The Right to Read (1997)
gnu.org
gnu.org
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.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...
How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us.
Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.
Information never wanted to be free. It has no will. The freedom was the result of many people willing to stand against its confinement.
Imagine a small village. If John makes an axe, and Jim sees it and copies it, did Jim steal John's axe? Seems like there's only theft occurring if Jim claims to have designed it himself---stealing some of John's reputation as the designer and first maker of that kind of axe. Doesn't the whole village benefit from more abundant chopped wood? Or perhaps from cheaper lumber prices? True, John now has competition chopping wood, but perhaps he's got an advantage as a designer and he'll soon specialize as a carpenter or tool designer rather than just a wood chopper. Couldn't it be possible that copying ideas and attributing the persons who originate them enriches the entire village---including those who came up with the new ideas?
I find Christian philosopher Vern Poythress's ethical reasons why we should advocate for changing copyright laws to be insightful and persuasive... and I learned the axe inventor example from his article, https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....
In the US, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly legalized personal and noncommercial copying (e.g. mix tapes) and established a tape tax to compensate record companies (!), musicians, songwriters, and music publishers.
Indeed "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's slogan for iTunes in 2001, and it seems to have depended on the AHRA (and "music CD-R" media, which included the tape tax.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple subsequently argued that iPods were exempt from the tape tax and made it hard to record music off of iPods onto other media. One could imagine an alternate world where Apple('s customers) paid the AHRA tape tax and Apple enabled easy "rip/mix/burn" across iPhones and other devices.
This has been a big point of contention on YouTube. Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves. It’s crazy.
On the other hand, technology changes fast. A 1 petabyte SSD could hold all music ever recorded at reasonable compression. AI upscaling is making great strides in video compression. Most people already run a “server” of sorts at home in the form of e.g. a HomePod, PS4 or a Philips Hue bridge. Tech literacy is way up, too. I’m hopeful for the future.
I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see?
I'd say I see the opposite as being true.
The visibility of of technologically illiterate people is higher than ever. The number of people who are technologically literate is also higher than ever. The proportion of people in digital spaces who are technologically illiterate is higher than it was in the past. More people in the digitally connected world has decreased the average literacy level of that digitally connected world. But the absolute number of technologically literate people as well as the proportion of the overall population who are technologically literate has certainly increased.
Is that consistent with your observations & experience?
And I know the immediate response is that, in fact, those things are what lead to actual literacy, etc, etc. But the point I'm trying to make is that using prepacked apps, on a locked down device, in exactly the way the developer intends you to, to create content that you irrevocably license to the corporation that created the app isn't "tech literacy" any more than memorizing the bible and never reading anything else is what we would "written literacy".
Most people use tech in an entirely consumptive manner, and again, we wouldn't call someone who can only read but not write, literate. A person who can't use tech to empower themselves outside of the predefined forms set by the companies that made their devices is not tech literate, even though they may navigate those forms with great speed and fluidity.
Sadly, I'm not as confident as he is. I remember acting as tech support for my family who was of course tech illiterate. A common theme was to receive a complain of "something not working on the system" without further explanation, which was perfectly understandable even if frustrating. Nowdays, I receive the same kind of complains from developers at work.
Now there are undeniably advantages to both paradigms. But the average developer in industry being in the dark about anything beyond the surface layer, and who's expertise is more about quirks with api X rather than how X would be coded at all is a logical consequence.
Today’s tech doesn’t allow humans to ask questions, and I’m sad to see that many aren’t even aware that there are a lot of awesome things outside of the dominant corporate systems/tools which is exciting and interesting.
I don’t consider the using of black box corporate apps to be tech literacy. Not even close.
But if rather than biblically literate medieval peasants, we had biblically literate medieval scholars founding universities to study not only the Bible but also the classics, mathematics, the sciences, the arts, we would have the early foundations of the modern world. Consider that the oldest universities (Bolonga in 1088, Oxford in 1096, Salamanca in 1134, Paris in 1150, Cambridge in 1209, and Padua in 1222, and Toulouse in 1229) were primarily founded by Christian scholars who sought administrative and academic freedom (e.g. Padua's founding) because of their convictions based on the Bible that free inquiry is essential to finding truth.
My analogy, implied for tech, would be that free access to source code and technology is necessary to build strong foundations for technological freedom, as the biblical source code was necessary for building strong foundations for free academic inquiry. Jesus himself connects his word with knowing the truth and says the result is freedom - see John chapter 8.
