Yesterday, some DC user groups (including DC.pm) arranged for Richard Stallman to give his one-hour talk on Copyrights at the DNC Headquarters. It's actually pretty interesting, since the whole thing came together in less than a week and was only advertised for just over a day (~36 hours). Close to 80 people showed up.
Among the more interesting observations from last night were that Piracy describes the act of commandeering a ship by force while at sea, and should not be abused to describe the simple copying of electronic documents. The term "Pundit" has been turned upside-down, from a description of a publisher who does not pay authors for what they publish, to a description of authors who say what they want without the benefit of going through a publisher. Also, "Intellectual Property" is a fiction that serves to unite three disparate ideas -- copyright, patents and trademarks -- in a fashion that presupposes that these concepts are in fact property when they really aren't. (Thus, fsf-ly correct geeks do no talk in terms of either "intellectual property" or "pirating".)
Another point worth noting was that RMS has neither need nor desire to protect the revenue streams or business models of publishers and media conglomerates who have created a very lucrative toll-road in distributing content from authors to readers/listeners/viewers. (Thus, if you are stuck in a world-model that tries to preserve income to content distributors, you are simply starting from a faulty and absurd point of view).
All in all, this wasn't one of RMS' best speeches. He spent a significant amount of time advocating, justifying and defending a hypothetical utopian future (one that's almost here today) where "users" of content would have a universal mechanism to optionally send $1.00 to an author, musician or other such creative entity for use of their work. Such a plan would have the benefit of getting more of the user's funds to the creative agent (much more than is common through publishers and music companies), and promote much more content than we users see today.
This sounds strangely like a Sally Struthers ad for "Save the Musicians" or "Save the Authors".
It also sounds like someone should mention micropayments to RMS before he gives this talk again.
RMS must like the climate up his butt
--Nat
Re:Toll roads
vsergu on 2002-04-11T00:45:55
RMS did mention that editors add value, and he thought that in his micropayment-based self-publishing utopia there would be an important role for people who sorted the wheat from the chaff.
To me, his most convincing point was that there's simply no way to eliminate noncommercial copying without imposing draconian restrictions and Orwellian surveillance on everyone. He's not sure what effects less restrictive copyright laws would have on authors and publishers, but regardless of what the effects are he doesn't think they're bad enough to make it worth living in a police state. I tend to agree with him.
The advance of technology continues to make it possible for individuals to accomplish formerly impossible tasks with fewer resources, and unfortunately those tasks include things that might be harmful to society. I'm not willing to choose the police state to prevent people from copying things. When it comes to preventing individual wackos from killing millions of people (something I think we'll have to start worrying about before many more years have passed), it's a tougher decision.Re:Toll roads
gnat on 2002-04-11T04:40:43
Yup, he's absolutely right there. Fair use has survived so far because it's impossible to police without technology. Now they're talking about introducing the technology, we have to choose whether we want to accept the RIAA's definition of "fair" (remember, these are the people who screw the bands that feed them).That's something a lot of people find frustrating about RMS--it's easy to agree with him on a few points, but very few people manage to agree with everything he says.
--Nat
Re:Toll roads
ziggy on 2002-04-11T02:23:47
True, but in Richard's defense, that's not an excuse to make every little cowpath a toll road.Many roads wouldn't be built without tolls!Richard's worldview sounds like a place where websites to collect and rate content would sprout up like fungi in the forest, filling in the void spontaneously created as publishers blink out of existance. (Like replacing O'Reilly and Blue Note with a thousand Slashdots and Napsters.)
Much of RMS' rant against toll-takers wasn't against the dead-tree-pushers per se as much as it was against the music industry. But he did lump the music industry ("which treats the vast majority of musicians like dirt") together with the print publishing industry ("which generally treats authors like dirt"). And he's very afraid of what could happen if eBooks (and the freedom-limiting technologies that come along with them) become the norm instead of the flop they are today. Similar things can be said about electronic music trading as well.
