The Right to Read (1997)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

by boogies • 6 years ago

379 92 6 years ago

nivenkos• 6 years ago

I'd recommend reading the whole of Free Software, Free Society: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf (PDF)

cashewchoo• 6 years ago

I have a signed copy of this. I love it. Free Software, Free Society was maybe the most important book I read in college.

I wish RMS didn't have the issues around women that he does, but I immensely venerate his thinking on software freedom.

murgindrag7• 6 years ago

I wish people didn't believe everything others say about people.

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.

nine_k• 6 years ago

I read it back when it was published, and thought: "this logic is incontrovertible, but assumptions are way dark; what is the probability he's right?"

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

murgindrag7• 6 years ago

RMS has always been prophetic. He's got the biggest Cassandra syndrome of anyone I've known. He's 100% right most of the time (at least evaluated a decade or two later), and most people have always thought that he sounds like a nutcase.

He's devoted his life to letting people know, and so few listen.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

Yes, it's amazing. He was using systems with Free bootloaders and bios etc. before Librem Purism was a thing at all, and has continually been on the bleeding edge of privacy and freedom.

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.

will_pseudonym2• 6 years ago

Thank you for the reference of the "Cassandra" metaphor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

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.

zanny• 6 years ago

I'm super grateful he dedicated his life to spreading such anti-mainstream ideas about intellectual property. He wasn't the first at all to think outside the actual box that is the mind prison living under a copyright regime puts you in, but he had profound impact on so many to break us out of it. Technology would be nowhere near where it is now if not for the millions of us that gave the sweat of our brow to free software. Which also coincidentally created the largest concentration of wealth and power in the history of the species on the backs of that collective labor but I digress.

User23• 6 years ago

RMS is a stellar example of why we should avoid falling into the genetic fallacy[1]. Yes he is stupid about inter-sexual relations and sexual relations in general. But I don't look to RMS for dating or sex advice and neither should anyone else. Contrarily, just because he's stupid about some things doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to him in the domains where he's literally a genius[2], like software and information freedom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

[2] Genius in the seminal sense.

mhh__2• 6 years ago

I saw a Reddit thread of some obviously new programmers having their first introduction to how... interesting... a character Stallman is. He's not normal, but it takes all sorts to make a world (as the saying goes)

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.

ve552• 6 years ago

I really enjoy having copies of all of the content I consume locally. It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone. It's there when I lose Internet, it is there if I stop paying for various subscriptions, and it is there even if companies receive takedown notices, or otherwise just remove content for arbitrary reasons with no transparency or warning.

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.

titanomachy4• 6 years ago

You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

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.

est31• 6 years ago

That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...

devilduck• 6 years ago

There's an old idea that once you release something you have created into the wild it is no longer really yours, but ours. Copyright and IP have never really prevented artistic theft, just slowed the ability to make money using someone else's IP. However, when you consider things such as the success of "Old Country Road" where a core characteristic of the song was a sample not originated from the artist themself, you can see how copyright and IP law really don't mean anything in the world of art. Information still wants to be free

core-questions2• 6 years ago

Owned is the wrong word, then. Possessed is probably a better term.

musicale• 6 years ago

You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

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.

coddle-hark2• 6 years ago

We don't even own the things we write ourselves

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.

bergstromm4663• 6 years ago

Tech literacy is way up, too.

I'm surprised to read that. Is that really what you see?

I'd say I see the opposite as being true.

andrewjl• 6 years ago

Entire channels being taken down because the licensed music they used contained samples that weren’t properly licensed themselves.

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.

phkahler• 6 years ago

> 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

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.

ve552• 6 years ago

Absolutely, but this seems hard to attain. For-profit tools inherently have millions (or billions) of dollars to put into not only improving their UX, but also into advertising and making their product viral, sometimes at the cost of users (e.g. data harvesting).

I'm not sure who really has enough money, drive, and talent, to be able to do this but with free software.

blitblitblit• 6 years ago

It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone.

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

throwaway9980• 6 years ago

Imagine if the material being burned was instead the only remaining record of billions of hate filled Tweets and Facebook posts.

dudul• 6 years ago

Same here. People make fun of me when I buy DVDs/BRs, but I'm too attached to some classics to take the chance that they'll be censored, removed, modified.

FpUser• 6 years ago

This is why I buy digital material I like and keep it locally with the copies backed up in few places around the globe on rented servers. Not hosting my source codes, software etc on clouds either. All on my own servers with backups/standby elsewhere.

conception• 6 years ago

This really hit me with flash self-uninstalling this month. All that content just systematically erased via the viewer disappearing. Flash was trash but it was a lot of the golden age of the net.

forgotmypw173• 6 years ago

Open formats and viewers live on, closed formats and viewers fade away. I've stopped investing my time and energy in the latter as much as possible.

Shame about all that Flash content...

svikashk• 6 years ago

It feels nice knowing that it cannot be taken away from me by anyone.

One of the main reasons why I download stuff (YouTube videos/articles), so I can always revisit it whenever I want to.

thayne2• 6 years ago

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

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.

cjfd• 6 years ago

Or just have a spare hard drive outside the house on which you backup the hard drive every few months or so. This is what I do to protect my media files.

CapitalistCartr• 6 years ago

Not counting the kid's books, I have about 1600 books in the house, and every time I read another kindle-style invidious story about forced changes after purchase, I buy more paper. I actually prefer reading on a screen, and someday, it'll be safe to do so.

saagarjha• 6 years ago

DRM-free books should be a suitable replacement, no?

gen220• 6 years ago

There's plenty of websites where you can download drm-free pdfs/mobis of most of the world's texts (at least I can attest for English, I'm less familiar with other languages).

I also usually buy paper books. If you buy the book, you shouldn't feel particularly guilty for "acquiring" the pdf/mobi. :)

oriesdan• 6 years ago

Do you know wikisource? [1]

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

[2] https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

[3] https://www.kiwix.org/en/

HaoZeke• 6 years ago

Am I the only one surprised to see that the article thinks researchers are paid royalties for their articles? That's actually way better than the system now

ggm2• 6 years ago

No mention of the kindle 1984 incident..

iso1210• 6 years ago

This was written over 20 years ago, and predicted things like the kindle.

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

ggm2• 6 years ago

sorry. let me re-phrase: no mention of the kindle 1984 incident.. in the comment threads here in HN.

miki1232113• 6 years ago

In my opinion, a good compromise between DRM and just giving everyone an epub file is watermarking.

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.

The Right to Read (1997)

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