Calgary City Council video archive for Dec 1st.
Richard Stallman lecturing about copyright at University of Calgary on 2009-02-03. Free/Libre formats can be found at: www.archive.org , as per Stallman’s request. Thanks to Sebastian Ochmann from the University of Bonn (Germany) for his ongoing efforts to correct YouTube’s Machine Translation captions!
this guy is taking away my freedom to watch dvds
@OutOfTheBoxThinker That’s a great point. If you want something done custom, it isn’t as though it’s always easy to do. There would still be a market for skilled works that have yet to be created.
@OutOfTheBoxThinker That’s a great point. If you want something done custom, it isn’t as though it’s always easy to do. There would still be a market for skilled works that have yet to be created.
@thunderpheonix33 : I don’t see why. I’m a programmer and a designer myself and I don’t see why anyone would be out of a job if copyrights were abolished. There will always be high demand for both custom programs and custom designs and no amount of free software and designs would change that.
@thunderpheonix33 : There’s nothing wrong with being a hippy. Some of the most interesing people I’ve met in my life are hippies.
@OutOfTheBoxThinker
the guy is also a fucking hippy
the guy is a fking idiot if his vision became reality then a lot of people around the world would lose jobs
@inscrutabled: What’s the benefit of applying copyrights? Don’t people benefit from interviews, news articles, public policy works, manuals, etc. to be spread freely by anyone who can? Sure, one might attach a criterium that such works can only be spread when referencing the original work, but I don’t see any benefit in limiting their spread by others through copyright. I don’t see any benefit in making modifications illegal either, because modifications can be improvements just as in software
@OutOfTheBoxThinker I should have specified; I think it’s useful when a work’s integrity is beneficial to society. Interviews, news articles with quotes from important persons, public policy works, manuals with instructions for potentially dangerous activities–I think copyright serves these fairly well. Their distribution shouldn’t be limited, but for some works, prohibiting modified distribution is in everyone’s best interest. (Software obviously doesn’t fall under this category.)
@inscrutabledirt : In this age of blogging, copyright on journalism is a major restriction as well. With regards to scientific documents, the peer review process should be sufficient protection. I don’t see the need for copyright at all.
@inscrutabledirt : The GPL probably helped popularizing open source software during its first decade because of its “viral” nature, but today open source software is hard to ignore any more and now the GPL seems more of a nuissance and a restriction than a benefit. I agree that many libraries are released under the LGPL, MIT or other truely free licenses but I nevertheless found quite a very very interesting ones still under the GPL license, which is a pity…
@OutOfTheBoxThinker Fair enough. I think copyright is useful in some areas, like journalism and scientific documents.
@OutOfTheBoxThinker Most libraries are licensed under the LGPL, which allows linking with proprietary software. I agree that the GPL places occasionally onerous restrictions on developers. But the point of the GPL is to give _users_ the four freedoms. If it didn’t have that characteristic, GPL software wouldn’t last long in a world that is still, unfortunately, dominated by proprietary software.
@inscrutabledirt : Just for the record, I object to both “copyleft” and “copyright”. Both severely limit whatever someone can do with someone else’s creation and as such limit progress. To me, freedom implies the lack of restrictions and this I find in various licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD, MPL, LGPL, …) but NOT in the GPL.
@inscrutabledirt : I’m not planning to. I just hate Stallman insisting the GPL is free when in fact it puts such major restrictions on you. It’s ridiculous that I should license an entire framework, CMS or custom app under the GPL because it contains a single GPL-licensed library, yet that’s exactly what I’m supposed to do. That’s not what I consider freedom but just another form of totalitarianism.
Then don’t put any GPL code in your program. Or only use LGPL code.
@inscrutabledirt : The problem is that I want EVERYONE to be able to use my code if they feel like it, whether they want to use it for proprietary applications or free applications. It is precisely by being free for EVERYONE that frameworks like Zend or JQuery became so popular among hobbyist programmers and companies alike. Unlike the MIT or BSD license, the GPL code does not grant me that option and thus I feel limited to using only code released under MIT, BSD or similar licenses.
@OutOfTheBoxThinker Using the GPL doesn’t mean you can’t spread your name, and it doesn’t inhibit “progress.” If you don’t want to release a program under the GPL, don’t use any GPL code. It’s as simple as that. If you do want to use some GPL code, then what do you lose by using the GPL as opposed to the MIT license or the BSD license? They’re all free software licenses, and none of them prevent you from receiving credit.
@inscrutabledirt : Maybe so, but as long as proprietary software is legal and makes up the majority of software out there, I see no benefits in not giving them them access to my code as long as credit is given. That’s what I consider freedom. It is beneficial for me because it helps spread my name and it is beneficial for society because it stimulates progress. Stallman wants to limit access to his code and as such limits progress as well as my freedom.
@SVCFrost31 “Open source software” is software that is distributed under a license that meets the criteria of the Open Source Definition (which is actually the Debian Free Software Guidelines). “Free software” is software that is distributed under a license that meets the criteria of the Free Software Foundation (created by the Free Software Foundation). There are some differences and some software meets one definition and not the other. But in general, they tend to refer to the same thing.
@OutOfTheBoxThinker The freedom to exploit users isn’t a freedom that Mr. Stallman (or I) think you (or anybody) deserve.
As a programmer I don’t like the GNU license because it limits ME as a programmer. A library or framework using ANY code released under the GNU license has to be released under the same license, which IMO does not equal freedom. I want the freedom to use any license I want and have individuals or companies using my code to have the same amount of freedom. As such, I prefer the MIT, X11, MPL, Apache and other TRUELY free licenses over Stallman’s actually pretty restrictive GPL license.
INSTALL GENTOO
Wow, what a great video.
I came to think of the current controverse between my internet/TV provider and some random monolithic copyright organization. SVT is the national television station, meaning I pay taxes to access their programming. This organization has somehow weasled itself into this system and actually owns the rights to streaming SVT programming. Now they made absurd demands on my TV provider which means I can’t stream programming I have already paid for until this is settled!
Omfg… rootkits? Srysly? Now I regret having a sony mp3 player >_>