Freedom Fighter of the Digital Age

As music, movies and books move further into the digital realm, the question of our freedoms being diminished was raised by Richard Stallman at Cambridge University on April 30th at his talk on "Copyright vs. Community".

Stallman, a legendary software developer and free software activist, argued that current copyright laws are an attack on individual freedom, are not beneficial to social progress and are unacceptable.

"There is no justification for forbidding people to share. In fact it's about as evil a thing as one could imagine because sharing is the basis of society. To attack sharing is to attack society and those governments that try to forbid people to share are attacking society. They have chosen to side with the mega-corporations against society," said Stallman.

Copyright law came into effect around the time of the printing press and was always intended to promote social progress. The full title of Britain's Statute of Anne, considered the world's first copyright law, starts "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning"; the U.S. Constitution's copyright clause begins "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

With modern copyright laws, however, businesses are able to to restrict the public's use of content and technology as they never have before—thus restricting social progress.

"Copyright in the age of the printing press functioned as an industrial regulator. Regulating publishers, controlled by authors, with the benefits intended to go to the public. It only restricted printing and publication, it didn't restrict the reader. The result was that it was uncontroversial, easy to enforce and beneficial to the public. So the deal was beneficial for the public," said Stallman.

DRM: "Digital Handcuffs"

Currently, the two ways in which corporations have manipulated copyrights to their advantage are by extending the length of time of copyright and by extending the breadth of control—to the point of allowing publishers to write their own copyright rules.

Copyrights now allow them to publish something encrypted or proprietary to access, and forbid us to bypass these limitations. This practice is known as DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) or "Digital Handcuffs".

"Digital Restrictions Management attacks your freedom at two levels at once. Its purpose is to take away your freedom, to deny you the ability to do what would otherwise be your legal right in many cases. But in order to do that, they have to make sure you can't access it with free software at all. So you have to use proprietary software and that also is an offense against the freedom that you deserve to have," said Stallman.

For example, there has been a big push by Sony and Amazon to convince people to start reading e-books in proprietary digital formats.

"The publishers have envisioned using digital technology to achieve total control over everything anyone does with a book. You might call it a 'pay per read universe'. That's what they want," said Stallman.

Proprietary e-books deny readers the traditional freedoms that they have thus-far enjoyed, such as:

• buying a book anonymously by paying cash

• lending a book to your friend

• selling it to a used book store

• borrowing it from the public library

• keeping it for years, reading it as many times as you wish and passing it on to your heirs.

Stallman stated that in order for corporations to secure their "pay per read universe," they plan to do this in two stages. The first stage is to outlaw free software that breaks DRM, which the corporations have done already. The second stage is to convince people to switch to proprietary e-books, which is what they are trying to accomplish now.

Compromise Copyright System

Stallman is not against having copyright laws. What he is against is our freedoms being taken away by the overly restrictive current copyright laws.

The two areas where Stallman proposed to reduce copyright are in length and breadth. For length, he suggested trying ten years. Once, at a panel discussion with some writers he mentioned this and an award-winning fantasy writer exclaimed "Ten years? That would be intolerable! Anything more than five years is too much!"

"Most authors realise that the publishers are just screwing them anyway. In fact these same publishers that demand more power over us in the name of the authors are grinding those authors into the ground with their heels," said Stallman.

The area of breadth that Stallman proposed to change is dependent on the classification of the work, since different works contribute in different ways to society.

Functional works: These are works you use to do a practical job, like software, recipes, text fonts, educational works, reference works, etc.

These works must be free and given the four freedoms like free software in order to benefit society best.

Works of testimony: Works whose purpose is to state what certain people thought or experienced or believed: works such as memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers.

For these, a "Compromise Copyright System" is proposed, stating that "Everyone is free to do non-commercial redistribution of exact copies, but everything else is covered by copyright law". This turns copyright back to an industrial regulation and frees people to do the the thing they most wish to do.

Works of 'art': Artistic and entertainment works.

This is a difficult category because some work has artistic integrity; modifying the art could destroy that integrity. On the other hand, modifying a work of art can contribute to art.

Stallman cited Shakespeare as an example, who used stories from previously published works. If copyright law existed, those plays probably wouldn't have been made and we would have lost masterworks.

For this category, Stallman suggests that modified works can benefit society; unlike functional works, their redistribution is not urgent. So he proposes to use the Compromise Copyright System for ten years.

Free Music Downloads

One consequence of this proposed copyright is that sharing music and other art on the Internet will be legal. The record companies would claim that this is taking away money from the musicians, but this is not entirely true, explained Stallman. Only 4% of the record company's income goes to musicians and the superstars get the bulk of this money; the system is about 96% inefficient.

Stallman suggested that there were far more efficient ways to support musicians. One way is to tax something connected with the copying of music, like blank disks. The other was to make voluntary payments directly to the artists. The latter has already been proven to work on the Internet.

A Canadian musician was cited, who is earning more than the norm by relying on voluntary payments for her freely downloadable music. But Stallman also cited how Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead also set up voluntary payment schemes for downloading their music and each got about a million dollars—showing that superstars would still do quite well under voluntary payments.

Stallman's proposal would give money only to the musicians and composers, never to the record companies. The money would also not be distributed linearly, so if artist "X" is ten times as popular as artist "Y", then X would not get ten times as much money as Y but rather, they would receive two or three times as much, following something like a cube-root function rather than a linear function for distribution.

The tax schemes that have been implemented in other countries either (1) the money goes to the record companies or (2) the money is distributed to musicians in linear proportion to their popularity. Both of these are less efficient for supporting artists.

With such a copyright system in place, Stallman suggests that artists and society would do far better than under the present copyright laws, and most importantly, we would still retain our freedoms.

For more information visit: The campaign against DRM "Defective by Design" at DefectiveByDesign.org and gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.html