This is a transcript of the interview between
Kim
Hill of
Radio New
Zealand and Richard Stallman of the
Free Software Foundation. The transcript
was created using Free Software -- Radio New Zealand provided the
audio in the Free
Ogg Vorbis
format, I listened to it using the Free, cross-platform sound
editor
Audacity, and
the text was typed in to an instance of
the Vim editor on an
Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system. It
is published here using Free Software -- the
NanoBlogger blog engine
and the
nginx web server, running
on the same Ubuntu GNU/Linux server. RMS requested the "no
derivative works" clause in the license, and Radio New Zealand
requested "noncommercial".
Saturday 3 October 2009 / approx. 9.05 am NZST
Radio New Zealand National / Saturdays with Kim Hill
Interview between Kim Hill (presenter) and Richard M Stallman
Transcript by Jim Cheetham jim@inode.co.nz with permission from Radio New
Zealand.
Transcript Copyright (c) 2009 Jim Cheetham
This work is released under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/nz/
You are free to Share -- to copy, distribute and transmit the work;
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the
author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse
you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Please attribute this work by reference to the original participants,
Richard Stallman and Kim Hill/Radio New Zealand.
--------------------
Interesting sections :-
[00:00] Introduction
[00:40] Surveillance
[00:19] Terrorism and 9/11
[04:30] Barack Obama
[06:23] Airline Security
[08:02] Digital Surveillance
[10:26] Systematic Surveillance
[12:20] Taxi surveillance
[14:25] Matters of Principle - cellphones
[15:33] Free Software and Freedom
[17:24] Free Trade treaties
[20:08] Cars, microwaves and planes
[21:05] Copying books
[25:31] E-books & supporting artists
[28:42] Micropayments
[30:47] A simplistic political philosophy?
[32:51] Income
[33:48] Digital handcuffs -- Amazon Kindle
[36:13] Buying books
[37:16] Social networking
[38:08] The ACTA
--------------------
[00:00]
[KH] We spoke to Richard Stallman a while ago last year about his campaign for
Free Software. He's a hero, of course, of the movement; launched the Free
Software Foundation, campaigns against software patents and extensions of
copyright laws. His battle is, as he told us last year, against what he calls
extreme capitalism. His GNU operating system with Linux was the first Free
operating system that could run on a PC. Richard Stallman says "it's all about
freedom", a cause which goes beyond software; and we could talk about the
others he's identified, surveillance and censorship, because he joins me now,
hello.
[00:40]
[RMS] Hello
[KH] Let us talk about surveillance and censorship. I've been looking at your
personal website and you're talking about fingerprinting of air travellers, for
example, which is something you're very hot about.
[RMS] Yes, I urge people to refuse to go to the US where they would be
mistreated that way.
[KH] Why is that mistreatment, do you think?
[RMS] Because it's too much information to collect about people who aren't
criminals. And by the way for the same reason I will not ever go to Japan again
unless they changed that policy, which makes me sad, but one must ...
[01:19]
[KH] It's not justifiable in order to make sure that terrorists aren't getting
on the plane?
[RMS] There's no need. Basically terrorism, and by the way we don't really know
who was behind the September 11th attacks in the US, we don't know whether it
was a bunch of Muslim fanatics, or it was a bunch of Christian fanatics and the
White House. We do know that Bush corrupted and sabotaged the investigation
when he was unable to prevent it from happening.
[KH] So, are you an advocate of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11?
[RMS] I can't say ... first of all I think it's unfair -- we know that the
attack was a conspiracy. All the theories are conspiracies.
[KH] Well, all right, the conspiracy theory for example, that has the Bush
administration staging the 9/11 attack in order to justify ...
[RMS] I don't know. The only way there could ever be proof of that is with a
real investigation, but when you have a government not allowing a real
investigation of a horrible crime then you've got to suspect that they're
hiding something. Now I can't know for certain what they're hiding, but I want
a real investigation to be carried out with the power to subpoena anyone
possibly concerned, including Bush, and make those people testify under oath
and show them no deference that everyone else wouldn't get.
