the real debates that we all should be having.
MarkMc 12y ago
> As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights... When will it stop? I don't want it to stop - I think it's a good thing. By making a book impossible to pass from one person to another, the publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money. And so more books will be written, and readers will have a wider choice of better quality books. And it's not just that digital books kill the secondary market for books - they also allow publishers to be highly discriminatory. If you are a woman in your 20s you pay full price for the new Taylor Swift biography, but a man in his 50s is offered a generous discount. For the latest Glenn Beck polemic the pricing structure is reversed. So not only do publishers get a larger slice of the book-value pie, they are also able to grow the size of the pie. Magic!
- barrkel 12y ago
  publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money These two statements are not logically connected. Price is controlled by supply and demand. If publishers are able to make more money from scarcity of books, it does not follow that authors are able to get more money unless there is also a scarcity of authors and a surplus of publishers.
  - VLM 12y ago
    It also assumes there's anything like a marketplace. Not, for example, one corporation pretty much owning the entire ebook market segment.
    - MarkMc 12y ago
      Yes, I agree that one company having a complete monopoly in the publishing business would be problematic. But in that case perhaps the better solution is to use existing regulatory powers to break it up (like AT&T was broken up) instead of restricting the types of licences it can offer.
  - MarkMc 12y ago
frik 12y ago
It's not only about tractors. Cars and other equipment are based more and more on computers too. I saw 60+ year old tractors and cars, all work fine. For expensive physical products, I would rather choose one with a high quality and a long lifespan with no computer in it at all. There are only a few left like Mercedes-Benz G-Class, Land Rover Defender, Hummer H1, Jeep Wrangler, Caterham 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 . Watching the Top Gear Specials where they drive with old cars through foreign countries on crappy roads - I always think about how would a modern car survive that - it wouldn't. For example the Porsche 924 (1980s) was cars with a lots of computer chips, it was completely dead (the dashboard lighted like a Christmas tree, the windscreen wipers was the only thing working) after a few days driving through Africa. Richard Stallman was right. The GNU (L)GPL 2+ is a very good choice for open source projects - at least for bigger (for smaller BSD/MIT is good too).
tracker1 12y ago
I'm waiting for the first class action suit against said manufacturer for selling products which don't meet expected standards of fit for usage. It seems to me that locking up products in this way artificially limits their usage lifetime and fitness for use which seems to run afoul of an implied contract that they are selling a product. If that product cannot be used past X years, and the consumer is locked out of changing/adapting said product, they should be given a refund when it's no longer fit for use.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  Thanks for doing my homework for me. do I need to pay you royalties if I use this argument in a class proceeding?
metaphorm 12y ago
Stallman understands better than most the true nature of wealth and power. Concentrated wealth (in the hands of either individuals or corporations) becomes obsessed with maintaining the concentration of wealth. The most straight-forward way to do this is to never actually sell anything, but rather to collect rent on it. However, the right to collect rent is a legal right that must be enforced by the state (or by force of arms, otherwise). Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law is focused on precisely the mechanism by which our society grants rent-collection privileges to concentrated wealth. His core principle is that we must proactively ensure that concentrated wealth is not permitted to collect rent on EVERYTHING in the world, or else we will all be made their serfs forever.
- jordigh 12y ago
  > Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their inventions instead of keeping them as trade secrets, and trademarks are so that consumers don't get duped into buying the wrong product. There are other sets of laws that have other purposes and histories, such as regional designation or shipwright designs. Lumping them all together as "intellectual property" promotes oversimplication and confusion.
  - brrt 12y ago
    Stallman himself is very well aware of this issue and has written about it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
    - pdx 12y ago
      That's why he said "channeling Stallman"
      - 12y ago
wahsd 12y ago
Unfortunately, many people, including me, are called alarmist; until what they say or a variation thereof comes to fruition. And then its just too late. As you imply, a damning precedent has already been set that you do not own books and we have even already seen examples of those books simply being erased form people's libraries. But in this new world, where the sheer confusion about what digital anything is, evil forces are taking any and all advantages from that confusion to undermine and usurp civil democracy and society.
Joeri 12y ago
The difference between a prophet and a fool is whether they are right.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
Exactly correct. The thing is, I do like digital media but I am starting to prefer buying eBooks directly from publishers when they provide DRM free versions for Kindle, Apple, and PDF. Every once in a while, I will gather the recent Kindle books I have purchased and attempt to convert them to PDF. This seems to work for most of them. IANAL, but my understanding is that if I have purchased a Kindle book then I can legally back it up as a PDF. Similarly, sometimes when I purchase a movie on DVD, I sometimes like a ripped copy on my laptop, especially for Qi Gong and Yoga lessons.

by apricot 12y ago

fweespeech 12y ago

Some of us just don't buy DRM books and make copies for personal archival purposes.

