Richard Stallman at UQAM
We had the pleasure to hear a talk by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation on copyrights. The event was organized by many volunteers. Strangely, most of them were not from hardcore geek groups. You could even see hippies advocating the benefits of homegrown berries and comic writers debating about the proper inking techniques.
The first part of the event was featuring various kiosks by several organizations active in the Montréal area. There was my former employer, several GNU/Linux user groups and few free speech activists. There was not many visitors. Given the lack of prior notification that was understandable but still disappointing. Nevertheless, it was fun to see former coworkers again. I finally had the occasion to brag about by new π memorization skills. At university, I'm affiliated with the LaCIM, the lab Simon Plouffe was affiliated to when he came up with his formula for the computation of digits of π. Simon Plouffe is also a former world record holder for remembering digits of π so I don't impress anyone there.
The second part was something else. The large auditorium was filled at capacity. I would say over 300 attendees. You could see GNU and penguin shirts everywhere. You could also see a lot of older people and even a few suits. There was a little delay, as expected with any presentation, and a bit of panic. What I understand is that the organizers lost track of Richard Stallman. Then he entered the room, irradiating with his strong charisma. You can read about that in Free as in Freedom but to see it in reality is something. Everyone stopped talking and every look was locked on his eyes.
He started his presentation with a small history of Free Software, the fundamental rights and why software is different from chairs and other physical objects. He was talking with a really good french. Some people live in Montréal all their life and never manage to speak french that well. He only inquired a few times about the proper terms to use. This is written in many places but RMS started the GNU project when he saw the world of software starting to take away from the users fundamental rights. The right to use the software however you like, the right to study it, its internals and how it works and to modify it, the right to help you neighbors, by redistributing the software and the right to redistribute a modified version of the software.
Software is different because you can share it without loosing it. Software is different because you can hide how it works. The version of the software that you use if the version that only the computer can understand. To see how the software works and to adapt it to your need, you need its source code. If a toaster is not pleasing you, you can take a screwdriver and you can take it apart. You don't need the blue print to do so. But the talk was not about Free Software so RMS proceeded with copyrights.
In antiquity and in the middle age, the skill required to use a book was also the same skill required to reproduce it. The reader of a book could reproduce it just as easily as the original author and to reproduce 100 book was 100 times as long as to reproduce a single book. If you wanted Euclid's Elements and you were not living in Alexandria, you had no hope to find Euclid and to ask for a copy of his book. You had to find someone who had it and either to borrow the book from him to make you own copy or to convince him to make a copy for you. Euclid had not much to gain by knocking at every door to find if you had copied his book. Euclid probably had something better to do than to do all the copies himself. Books were written, authors had a motivation, sharing knowledge and stories is part of human nature. We have made it for thousands of years.
Things started to change with the printing press. With the printing press, you had an enormous price to acquire the equipment and a long setup to could typeset a book but once your plates were ready, you could print as many copies as you liked in a relatively short time. Nevertheless, it was not all kinds of work that benefited dramatically by the printing press. You need to print enough copies to account to the time spend to typeset the plates. So a print-shop could decide to print a book and the author would get nothing while the print-shop would sell hundred of copies. This is not theft, the print shop does not prevent to author to continue to sell his own hand made copies or to open his own print shop.
Some prestigious authors managed to influence rulers in granting them monopoly for the reproduction of their own work but it was on case by case basis at that time. Around the 18th century, we started to see official copyright laws. That way, it was thought that by restricting the rights of the public for a limited time, the authors would gets more motivation to write more books for the greatest good of all. Manual copying was still going on for niche market works and for really poor people. Manual copying was not targeted by these laws were meant to prevent to abuse by print-shops. A manual copyist cannot abuse much and the laws were easy to apply since print-shops had to advertise what they were planning to sell.
The public was giving away a fundamental right, the right to share and to communicate its knowledge but it wasn't taking away too much, only the right to share with a printing press that most people didn't have. But the technology continued to progress. Now most people own devices capable of better reproduction than a printing press. Now the public has something to loose. During the time of the printing press, the power shifted relatively fast from the authors to the editors. The author had an exclusive monopoly on his work but there were many authors and not that many print shops. The print-shops were not to agree to print your book and to give you royalties if you were to bypass them by also dealing with another print-shops.