Like most of RMS' musings, there's a sound ethical principle lurking underneath the rhetoric. He did convince me that there is a danger to our current state of affairs, where the big media conglomerates are large enough to create their own legislation. For example, extending copyright span (to protect Mr. M. Mouse). And preventing fair use that's not filling the coffers at ASCAP. The DCMA did get passed after all, and it's looking like similar legislation is being discussed elsewhere; the bill-formerly-known-as-CCC^WSSSCA was well on it's way to outlawing the simple task of maintaining a browser cache without the copy protection knob turned all the way to eleven.
Re:Toll roads
gnat on 2002-04-11T05:01:45
Hmm. The world of blogging is very interesting right now. It used to be that everyone could read everything, but it's now at the point where no one person can keep up. (Remind you of Usenet? Hold those flashbacks.)More and more, people like Dave Winer are acting as hubs. It's a lot like "The Tipping Point"'s "connectors" role, where some people know a lot of people, and if you can get noticed by a connector then you'll probably be noticed by a lot of people. If you're another voice in the wild, hardly anybody will pay attention to you.
This is very similar to the way the web went. Remember the good old days of "what's new on the web?" Now we rely on emailed links, blogs, and google. And we're the sophisticated ones--most people visit the same websites as everyone else. If it's not provided by Yahoo or MSN, they don't know about.
A hip economic analysis of this would probably mean that Dave Winer is a "brand" that people trust (at the very least they know what they're getting). What an appalling idea.
So I'm not entirely sure I believe in RMS's ideal world where there are no commercial aggregators and filters such as publishers. And I reserve a special pot of scorn for micropayments. The only way to make macrodollars from micropayments is to enforce their use, which gets you back to the same totalitarian mind-control that RMS is against in the SSSCA (or whatever it's called this week).
--Nat
Re:Toll roads
vsergu on 2002-04-11T11:51:03
The micropayments RMS wants are specifically designed to be anonymous ("digital cash"), so I don't think the issue of totalitarianism is relevant. Whether it will be possible to develop such a thing in the real world is a separate issue. People have been talking about digital cash for years, but it hasn't happened yet. The economy is run by corporations that aren't interested in -- in fact are opposed to -- anonymous payments.Re:Toll roads
ziggy on 2002-04-11T14:07:15
The other issue with RMS' anonymous transactions is that he's describing them as pretty high value transactions: Click here to send $1.00 to this band!.The hypothetical solution he describes is wrong on so many levels (a pop-up window that appears on your fsfly-correct Ogg player, or Stephen King holding his novel hostage until 75% of the people who download it pay for it, always totally anonymous and optional). But it did get me to thinking about how that kind of fan support system does work today.
I'd be extremely unlikely to do one-click-support of a band or an author, through paypal or any anonymous FSF-approved equivalent. But I have gone out to bars to see indie musicians play, and paid $10.00 for whichever CD they're hocking on this tour (sometimes $20 if they have multiple CDs for sale). RMS asserts that sending that band $1.00 because you like one of their songs (distributed electronically) actually gives them more money than the music companies actually send to them. Of course, if Ms. Singer-Songwriter sells a CD for $10, she may be keeping $7 after production costs, but that still doesn't really provide a sustainable income.
On the other hand, my morning ritual when I get online is to visit about 10 websites. I visit them pretty regularly, and if the infrastructure were in place, I'd gladly pay $0.001 each time I hit the homepage. Maybe even a whole cent if I found it valuable enough and the payment were totally optional. It doesn't add up to much, but for independant aggregators that have become important connectors, it could amount to a significant revenue stream. Perhaps enough for a FTE, with benefits. I also acknowledge that this would be an incredibly small minority of independant publishers on the web, but it would help support the indies in the shadow of the big media companies.
Re:Toll roads
TorgoX on 2002-04-11T03:46:35
we [editors] improve [authors'] languageIdeally.
My experience with a half-dozen tech publishing houses is that most just don't bother trying to make editing be other than "So, done with that chapter yet?"; and some try for more, with extremely mixed results, partly because there's nearly no idea of how one actually trains and oversees an editor, or whether they actually pay for themselves in any role beyond just schedule-nagging.
I get the feeling that this is part of a trend in publishing generally, to just whisk into print whatever gets written. (Cf. the first edition of Cryptonomicon which seemed to have no editor OR proofreader or even a spellchecker lexicon with anything beyond a fourth-grade vocabulary.)