sker 12y ago

What happens when we have computers implanted in our brains? Do I no longer own my brain?

jellicle 12y ago
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/
aeturnum 12y ago
"Metabolic control. Enhanced sensory perception. Improved reflexes and muscle capacity. Vastly increased data processing speed and capacity. All improvements thanks to our cyber-brains and cyborg bodies. So what if we can't live without high-level maintenance? We have nothing to complain about. It doesn't mean we've sold our souls to Section 9. We do have the right to resign if we choose. Provided we give the government back our cyborg shells and the memories they hold. " - Ghost In The Shell (1995) Script
- simplemath 12y ago
  Such a great movie.
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    Shirow's vision of a post-digital society is extremely forward looking for 1990. Many of the themes he was interested in 25 years ago are only starting to come into focus now, which is pretty legit for a pop scifi author.
    - simplemath 12y ago
      I cannot think of an anime film particularly that is as prescient as Ghost in the Shell. For my money, the best non Miyazaki piece of art the genre ever produced.
LLWM 12y ago
What happened to australopithicus? You'll be free to starve with a meat-based brain as everyone with implants outcompetes you at everything if you'd prefer.
arca_vorago 12y ago
I think the brain reading writing argument is a really good example that should be used in discussion of this topic more often and more in depth. It shows even a layman how this issues can have a real ompact.
dropit_sphere 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQC62FUgqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elQC62FUgqw

andrepd 12y ago

Alarming is the proper way to describe it. I remember how I thought it would never happen that I would buy a book and have it deleted remotely from my device when it so pleased the bookstore. But it happened. Then I thought absurd how anyone could seriously believe that the NSA was massively spying on its citizens and performing surveillance "carpet bombing". But then lo, Snowden happened. Time and time again it happened. And invariably, Stallman was right all along.

userbinator 12y ago

When will it stop? Once most of the population realises the situation we've gotten ourselves into, perhaps things might change for the better. However, it's looking more and more like we're increasingly willing to sacrifice individual ownership rights and freedom for convenience or other things like security... The closest we've gotten to a sort of "copyright revolution" might've been in the last decade when file sharing grew explosively and many people started thinking about the issue, but then the efforts of governments and corporations seem to have effectively suppressed that by leading consumers into using more convenient but less free systems.

aeturnum 12y ago

> As soon as books become computer files...When will it stop? IANAL, but legally, this has nothing to do with software. You can force buyers to agree to a license agreement to legally read your book. The right to first sale applies to copyright and trademark - it does not allow you to ignore license agreements. Obviously it's easier to enforce on software because you can execute DRM code on a device. Blaming this on software or computers misses the underlying mechanism and focuses on the wrong thing. It is, and always has been, an issue of what we allow and don't allow in our legal system. It will stop when people want it to stop.

api 12y ago

This is getting meta and no longer directly responsive to the article, which I don't wholly disagree with. A tractor and a book are different situations. Books are hard to copy, while files are easy to copy. Writers have to get paid, and people are cheap and don't want to pay them... even while they will pay the same for a fancy cup of coffee. Hence a scramble for some way to set up a toll booth that is hard to circumvent... DRM, streaming, proprietary reading platforms like Kindle, etc. Stallman is absolutely right and was a visionary for seeing this when he did, but he doesn't get the full breadth of the problem. In his world, the creators of things starve. People can't have freedom because they want "free," which means slavery for the producers of content. (Someone who works for nothing is the definition of a slave.) Stallman can ignore this side of the equation because he is a tenured academic. It doesn't matter to him that nobody pays for his work. What we need is some kind of open digital rights tracking system that does not rely on hardware locks and that lets certain bits of information behave like physical objects with physical characteristics. It's a hard problem, but hard problems get solved. I used to think cryptocurrency was impractical in practice. Maybe something can be done with homomorphic encryption. Too bad nobody is working on this because everyone still thinks we can make everything "free" and (magic happens here) and the creators of things can somehow still eat.

lisper 12y ago
Stallman is not a tenured academic. He's the president of a non-profit (the FSF). He makes his living from people's voluntary donations and (I presume) speaking fees.
- api 12y ago
  Doesn't he have an office at MIT in the Gates building? In any case, it doesn't impact what I said. His gig is nice if you can get it, but I don't think the FSF can afford to pay everyone who works on GNU code.
- mikegerwitz 12y ago
  He does not get paid by the FSF, nor does he accept speaking fees (insofar as I am aware; I'm not sure if there are certain sponsors, but he insists that those be donated to the FSF, not himself); his time is donated. He received a MacArthur grant a while back, while he is able to live off of.

