As much as I like rms, I find it very difficult to move past his comments on child pornography[1].
[1] https://stallman.org/notes/2011-mar-jun.html#4_June_2011_(Bo...
[1] https://stallman.org/notes/2011-mar-jun.html#4_June_2011_(Bo...
I really think he should run everything he writes by someone who is more empathic. He is a public figure. He has a serious disability when it comes to public communication. He should take measures to deal with that. But I guess he's too proud?
I truly think Stallmans intentions have been OK. But you can't just pretend like it doesn't matter how communications are received by the reader. That's the whole point of communication. It's a bit like driving with poor vision. You don't intend to crash, but it's kind of inevitable if you don't correct for your disability.
Stallman is an activist, the kind of person that intentionally provokes outrage to make a point and bring issues to discussion.
The bizarre part of all this saga is that he's being attacked by exactly the same kind of people using his very same tactics. It's like some of those Godzilla vs Kong movies.
Honestly I don't find this funny. But I don't care about it either. I had not heard much about the FSF last decade.
There's something ironic about a lynch mob calling someone ableist because he's got autistic communication issues.
RMS is not wrong.
Everything out of context will sound strange.
Can you explain to me how the context of [1] and [4] makes [2] and [3] - "is having that photo is not hurting everyone" - sound different than without the context?
"[1] This "child pornography" might be a photo of yourself or your lover that the two of you shared.
[2] It might be an image of a sexually mature teenager that any normal adult would find attractive. What's heinous about having such a photo?
[3] But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a "child", that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship.
[4] The government will invent an unlimited number of opportunities to censor us and search us if we grant the legitimacy of its all-purpose excuses for doing so."
So make CP illegal, find the criminals if you can, stop the commerce with such material , my paranoia is that I could be setup by police, or by someone that does not like me or even by a fucking troll. In today world such an accusation can destroy your life.
Strange how the law sees nothing wrong with two teens fucking each other, but somehow sending nude photos of themselves to each other is a felony.
I read that he’s intending the extremely literal meaning of “having” as he often takes extremely precise, literal meanings that make his writings more difficult to understand than would otherwise be.
Let me be clear: I’m not in any way supporting child porn, but I can see how rms could hold a view that merely having a specific sequence of bits that can be displayed as a picture does not harm anyone.
Perhaps someone was harmed by the circumstances under which the picture was taken. Perhaps some ex- is harmed by the thought that you might have that photo. Almost surely allowing the purchase or trading of such pictures encourages future harm. There are lots of reasons to oppose child porn, but rms is, for reasons known to him, choosing to argue that, in a very literal sense, the passive having of the bits is not among them.
Context: I’ve read a lot of rms writings and worked for FSF as his typist for 9 hours back around 1990 before I quit. (I wish I’d have been able to do it longer, but it wasn’t worth the $10/hr to listen to rms dictate keystrokes and enter them. I would frustrate him as I was trying to learn what the keystrokes were doing and he just wanted me to type faster. When I told him I was quitting after the third three hour session, he graciously offered that I was just getting fast enough to not be frustrating, that most people quit in session 1 or 2, and he’d make sure FSF sent me the $90 which they did.) I don’t consider myself to have a particular “side” here, but if my minor interactions with him are relevant to anyone, I wanted to disclose them.
To play devils advocate here:
Taking GPL code into your product and selling it, the fact of selling your product is not harming the person who wrote the GPL code. But with GPLed code RMS has a totally different view than with pictures of nude children.
I can imagine reading an rms essay on how coming into my yard and taking my ladder without permission, using it without damage, and returning it before I noticed it missing imposed no harm upon me, so the taking of my property was not wrong, though the ongoing possession would be.
To your later-added devil’s advocate paragraph: rms is fine with you selling a product that includes GPL code and as far as I can tell always has been. What he’s not fine with is you imposing restrictions that prevent someone that you do sell the code to from effectively modifying or further sharing that product.
Nothing in the license precludes the sale of such a combined work though, as in your devil’s advocate query.