[KH] Putting 9/11 aside then because we haven't got time here to go into the
various theories about what could possibly have caused 9/11, there is
undoubtedly a thing called terrorism.
[RMS] Yes, but it's a minor problem. More people died in the US in September
2001 from car accidents than from a terorist attack, and that continues month
after month, but we don't have a Global War on Accidents, so basically
politicians used a real danger, but not the world's biggest danger, as an
excuse for what they want to do, which is ... and remember that these
governments are much more dangerous, it's quite clear that Bush's invasion of
Iraq was far more destructive than anything non state-sponsored terrorists have
been able to do -- that's assuming that those terrorists in September 2001 were
not state-sponsored, which we don't know -- but the point is, what Bush did by
invading Iraq, using those attacks as an excuse, was tremendously worse and we
must remember than governments gone amok can do far more damage than anybody
not state-sponsored. After all, governments have a lot more men under arms and
they don't have to hide the fact that they have men under arms, so they're in a
much bigger position to do damage, so we must be concerned about letting them
have too much power. A world in which the police can easily do whatever they'd
like to do is a world in which the police are a threat.
[04:30]
[KH] Last time we spoke, and we were talking about the issue of Free Software,
but specifically in relation to that you doubted that President Bush's
successor, who we now know is Barack Obama, would be pretty much any different
from Bush.
[RMS] He's a little different, but I have to say he's small change. On human
rights issues he's not very different. He's still in favour of keeping people
in prison, without charges, indefinitely, and you can't get much worse than
that in terms of human rights.
[KH] Well except he's addressing Guantanamo Bay.
[RMS] Well that's just one of the places where it's done, it's done also in
Bagram in Afghanistan, and I really don't see why it would be better to move
those people to Bagram. What has to be done is charge them or release them.
They're entitled to that.
[KH] Yeah, they may be entitled to that but he's also democraticaly elected
President who ...
[RMS] That doesn't mean he's entitled to violate human rights.
[KH] No, but would the American people be in favour of the release of those ...
[RMS] I don't know.
[KH] ... that's got to be a consideration.
[RMS] No it's not, if they're not that just makes them responsible.
[KH] I know you're ...
[RMS] I don't think I can excuse massive violations of human rights by saying
that the public is maddened and supports it. Especially, why are they so
maddened? Because of a constant propaganda campaign telling you "Be terrified
of terrorists", "throw away your human rights and everyone else's because
you're so scared of these terrorists". It's disproportionate, we have to keep
these dangers in their proportion, there isn't a campaign saying "be terrified
of getting in a car" but maybe there ought to be.
[06:23]
[KH] Most airline security, getting back to the fingerprinting issue, you've
said is just for show.
[RMS] A lot of it is, not all of it is, I'm very glad that they have reinforced
the cabin doors so that hijackers can't get at the pilots, OK, that's a
sensible measure.
[KH] But are you? I would have thought that you would have said "why would they
spend money reinforcing the cabin doors because hijackers are a minor issue".
[RMS] I'm not against spending a little bit of money.
[KH] You're saying that that issue isn't an infringement of human rights.
[RMS] OK, and I don't mind spending some money for safety, I even make some
compromises you know on issues of rights, I'm not saying police shouldn't be
able to get a search warrant, but they should have to go to a Judge, to present
probable cause, to keep them in check because police are very dangerous when
they run amok, as people discovered a few months ago in London, when the police
did run amok, and they killed somebody who was trying to walk home past a
protest, and he couldn't get home because the police were just deliberately
blocking the streets, and then they hit him. And then they lied about it too,
which they typically do. Whenever the police attack someone they lie about him,
they lie about what they did, and they lie about what he was doing, to make it
sound that they were justified in mistreating him in the first place, it's
standard practice, they're like an armed gang.
[08:02]
[KH] If you don't agree with surveillance, is there any way that you would
accept that it might be quite a handy thing, CCTV ...
[RMS] Wait a second, your view of surveillance is oversimplifying things, what
I see happening with computers is they make possible a form of total
surveillance which wasn't feasible in the past, even governments like Romania
under Ceauşescu, or East Germany with the Stasi, they did a lot of surveillance
but it took a lot of people working on it and even then it was limited what
they could actually watch and record because it was so hard. Now, we're
entering a kind of surveillance society that has never been seen before ...