chacham15 12y ago

The real problem here isnt that we're leasing things (we have leases for cars, houses, and many other physical goods). The problem is that the manufacturers mix leasing and owning. I.e. you own the device, but lease the software. I think that everyone would be radically happier if you either leased everything or owned everything. This is partly because when we buy something at a store, we expect to own it, not own part of it and lease the rest. This leads to the price of the object being higher than what you would actually pay if you were going to only lease it. In a world where nobody owns tractors and just leases them, we would still be fine because nobody would pay full price for a tractor every month, but rather only what would make sense economically.

therandomguy 12y ago
Price is set by the market. The lease cost will match the purchase price today. It will all be the same for the consumer.
- metaphorm 12y ago
  [citation needed]
- simplemath 12y ago
  The mythical "free market" uninfringed upon by bad actors, and other fairy tales.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
baddox 12y ago
I don't think it's that either. I think it's that laws exist to protect "intellectual property," which leads to a lot of bizarre consequences that don't occur with laws protecting traditional physical property. A lease on a physical good like a car is not particularly strange. It's just a contract that allows the lessee to use a scarce physical item that belongs to the lessor under certain terms. If we had that kind of lease on software, but without IP laws, there still wouldn't be any strange legal consequences. The lessee gets the software, and perhaps the terms say that the lessee cannot copy or modify the software. The difference is that if the lessee does distribute a copy of the software, the lessor cannot go after third parties who download those copies, because they haven't signed any sort of lease or contract. The lessor can go after the lessee, of course, but that's it. This latter description shouldn't be described as an "attack on ownership" any more than renting a car from the airport is an attack on ownership. The real attack on ownership is the existence of IP laws. You own your hard drive, but only until the hard drive happens to arrange some bits in a particular order.

danans 12y ago

To me, this is particularly concerning in the case where the physical equipment outlasts the software support cycle. We (society) haven't worried about this so much with computers because the $/compute-power has declined so precipitously over the years. But it seems more important than ever that we have a way for individual users of software-controlled devices to move their "business logic" between standardized service vendors, whether that service is compute cycles in the cloud, or the physical work provided by a tractor. Also, if the equipment is ultimately being rented, and the user owns the configuration, then the farmer could just rent another tractor (maybe from a competing tractor rental vendor), load his configuration on it, and keep the farm running. Of course this is far from Stallman's vision of the everyman owning/modifying the code down to the bare metal, but it at least tries to shift the balance of control back toward the user.

mwfunk 12y ago

Yeah, I remember back before ebooks, we could all just Xerox the books we owned, bind them together, and sell or give away the copies to anyone we wanted to, and they could do the same. It was a lot more work than just copying a file, but everyone was perfectly fine with people doing it. Oh wait a minute, that's not at all what it was like. It's very easy to latch onto people like RMS who make everything seem so black and white, especially when they're older than you and can remember the "good old days" when everything was more civilized. These are all critical, important, vital issues that people should not let go of for one second and never stop thinking about. It's just unfortunate when people like RMS want to turn it into some grand good vs. evil narrative (frequently in which they see themselves in the hero/prophet role). It frames everyone with a differing or more nuanced opinion as someone who is not operating in good faith, which is just never good for anyone. I don't think there's a person alive today who has all the answers about this stuff. There may not even be a correct or true or proper answer given the ways in which we've framed the debate, only a pseudoinverse solution that makes everyone the least unhappy on the whole. But we're long past letting any one person with their very, very, very specific ideology define that debate. I worry like hell about all this stuff, but the people going around saying "See?!? RMS was right!!!" might be counterproductive. It twists the debate back into "you're either with RMS or you're against him", and whatever his other good qualities may be, that's a tough pill to swallow for just about everyone. He approaches everything in the most fundamentalist way possible, which I've come to see as a sign of intellectual conceit rather than conviction.

mwfunk 12y ago
I just realized that I'm basically saying that RMS himself does not function in good faith, and I think that's the root of my distrust of him. He's the kind of person who likes to assemble elaborate ideologies over time. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who is instinctively skeptical about his own perceptions. I really don't get the sense that he ever plays devil's advocate with himself or actively tries to come up with the best arguments against his own beliefs in order to strengthen them. If he had ever written anything in which he talked about how his views have evolved or changed over the course of his life, that would be one thing. But I don't think he's changed his mind about anything over the past 30 years, outside of becoming even more fundamentalist. I don't trust people who never change their minds about anything, especially those who think changing their mind is a sign of weakness. If they are widely known for declaring those who disagree with them as being evil or otherwise morally and ethically questionable, I not only don't trust them but start to think of them as toxic distractions to the real debates that we all should be having.

