Who does that server really serve?
gnu.org
gnu.org
The condescending tone and the cheap shots do not put him in a good light. Nor does actually hearing the man talk, for that matter.
Again, it's not a cheap shot. Digital books and newspapers present a clear and present danger. I'm open to well supported arrangements about why the rights of copyright holders are more important than freedom of the press and free speech, but honestly I don't think such arguments exist.
Never in the history of written works can a shout of a single man be heard by over a billion people. The internet still blows my mind, when I stop and think about it for a second. Thanks to encryption and publicly available algorithms people will always be able to communicate against the will of any government, even if the internet itself is compromised. So I don't think we have to worry about DRM and similar technologies. At any point in time we can just say 'No more!' and use something different, so DRM has no power over us.
If you want to worry about something, worry that data can't be deleted, and advances in data mining (artificial intelligence) will change the laws of privacy forever. Perhaps, in 10 years from now, you'd wish for a remote wipe button.
I'll never wish for something like that. The fact that data can't be deleted is one of the most encouraging developments of current technology.
The kindle is not designed for book burning, even if it might be used for that purpose.
This is incorrect. Figurative book burning is an explicit design goal of the Kindle. Without it, Amazon would have a very difficult time getting major publishers to put their works on the Kindle. Even if your statement was correct, design intentions are irrelevant; the fact that the capability is there is what matters.
I'm not 100% comfortable with the concept of the "remote wipe", but as companies go Amazon has proven itself to be pretty trustworthy.
I'll never be comfortable with the idea that I have to trust a company not to violate my rights. Rights are not a matter of trust, they are inalienable, natural guarantees.
And what's the worst case scenario? Amazon censors/deletes a bunch of books, people scream bloody murder and host some torrents.
Maybe in America. But not in China. And maybe not in America, now that you mention it. Public outcry may seem large from a technical person's perspective, but the average American does not care or know about the implications of remote deletion.
You're also making the faulty assumption that deletion is the only option. Modification is far more dangerous. Did you know that the average Chinese citizen older than 40 has no idea how heavily their search results are being censored? Picture a Grandma sitting in her living room in China with her Kindle. She's reading Animal Farm. Her copy is sufficiently doctored that she thinks it is a novel about farm animals, not a work criticizing the corruption that results from a communist revolution. After she's done Grandma will go to sleep feeling happy, enlightened, and unoppressed by her government, blissfully unaware that she's been duped. Sounds far fetched? If you had asked me in the early 1930s whether a German political party would be able to convince a large portion of the German population that an Aryan race was desirable, I would have said it was far fetched too.
Thanks to encryption and publicly available algorithms people will always be able to communicate against the will of any government, even if the internet itself is compromised. So I don't think we have to worry about DRM and similar technologies. At any point in time we can just say 'No more!' and use something different, so DRM has no power over us.
Not if using encryption or circumventing DRM is illegal. If DRM achieves sufficient market penetration, you wont be able to go about your daily life without it. You barely can as it is.
Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.
"You're also making the faulty assumption that deletion is the only option. Modification is far more dangerous. Did you know that the average Chinese citizen older than 40 has no idea how heavily their search results are being censored? Picture a Grandma sitting in her living room in China with her Kindle. She's reading Animal Farm. Her copy is sufficiently doctored that she thinks it is a novel about farm animals, not a work criticizing the corruption that results from a communist revolution. After she's done Grandma will go to sleep feeling happy, enlightened, and unoppressed by her government, blissfully unaware that she's been duped. Sounds far fetched? If you had asked me in the early 1930s whether a German political party would be able to convince a large portion of the German population that an Aryan race was desirable, I would have said it was far fetched too."
Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years. I don't think a grandmother in China would even want to read an anti-communist novel, considering the consequences. China is a scary place.
"Not if using encryption or circumventing DRM is illegal. If DRM achieves sufficient market penetration, you wont be able to go about your daily life without it. You barely can as it is."
You cry about DRM yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works. DRM is the direct result of the slow attack of the current copyright system through large amounts of people online that not only have no problem copying copyrighted materials, but feel it is their right.
No one is crying here. It's a serious issue.
...yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works.
First, it's not clear they need protection. In 2009 movie revenues reached an all time high, despite 2009 being the year of the pirate.
Second, copyright holders can protect their works by making the legitimate version more valuable than the pirated one. DRM is an attempt to get around this basic economic reality. Valve and Apple are examples of companies that understand this. Other companies should use Steam and iTunes as the gold standard for content distribution. DRM isn't what makes Steam and iTunes successful, it's that the distribution mechanism is convenient, quick, and social.
Third, it is illegal for copyright holders to protect their copyrights by taking away the rights of citizens. Copyright is not a natural right and enforcement via rights restrictions is not in the purview of private entities. The government grants and protects copyright if and only if such granting and protection "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, the US Constitution]. It's up to the government to decide what rights can be restricted to protect copyright and if such restrictions benefit the people at large. Personally I think DRM for the purpose of copyright enforcement developed by private entities is unconstitutional. Congress and Congress alone mandates the protections on copyright.
Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.
I don't really think this statement needs refutation. Let me phrase your statement another way: "law enforcement wouldn't need to resort to wiretapping every phone in America if crime didn't exist".
Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years.
Well first of all it was a hypothetical. But I can and will blame companies for such behavior. Do you know how much money Cisco made from the Great Firewall? Companies that enable human rights violations share some responsibility. I'll blame the construction companies that provided materials to build the concentration camps too.