[KH] You're talking about digital surveillance.
[RMS] Yes, but as people do more things using digital technology it becomes
easy to keep a record of everything everyone has done, things that weren't done
in the past and still aren't done with other media, there's no record of who
sends a letter to who for all letters, it just isn't done. But there are
records in many countries of who sends an email to whom and those records can
be saved for years and we don't know that they'll ever be disposed of.
[KH] If you think that governments are not to be trusted, which is a legitimate
position of course, and if you think that the police are not to be trusted,
again a legitimate position, why can't you feel happier about digital
surveillance and CCTV surveillance given that it may well give the people more
protection.
[RMS] Oh, I'm all in favour of the right to make and record videos, such as
when you're on the street or when you're watching a protest or whatever, I'm
concerned about systematic surveillance.
[KH] What is that, systematic surveillance?
[RMS] Well suppose the police set up a camera that always watches the street,
and connects it to a face recognition program and make a database of everyone
who passes, that's systematic surveillance. Now if you walk down the street and
maybe you see somebody you know and you recognise him, that's not systematic
surveillance, that's a whole bunch of people knowing something, there's nothing
wrong with that, that's just what life is.
[10:26]
[KH] What makes systematic surveillance more sinister to you?
[RMS] Because we know that there's a tendancy for many different governments to
treat dissenters as terrorists, and investigate them using laws that were set
up supposedly to help them prevent terrorism. We know also that they tend to
sabotage political activities, and this is dangerous.
[KH] What's wrong with being investigated?
[RMS] Well, it depends if the government's investigating you because you're a
political dissident, there are a lot of things they could do to harrass you.
One thing I remember was in England, a busload of protestors, they were on they
way to a protest, the police stopped their bus and drove them away from the
protest, and they cited a law that had been passed to supposedly prevent
terrorism. Well this is sabotaging political activity. And then another thing
that happens I know in England, is people have been prosecuted for copies of
texts that they have, you know reading is sometimes illegal, it's really
dangerous. What we see is a global tendancy for governments to bring out the
worst side of themselves with terrorism as the excuse, so we must be on guard
against that, that's potentially a much bigger danger than the terrorists it's
supposed to protect us from. I don't have to say that they don't exist, or that
they're no danger at all.
[KH] No, the difficulty is being on guard against the danger that you've cited,
without giving quarter to ...
[12:20]
[RMS] Ah, no I don't see it's any problem at all. Police have lots of things
they can do to investigate people and it's more all the time and whenever
there's a specific reason to suspect particular people they can basically get
permission to search whatever. So OK, that's necessary, but beyond that we've
got to be careful not to go, and the digital surveillance society goes far
beyond that, there's a tendancy to keep records of everything, check
everything. In New York City for instance a taxi driver told me he had been
required to install a camera which transmits by radio people's faces to the
police where they run face recognition over it. I don't think that should be
allowed. I don't mind if they have a system that records people's faces and
keeps it for a week in case somebody attacks the taxi driver, that's not going
to do anything to us if we don't attack taxi drivers. We can make use of
surveillance technology in ways that don't threaten people's rights but we've
got to make sure we use them in those ways.
[KH] How come you can justify people being treated as if they're going to
attack taxi drivers ...
[RMS] But you see there the point is, those are not looked at unless there's a
crime to investigate and then they get erased if it's done right, but the way
it's actually being done in New York City is they're sent to the police, and
the police keep track of who goes where, and that's what scares me. Having all
the information about what you do available to the police for years in the past
whenever they want to look. Well part of what I do about this is I don't buy
things with credit cards unless it's something where they demand to know who I
am anyway, I don't use a credit card or any digital method, I use cash, and
that way Big Brother's not making a database of every place I've been, that I
bought anything in, what I bought.
[14:25]
[KH] As a matter of principle, rather than ...
[RMS] As a matter of principle. It's not an issue of convenience.