MarkMc 12y ago

> As soon as books become computer files, you don't buy them anymore, you lease usage rights... When will it stop? I don't want it to stop - I think it's a good thing. By making a book impossible to pass from one person to another, the publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money. And so more books will be written, and readers will have a wider choice of better quality books. And it's not just that digital books kill the secondary market for books - they also allow publishers to be highly discriminatory. If you are a woman in your 20s you pay full price for the new Taylor Swift biography, but a man in his 50s is offered a generous discount. For the latest Glenn Beck polemic the pricing structure is reversed. So not only do publishers get a larger slice of the book-value pie, they are also able to grow the size of the pie. Magic!

barrkel 12y ago
publisher is able to extract an income that is closer to the total benefit people derive from reading the book. In short: authors make more money These two statements are not logically connected. Price is controlled by supply and demand. If publishers are able to make more money from scarcity of books, it does not follow that authors are able to get more money unless there is also a scarcity of authors and a surplus of publishers.
- VLM 12y ago
  It also assumes there's anything like a marketplace. Not, for example, one corporation pretty much owning the entire ebook market segment.
  - MarkMc 12y ago
    Yes, I agree that one company having a complete monopoly in the publishing business would be problematic. But in that case perhaps the better solution is to use existing regulatory powers to break it up (like AT&T was broken up) instead of restricting the types of licences it can offer.
- MarkMc 12y ago

frik 12y ago

It's not only about tractors. Cars and other equipment are based more and more on computers too. I saw 60+ year old tractors and cars, all work fine. For expensive physical products, I would rather choose one with a high quality and a long lifespan with no computer in it at all. There are only a few left like Mercedes-Benz G-Class, Land Rover Defender, Hummer H1, Jeep Wrangler, Caterham 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_G-Class , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Rover_Defender , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummer_H1 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Wrangler , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterham_7 . Watching the Top Gear Specials where they drive with old cars through foreign countries on crappy roads - I always think about how would a modern car survive that - it wouldn't. For example the Porsche 924 (1980s) was cars with a lots of computer chips, it was completely dead (the dashboard lighted like a Christmas tree, the windscreen wipers was the only thing working) after a few days driving through Africa. Richard Stallman was right. The GNU (L)GPL 2+ is a very good choice for open source projects - at least for bigger (for smaller BSD/MIT is good too).

tracker1 12y ago

I'm waiting for the first class action suit against said manufacturer for selling products which don't meet expected standards of fit for usage. It seems to me that locking up products in this way artificially limits their usage lifetime and fitness for use which seems to run afoul of an implied contract that they are selling a product. If that product cannot be used past X years, and the consumer is locked out of changing/adapting said product, they should be given a refund when it's no longer fit for use.

anonbanker 12y ago
Thanks for doing my homework for me. do I need to pay you royalties if I use this argument in a class proceeding?

metaphorm 12y ago

Stallman understands better than most the true nature of wealth and power. Concentrated wealth (in the hands of either individuals or corporations) becomes obsessed with maintaining the concentration of wealth. The most straight-forward way to do this is to never actually sell anything, but rather to collect rent on it. However, the right to collect rent is a legal right that must be enforced by the state (or by force of arms, otherwise). Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law is focused on precisely the mechanism by which our society grants rent-collection privileges to concentrated wealth. His core principle is that we must proactively ensure that concentrated wealth is not permitted to collect rent on EVERYTHING in the world, or else we will all be made their serfs forever.

jordigh 12y ago
> Stallman's focus on copyright law and intellectual property law Channeling Stallman here, there's no such thing as "intellectual property law". There are a bunch of laws that work in very different ways, evolved under different circumstances, and have different purposes. Copyrights are for ensuring authors retain economic and/or moral rights on their work, patents are so that inventors will disclose their inventions instead of keeping them as trade secrets, and trademarks are so that consumers don't get duped into buying the wrong product. There are other sets of laws that have other purposes and histories, such as regional designation or shipwright designs. Lumping them all together as "intellectual property" promotes oversimplication and confusion.
- brrt 12y ago
  Stallman himself is very well aware of this issue and has written about it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
  - pdx 12y ago
    That's why he said "channeling Stallman"
    - 12y ago

wahsd 12y ago

Unfortunately, many people, including me, are called alarmist; until what they say or a variation thereof comes to fruition. And then its just too late. As you imply, a damning precedent has already been set that you do not own books and we have even already seen examples of those books simply being erased form people's libraries. But in this new world, where the sheer confusion about what digital anything is, evil forces are taking any and all advantages from that confusion to undermine and usurp civil democracy and society.

Joeri 12y ago

The difference between a prophet and a fool is whether they are right.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

Exactly correct. The thing is, I do like digital media but I am starting to prefer buying eBooks directly from publishers when they provide DRM free versions for Kindle, Apple, and PDF. Every once in a while, I will gather the recent Kindle books I have purchased and attempt to convert them to PDF. This seems to work for most of them. IANAL, but my understanding is that if I have purchased a Kindle book then I can legally back it up as a PDF. Similarly, sometimes when I purchase a movie on DVD, I sometimes like a ripped copy on my laptop, especially for Qi Gong and Yoga lessons.