I’m not even sure where the confusion or disagreement is in this sub-thread to be honest. The license is short and fairly clear; there’s ample additional “what does this mean for inclusion of GPL code in commercial products?” FAQs and a fairly large body of commercial products openly marketed which include GPL code in them.
[0] - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCommercially
In your scenario, the user won't have access to the code they'd need to modify the product you sold them. That is the harm the GPL is designed to protect against.
This "child pornography" might be a photo of yourself or your lover that the two of you shared.
Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship.
Having a photo of you out there, shared to people you did not intend or want to have it shared with can most definitely hurt someone.
I can't find the quote right now, but there was an interview in the news here last year with a woman who's dad had taken and sold explicit images of her as a child, and she said a major part of her issues as an adult was that a mere glance from a stranger could trigger a crippling fear that the stranger had seen those photos and had recognized her. Let alone a proper look from someone.
Even though the images might have been taken with consent, unlike my example case, they might later have been spread without consent as in the numerous "revenge porn" cases. Again this can inflict real hurt to those depicted.
In other words if:
1. someone already has a photo.
2. No one interacts with it besides the current owner
3. Nobody knows or will ever know about it but the current owner
Do you think there is damage being done? Right now I don't think so. I think all of the damage is done when material is produced and spread, and then spread again.
I dislike talking about this subject so I'm alright with disagreeing.
I also don't disagree entirely with the point RMS is trying to make regarding unmotivated searches of property and person. I do disagree with the specifics of his argument though.
Child pornography is in many cases indeed a heinous offense, however blanket searches of person and property is also a grand invasion of privacy.
I understand the point about hurting children or adults by the porn industry but I would hope we can find better methods to stop this crimes , social media justice is not the way,,, I read about under cover cops catching soem criminals so let's fund them to do their jobs ... and I also read about some teens killing an old man because someone accused him to be a pedo
Anyone making actual CP should be thrown into vulcano, but teens sending nudes to each other are as innocent as they can be.
"But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a "child", that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship." - https://stallman.org/notes/2011-mar-jun.html#4_June_2011_(Bo...
You equate this: "Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone" to "child pornography does not hurt anyone".
Do you really think those two sentences mean the same thing? Really? This is the reason the following saying is a thing.
>Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.
Stop being so aggressively bad in finding faults. I mean, just being realistic, Stallman has most likely been stopped and searched multiple times crossing borders. You'd think if he was a pedo he would've been caught by now. Instead he's speaking his mind about censorship and freedom yet people that will never have an iota of the drive this guy had at least once in his life are trying to tear him down.
Do you take some sort of pride in attacking him or something? Regardless of his flaws, what have you done?
"Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone" is factually wrong.
My examples were porn-related since that's the topic of RMS' post. But they don't need to be.
> You equate this: "Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone" to "child pornography does not hurt anyone".
This was admittedly poorly written, however I do not believe that possession of child pornography is a victimless crime either.
> Stallman has most likely been stopped and searched multiple times crossing borders. You'd think if he was a pedo he would've been caught by now
I am not saying he is a pedophile but that doesn't make what he said any less bizarre.
OHO, I think RMS is making a point about the excuses governments and LEOs make in favor of censorship/anti-encryption - a good one, at that.
OTOH, he does a pretty piss-poor job describing it in that blurb. I'm not convinced this is an argument in favor of child pornography. I'm simply choosing to believe it's poor wording on RMS's part trying to make a point about encryption and he's not actually in favor of child pornography.
His general argument is a good one, even given how reprehensible child pornography can be - there are ways to fight it without giving open ended backdoors and carte blanche to law enforcement. But part of that argument does rest implicitly on an argument that child pornography itself isn't harmful. His rationale that simply possessing an image does no harm doesn't take into account the harm that went into creating that image or the networks of harm that their creation and distribution supports.
Setting everything else aside, that's not really the sort of argument people should want a spokesperson for free software to be making on their behalf. Most people don't see child pornography as mere images with no context or moral weight, so an argument that deviates into a tangent of "and they're just pictures anyway so what's the harm? Maybe the kids were into it" isn't going to be compelling.