Eg. “The Anti-Wycliffite Statute of 1401 extended persecution to Wycliffe's remaining followers. The "Constitutions of Oxford" of 1408 aimed to reclaim authority in all ecclesiastical matters, and specifically named John Wycliffe as it banned certain writings, and noted that translation of Scripture into English by unlicensed laity was a crime punishable by charges of heresy.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe#Last_days
The geek/MOP/sociopath triangle wouldn't be a terrible description of the “subculture takeover” that seems to have occurred.
One has to wonder why this happens at a time where it's never been easier to build your own mini-YouTube, for your own content. The problem is cultural, not technical.
This IMHO is what should be a priority for someone - the FSF or EFF I dont know. The reason people keep handing over their freedom is often convenience. Free tools need to be as easy to setup and use as tools that take away peoples freedom.
I'm not sure who really has enough money, drive, and talent, to be able to do this but with free software.
The problem here is that, if you prize security, privacy, or decentralization above anything else, you must make trade offs by increasing some friction.
The more centralized information you have, the better your UX can be.
On the other hand, if you prize data collection or centralization, you must make some trade offs, including increasing some friction, as well.
The less you seek to control your users, the better their experience can be.
A tiny anecdote, with Jitsi Meet you can send a link to a meeting, someone who’s never used it before can click it, and they’re there. No need to set up or be logged into any account, install an application, or even find a small web client link at the bottom of what’s more or less a malware ad.
Trust me, as a screen reader user who often transmits high-quality audio, I know that a web client just won't cut it in more advanced scenarios. WebRTC implementations work... kind of. Sometimes. An actual app gives you much more flexibility and control, and makes the UX much better.
Just make sure this stays science fiction.
“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Though my country fought at the side of the axis during WWII, the government did not sent the local jews to the camps. I was at a gathering where a jewish woman who was a girl at the time talked about her experiences during the war. Truly moving experience that gave me much deeper understanding of the times, what people have been, and what they are capable of both good and bad.
Shame about all that Flash content...
Libreoffice instead of MS Office, GNU/Linux instead of Windows or Mac, Firefox instead of other browsers, distributed social networks based on free software (Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfeld) instead of the monopolies, Librem 5 instead of IPhone, Pinetab instead of IPad, Pinetime instead of Apple Watch, Bandcamp instead of Spotify and many more:
One of the main reasons why I download stuff (YouTube videos/articles), so I can always revisit it whenever I want to.
hey, it's a difficult hassle for technical users too. And the flip side of this is I don't want to lose all my data if my hard drive dies. I think ideally you keep your data both locally and encrypted in the cloud, but that isn't trivial to do.
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
He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.
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.
It's something which I have struggled with. Not that I think my ideas are all prophetic, or ignored/misunderstood, but that in the past some of my ideas have been prophetic but ignored, until some point in time where they were validated to be true. With that being a possibility, I struggle to know whether or not an idea that I feel strongly about, but is misunderstood or discounted, whether or not it should be discounted or discarded. It's hard to know what the right thing to do is when you are pretty confident that you're right, but you know you could just simply be wrong.
It's mostly about trying to figure myself out that I'm bewildered, not issues that apply to society at large. But even in that limited domain, I'm still gripped by analysis paralysis for that reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
[2] Genius in the seminal sense.
It is both a testament to him and a terror that programmers are now coming of age who have effectively been born post- open source. A BSD licence is far better than nothing but the GPL has almost been hurt by its own success these days.
We currently program in an environment where people just open source stuff for the sake of it (and good on them/us for doing it), but with the advent of the mobile phone as a general purpose computer (You can't just download C code and run it on your iPad any more) and the cloud (same shit from a difference arsehole when it comes to user freedom) the pendulum will swing back the other way.
I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
You're making an is-ought distinction. Of course we should not believe serious accusations against someone until they can back up their claims -- in an ideal world. In the real world, standards of evidence are routinely weaponized against decent people by assholes. Everybody knows that Trump has colluded with Russia, but no one can make anything stick.
As another example, there is a small but growing movement to weaken the standards of evidence for rape and sexual assault. These crimes are notoriously difficult to get evidence for that meets the burden of proof, and the result is a very low conviction rape and active harm to women and society by rapists on the loose. I find it increasingly hard to challenge this argument except on theoretical or procedural grounds, and some countries -- such as Spain, which has special violence against women tribunals where the burden of proof is essentially on the accused to prove innocence -- have already followed through with this idea in their laws.
> What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years. He creates what is known in law as a hostile work environment. Women are afraid to work with him because they might be inappropriately propositioned, and risk consequences if they turned him down. (Stallman was "protected" by people in the MIT community, including Marvin Minsky.) And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
> Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years.