[KH] You don't do quite alot of things actually.
[RMS] Yeah, I don't carry a cellphone because I really don't want to be telling
Big Brother where I am all the time, every place I go.
[KH] Is that why?
[RMS] Yes, that's why. Well now there's another reason. Today, cellphones are
powerful computers and there's no way to run one without proprietary software.
[KH] I thought that would be your main reason.
[RMS] Actually there is one you can get, although they're not producing it
anymore, it didn't work all that well, it's Mark One. So that's another issue,
but that didn't exist, that issue wasn't there when cellphones first came out,
people didn't install programs in them, they were just fixed appliances, but
they have always raised the issue that they're constantly saying where you are,
and I just don't want to participate in a system like that, I think people
shouldn't. It would be very convenient for me to have a cellphone, I'm not one
of those people who would, who says "I resent the fact that people can call
me", it's convenient when people can call me, but I'm not going to do it that
way.
[15:33]
[KH] It's interesting that your battle for Free Software and the issues of
freedom that you identify intersect. They didn't start out being the same -- or
did they?
[RMS] Well they didn't start out being the same. Pervasive digital surveillance
wasn't a big problem twenty-seven years ago.
[KH] But the people who were in charge were still the people who were in
charge, the people who you identified as the people you didn't want to see ...
[RMS] Well actually they're not the same people. Proprietary software's mostly
controlled by various private entities that are developers, maybe Apple,
Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Amazon, they're all distributing proprietary
software.
[KH] I would have thought you'd identify them all as forces of extreme
capitalism.
[RMS] Well I'm sorry, when I say extreme capitalism I'm talking about a
philosophy, and that philosophy says "the market should control everything,
everything should be for sale, and business should be allowed to dominate
politics and get the laws it wants", which is very different from mere
capitalism, which says "within a socirty which we set up to protect peoples
rights and so on, there are lots of things that people shold be free to do, and
make businesses to do them, as they wish". That difference is why today's form
of capitalism is running wild and why we see free exploitation treaties which
basically undermine democracy and turn it in to a sham.
[KH] What are you talking about there?
[17:24]
[RMS] Well, the so-called Free Trade treaties, which I don't like to call that,
they're designed to transfer power from our governments to companies. They all
do this in one way, which is they let companies threaten to move to another
country, or move their operations; and so any time the people are demanding
that a government protect the environment, or the public health, or the general
standard of living, or anything else that's more important than just who's
going to buy and sell what, companies can say "we're against this, and if you
do this we'll just move our operations elsewhere" and the politicians now have
a wonderful excuse for why they're not going to do it. Of course it was they
who decided to adopt that treaty in the first place which they shouldn't have
done. But then a lot of these treaties go beyond that, and they explicitly deny
democracy. Now the US had a law that said it wouldn't sell tuna -- you weren't
allowed to sell tuna in the US if it had been caught in a way that endangered
dolphins. Well that law had to be scrapped because of the World Trade
Organisation, that's just one example.
[KH] Because it was regarded as a trade barrier.
[RMS] Exactly. Then NAFTA, which is between the US, Canada and Mexico, allows
companies to sue the government if they believe some law reduces their profits;
effectively saying the highest value in society is how much money a company can
make, and anything that gets in the way of that, we owe them.
[KH] Of course, we're in favour of Free Trade here, Richard, because we rely on
it ...
[RMS] Well I'm not in favour of free trade beyond a certain point. The people
who are in favour of Free Trade say that it can make everyone more prosperous
and that's true up to a point, and that point is where it starts subverting
democracy. But the point of these treaties is precisely to stretch free trade
to the point where it does subvert democracy. And you can see business
think-tanks reporting how they expect in a few decades governments will have
much less control over what goes on in the world and business will have more
control. What they're predicting is essentially that these treaties will march
on.
[20:08]
[KH] One of the other things you don't do, is you don't drive a car, is that
right?
[RMS] No, that's not true, I don't own a car. I do have a driver's license.
[KH] OK, one of the other things you don't do is you don't own a car.
[RMS] Yeah, well that's to save money. I live in a city.