Do you have sources for the "well documented" views that pedophilia is not harmful and that children can give consent and should be allowed to engage in sexual intercourse? Because the blurb above certainly does not say any of that.
Apart from the appendix linked to in the open letter being critiqued in the OP, there is this often mentioned quote by the man himself:
“I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.”
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006
[1]https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
[2]https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...
Then again, maybe what should be prohibited and punished is the sale and the buy, rather than just the possession. But is it technically feasible?
Is it reasonable to expect public figures to be 100% agreeable? I don't think so. In fact I think we'd all be a lot better off if we just stopped judging these peoples' character altogether. Shitty people can do good things. Why would we want to stop them?
His ideas on free software and freedom in general are certainly noble and inspiring, but it's like he went a hundred steps too far in simplifying everything.
I think the act can't be seperated from the result - this is were people go wrong.
As a side note: RMS seams to be totally against "stealing" digital GPLed code.
Certainly, but we talk about digital good here, stealing the first apple harms me (unless if I was not going to use it regardless), copying it however does not.
>RMS seams to be totally against "stealing" digital GPLed code.
Please explain what you mean by stealing here. He is against taking GPLed code, modifying it, compiling it, and then distributing the binary without distributing your modifications. He has no problem with selling the application/code. He has no problem with keeping the modifications to yourself as long as you do not share the binary. He has no problem with distributing the unmodified binary and/or code.
Yes.
Not saying it wouldn't be wrong. But it's decidedly different from stealing.
Likewise, getting a copy of a copyrighted movie with Bittorent through the Pirate Bay is not really stealing. It may still be wrong, but since it does not deprive the original owner from their own copy of the movie, it's different from stealing.
In general, non-rival goods should be treated with different rules and laws than rival goods. Turning them back into rival goods like copyright does strikes me as a very bad idea. Artificial scarcity is… non optimal to say the least.
There, completely separated. Possession of that specific photo would not do any harm to the kid in any way. It's contrived, very, very improbable and not how all of it happens in reality, but there it is.
Also, by the way, just by participating in this conversation, we are going to be labeled of being pro you-know-what in about five years from now, giving the current trend.
It would illuminate whether he’s actually a CP apologist or merely a poor legal philosopher who has bad judgment on the subject matter of his thought experiments.
Possession of CP is not an accessory-after-the-fact. CP is also not a physical good. This argument is similar to the argument comparing piracy to stealing a car.
The law doesn't criminalize dealing in stolen goods because those goods are physical in nature and receiving them perpetuates the inability of their actual owner to enjoy them. That is a red herring of your own introduction.
It does so because allowing easy disposal of stolen property to third parties who stand to profit from it encourages theft.
However, why is somebody holding these opinions a show-stopper?
One could argue that that's because in many cases somebody holding these opinions is a "dog whistle" for the person actually being a paedophile. In the case of RMS, though, we have no evidence that he actually is a paedophile, despite him being pretty thoroughly scrutinised over the years. We also know that he has a need to question everything and write about where he disagrees with society, which he presents in excruciating detail on his website, so it's not that he has some sort of fixation on this topic.
I'd argue that in an ideal society we should encourage thoughtfully heterodox people, since once in a while they'll invent something revolutionary like free software and copyleft, while them also sometimes holding some very weird opinions is not much of a cost.
In the non-ideal real world, once RMS came up with his revolutionary ideas, he probably should have stopped talking about his most fringe ideas, so his resignation as president of the FSF, for instance, had been sensible and over-due.
The only line that could be interpreted in that way would be:
> This "child pornography" might be a photo of yourself or your lover that the two of you shared.
And even then, it is ambiguous.
Yes.
"But even when it is uncontroversial to call the subject depicted a 'child', that is no excuse for censorship. Having a photo or drawing does not hurt anyone, so and if you or I think it is disgusting, that is no excuse for censorship."