Note that I'm not against other systems of government, just systems of government that systematically violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (of which the US is an author and signatory). I don't think US companies should do business with such governments.
I don't agree with most of the assertions you make. You seem to claim that book burning is a goal of the kindle, but I don't think you can really substantiate the claim. As far as I can tell the goal of publishers is simply to have control over the digital content. Remote deletions are a side effect. I also don't agree with you that capability is the only thing that matters.
By analogy: a knife can be used to make a sandwich, and it can be used to to repeatedly stab people in the face. The knife affords stabbing (which is arguably far worse than remote ebook deletion or modification), but I think knives are still generally a positive thing in society. Most things in life aren't forces for pure good or pure evil, so for me (and for most people) it's a matter of finding the right balance.
Right now, every inalienable, natural, human right you have can be violated by random strangers, the government and yes, even by companies. This is pretty much a fact of life, and I think that taking an absolutist position about this isn't helpful.
If DRM is a net benefit to you, then yay DRM. If not, then use alternatives. In the grand scheme of things, I think it's a bit of a non-issue. Yes, I admit universal DRM (for the broadest sense of universal) would be pretty awful. But it takes slippery slope logic to say that a bit of DRM here and there will lead to totalitarian DRM in the future.
How exactly are freedom of the press or speech in danger? The Internet pretty much has stopped any one governing body from taking that right away from anyone. In fact, it's destroying many newspapers.
No, I'm not forced to buy and use a Kindle (a rather facetious question). I'm not forced to buy and use teflon-coated bullets either. That doesn't change the fact that these two items which currently are legal have properties that I believe are immoral and illegal. Current law (specifically Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution [1] and the Federal ban against armor piercing ammunition [2]) suggests that certain properties of these items are legal only because of technicalities. I can advocate against these items even if I am not forced to buy them. A rather basic and reasonable claim on my part, if you ask me.
How exactly are freedom of the press or speech in danger?
If society is saturated with items that allow companies or governments to take away natural rights, then these rights are in danger. Just because these items haven't achieved full saturation yet doesn't mean we shouldn't be protesting them now.
The Internet pretty much has stopped any one governing body from taking that right away from anyone. In fact, it's destroying many newspapers.
Apparently not, given the Chinese government's success in censoring the internet there.
[1] http://topics.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8
The network effect potential lost is the worst part. Really, who wants to quote Stallman? Who mentions his name and gets respect for it?
Proprietary software can't "take away your freedom" under any meaningful definition of "freedom".
(If anyone doesn't know what I'm talking about: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/)
Must one's (everyone's?) fundamental purposes include having all software available by law? If so, that's a mightily counterintuitive notion of freedom, be it positive, negative, or else.
For example, it could be said that proprietary software increases the "positive freedom" of proprietary software developers. So then what's wrong with them releasing proprietary software? Isn't that what they should do, if it works best for them---makes them the most money or whatever, and thus increases their "positive freedom"?
One of the big problems with RMS is that he just throws out terms like "freedom" without stating what he means, giving a moral justification, and showing how they can be applied correctly.
If there was no copyright, or copyright is abolished, would there be a need for the GPL?
The Free Software Foundation also sues companies in court for not complying with their license. This doesn't really sound like anything different than the current copyright system.
I would not want to live in a world where I am forced by law to give out the source to my software.
No one's forcing you to use GNU licenced software in your proprietary application.
Anyway, he does raise a fair point -- one that I ponder about more and more often.
To me the solution seems to be open source/open standards/open data.
In the web world the standards and data being perhaps more important than the server's source itself.
If you can run that thing on your own server, if you can communicate with the existing servers and if you can get the data you put there back, it seems to provide the same set of freedoms that you had in the original GNU sense.
He cares about whether your application code generating responses on the server is GPLed, along with a few thousand other people. He also passionately cares the javascript running in your browser is GPLed, and is perhaps completely alone in this.
It may be simply because he has never used a rich web app, out of abject fear. He normally surfs the web via emacs+gnus+smtp+aliases+wget -- he is not one of us, you can't argue with him on your own terms.
He probably could have come up with a more credible example of spyware than Microsoft Windows.
What does he mean I can't "control" closed software I run? I start it, stop it, and click on the pretty buttons to make it do things. Sure I can't turn it into something different, but then I don't have the infinite free time necessary to do that to open software anyhow. If OpenOffice is changed in a way I don't like, I have exactly the same options I'd have if Microsoft Office was changed in a way I don't like: stay on the old version, move to a different office suite, or put up with it.
Hosted software is the same, except for the option to stay with an old version.
That said, Richard Stallman does sound like an idiot when he writes things like "Some web pages install nontrivial or even large JavaScript programs temporarily into your browser without informing you. When these JavaScript programs are nonfree, they are as bad as any other nonfree software".
Businesses don't want to run their own servers and have large IT shops, but they do want the sun/moon/stars in services. SaaS promises to deliver what they've wanted for years. It will take more than a security risk to dissuade businesses from using SaaS. It certainly didn't stop them from using proprietary software.
I wonder if the goals of Stallman/GNU/FSF/Anti-DRM/Patent folks are actually in opposition. Imagine if DRM was flawless? Paid OSS could be more common without risk to the publisher. IT shops would have more of a means to insist that vendors provide source for independent security review.
The AGPL is a goddamn clickwrap EULA: you can't just run the program without restriction if it involves responding to requests over a socket.