Sources? Not trying to be dismissive, but I can't find any on DDG or Google.
> And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
He never did that. He advocated for child consent. You may think I'm nitpicking but it's an important distinction. Child rape colloquially means unconsentual / forced sex, but technically means any sex since children cannot legally consent. If you say he defends child rape you are colloquially saying he defends unconsentual sex, when he never did such a thing.
No such thing. Children cannot legally consent to sexual activity because they cannot meaningfully consent to it in the moral sense, either. All sexual activity between an adult and a child is an abuse of the power dynamic between adults and children, and causes lasting psychological if not physical harm to the child.
Therefore, all sexual activity between an adult and a child is rape.
Therefore, Stallman is/was an apologist for child rape.
That is very jurisdiction-specific / cultural-specific position. In my home country, there is clear legal disctinction between child rape (non-consensual sex with child) and child sex abuse (consensual sex with child).
I would be surprised if the 'age-of-consent' laws (the age limit name is also cultural specific, here it is 'age-of-legal-competence') were generally motivated by legal fiction about children unable to give consent. That seems to me more like ex-post rationalization of such laws. IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).
What's curious is:
1) Going against social mores tends to cause psychological harm
2) Looking across history, plenty of cultures broke those mores without psychological harm
That's not just sexual mores. All sorts of things. Corporal punishment is harmful to kids in Western Culture, but not harmful to kids in many other cultures worldwide (yes, with good evidence).
The evidence for what constitutes healthy person-person relationships is mostly culturally-situated, whether that's parent-child, sibling, friends, work environment, or otherwise. The same behavior which might be considered a child abusing their parent in one country might be considered the parent abusing the child in another (and lead to actual psychological harm for the abused party).
It's helpful to look at mores across cultures and history to see which things are fundamental to humans, and which are culturally-situated. Of course, that doesn't make breaking culturally-situated norms okay -- it still causes psychological harm.
What is more problematic is that we can't talk about this in more than abstracts. I could pick dozens of concrete examples, and if I raised them in a public forum, my career would be dead.
In my opinion, what he actually said on the listserv is very benign compared to the consequences he faced for it. If that is the whole story, he was treated unfairly.
Here's another part of the story http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
In some ways, that made him less effective as a free software advocate, as did many of his other more controversial views on just about every topic. In others, that made him more honest.
That's not what's being reported, though.
I liked this line:
"The message of universal software freedom is a radical cause; it's basically impossible for one individual to effectively push forward two unrelated controversial agendas at once."
Were there people who didn't care about the issue at hand but just wanted him to go for other reasons who opportunistically seized upon the issue to finally rid themselves of the troublesome monk? Of course, and I have some particular people in mind. But the converse is also very much true. RMS is a complex person and you cannot pull but one thread from the fabric.
> And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power.
That's simply whataboutism, not an argument. The rms issue is the rms issue. I would be delighted if you worked on some of the other injustices in the world as well.
RMS has suffered a crippling emotional blow but he will get back on his feet. In these regards rms is hardly unique: he grew up in a community of people very much like him, many of whom routinely make far more shocking statements than he ever did. Leaving that environment for Harvard, and later MIT demonstrated and developed in him an ability to learn, which few apparently can see (and which even fewer possess themselves).
My experience with people going after corruption (n>3):
No one is perfect. Everyone breaks some laws, does something taboo, holds some controversial view, or does something improper. If you're going after power structures, they'll take that and pull on it to destroy you unless you back down.
This was done to an extreme in Communist regimes. For the most part, people didn't go to prison for criticizing the government. People who criticized the government went to prison for some other, complete inane but technically correct reason.
For a public examples, See Hunter Biden. Compare to Donald Trump. Yes, there appears to be corruption with Hunter. No, it's not out-of-mainstream for DC. Yes, it's greater than Trump's family. Only Biden has the resources to defend himself -- half the country is supporting him. Unless you're a presidential candidate, something like that WILL take you down.
Allowing that to work really benefits the power structures who can do PR and hire investigators. And it really harms anyone out of the mainstream or with unpopular views, where a simple cancel culture can kill your career.
None of those people should remain in positions of power, including faculty positions at MIT. The fact that RMS finally got consequences for the behavior we're discussing is good; the fact that the others didn't is bad; the fix is to apply consequences to the places where they're deserved but missing, not reverse some just deserts that were finally given.
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.
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.
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.
He's a strange man, but the beauty of free software is that you can be free to only view a man or woman as the sum of their code if you choose to.
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.
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.
I also usually buy paper books. If you buy the book, you shouldn't feel particularly guilty for "acquiring" the pdf/mobi. :)
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
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