The situation that we have now is that the editors always require to get the exclusive copyright from the author. The law that was supposed to limit the power of the editors and to protect the authors made the editors more powerful. The ones who are lobbying revisions to the copyright laws are the editors, not the authors. They have a strong propaganda machine and they claim that they do it for the starving authors. The reality is that the editors keep the authors in starvation.
To get a record contract, a band must assign its copyright to his record company. The record company will negotiate a royalty rate that will be around 4% of the retail prince. The record company will consider that recording, mastering and producing the record is an advance on the royalties. Most bands won't sell enough record to get passed this advance and they won't receive a single penny from the disc sales. Why do band still sign record contracts ? Because of the payola. Record companies are "well plugged" with radio stations. Many were sentenced for using illegal means for convincing radio stations to play selected records. Bands sign record contracts so they can get the promotion they need to have people in their shows, where they can make real money. Even if bands would like to let you download their songs, the copyright is not their anymore, the record company decides what you can do with the music.
We have reached a technological point where we don't need the record companies anymore. If you like a band and you share its music as much as you can to get them promotion, and you send this band one dollar, you have sent them more money than they would have get if you had bought a record from a store. Given the technological context, giving exclusive reproduction rights to the editors is not the good deal it was in the time of the printing press. The author gets screwed because he doesn't get has much as he deserve and the public gets screwed because he lose a right that he has the mean to exercise, a right that would give the public more happiness without taking away anything from the author.
The editors have at least one point right: we need to review the copyright laws. But not to give them more right, we need to take back our rights. The government should not serve to protect the business model of obsolete middlemen, it should serve its people. What Richard Stallman propose is a short term copyright. He think that ten years should be enough for an editor to cover the setup fee of typesetting and printing books, to cover the research of reference manual and to cover for the studio time of records. Indeed, most works are out of print long before that ten years delay. Editors don't care to provide you with a publication but they still want to prevent you from getting it from an individual who already has it. RMS must admit that he heard some protest from authors. A prized author once told his that ten years was way to much and that five years is as long as a work should be covered by copyrights. Editors claim that they need 90 years to fully recover from their investment. The reality is that they want to prevent you from using public domain work, work that they prevent from being available so that can sell you something else.
Richard Stallman also realize that not every piece of human work should be shared the same. Every piece of published work falls more or less in one of the three categories: utility and reference work, like computer programs and dictionaries, work expressing the ideas of someone, like essais, and entertainment. In all the cases, private non commercial verbatim copies should be allowed. A non commercial copy takes nothing away from the author and to prevent it would requires a police state that slams doors to perform full cavity searches, or at least who seize your computer or who install government sponsored spyware programs.
It should be possible to modify and to redistribute utility and reference work, maybe after a short delay. That may require that the government come into play and ensure that the source code of programs if made available for the public. It makes sense to allow only verbatim copies of works expressing the ideas of someone like essays. On the other hand, after a delay it should be possible to make work based on an entertainment work by someone else. This form of folklore is dominant in master pieces of the past. You can think of Lord of the Rings that is more or less an modern retell of Der Ring der Nibelungen which is also a germanic retell of the traditional Norse legend of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer.
Richard Stallman invites us to make a lot of noise. We can blog about copyrights and we can organize meeting for ultra geeks but thats now how we will reach that public. If we don't have the public, the government can afford not to listen to us. We must go down in the streets, possibly picketing in front of record stores.
There was a panel with invited speakers after the talk but we needed to clear the room for 22h so there were not many interesting questions. There was a bit of flaming among the speakers, quite sad. RMS reminded us that we often forget to give credit to all the GNU hackers when we refer to the GNU/Linux operating system as "Linux". He also highlighted that we are a bit victim of propaganda from companies like IBM who prefer to talk about the quality of "open source software" instead of talking about the freedoms protected by Free Software. Thanks again to Richard Stallman and to all the organizers! If you were shaken by the ideas in in this speach, don't forget to become member of the FSF so I get my free voice mail message. ; )