[KH] No philosophy.
[RMS] No, I don't think it's wrong to own a car, it's good if we all drove
somewhat less.
[KH] I though that it was because of the proprietary software in cars.
[RMS] Now that's an interesting issue. I have appliances, I have a microwave
oven which might have some proprietary software in it.
[KH] And you fly in planes.
[RMS] Yeah. Well I don't own a plane though. I don't boycott everybody who uses
proprietary software. If a company uses proprietary software I say that's too
bad for them, but I'm not going to punish them by boycotting them, what I will
try to do is explain to them why they deserve to have control over their
computing rather than letting somebody else control their computing.
[21:05]
[KH] What are you going to tell the Library and Information Association
Conference with regard to copyright and community?
[RMS] Well, I'm going to explain why copyright law today is an injustice,
because it forbids sharing, and sharing is absolutely essential. People must be
free to share, so the New Zealand Copyright Law that was adopted about a year
ago, and only one of several unjust things in it was temporarily withdrawn,
that went in the wrong direction, but it was already too restrictive, people
must be free to non-commercially share exact copies of any published work.
[KH] So just let me ... how would this work, for a moment? I write a book, I
spend, you know, five years of my life writing a book.
[RMS] Well who knows, maybe you do it in a month.
[KH] Maybe I don't do it in a month.
[RMS] The point is, you do it by choice. People wrote books before there was
copyright. I think you're going about this backwards. It's your choice whether
to spend time writing, and the main reason most writers spend their time
writing is because they have something they say they want to write and they
hope people will appreciate it. It's only a few who get enough money that it
starts to corrupt their spirit.
[KH] Don't most societies want to, and they don't do it fantastically
efficiently, but to some extent they try to encourage people to write.
[RMS] Oh, I'm all in favour of encouraging people to write.
[KH] Now how would you encourage people to write?
[RMS] Well first of all remember that I'm not talking about abolishing
copyright on artistic works, I'm saying that people must be free to
non-commercially share them. Commercial use would still be covered by copyright
as it is now.
[KH] If I can print off a whole book and pass it on, and they pass it on, pass
it on, pass it on, pass it on, as an author I'm not going to sell many.
[RMS] Well that may be so, or may not be. I've seen people claim that it's only
works that are bestsellers that are likely to sell less, because remember if
you're not a big hit and people pass along copies what they're doing is getting
you more fans. If you're not a bestseller then what you mainly want
commercially is exposure, and this is a way you'll get more exposure, and
without having to pay for it either, and without having to give control to a
company that would take most of the profits anyway.
[KH] So hang on, the only reason an author would want exposure would be to
increase the sales of their next book.
[RMS] Oh no, no no no no no. Only the ones who've been morally corrupted and
are no longer yearning to be read and appreciated, that's what they start out
wanting, and a few, only a few get rich, and then those few who get rich, when
people are paid to do something that they originally did from pleasure or a
yearning, they tend to start wanting the money more, and the thing that they
used to yearn to do, they want less.
[KH] So if being read and appreciated is what authors want ...
[RMS] Well they start out wanting. Those who have got rich, some of them want
to be rich.
[KH] Well we'll forget about those because you're implying they write bad books
as a consequence.
[RMS] No I'm not saying that they're all bad, I'm not making a simple
generalisation like that, I say that their feelings have been corrupted, that
doesn't necessarily mean their books are bad, I enjoy some of them. The point
is that that's not a typical author.
[KH] But a typical author you seem to be condemning to even more penury.
[RMS] Oh no I'm not, you're mistaken.
[KH] If they cannot sell the book ...
[RMS] You're mistaken, you're making a projection which people who know more
about this disagree. Cory Doctorow who has been a bestselling author puts all
his works on the net and he doesn't even think he sells less.
[KH] So people still go out and buy the hard copy from the shop?
[RMS] Yes they do.
[KH] Even though people can pass his book from hand to hand willy-nilly.
[25:31]
[RMS] They can do that anyway you know with printed books, that's the motive
for e-books. E-books are designed to stop you from doing things like lending
the book to your friend or selling it to a used bookstore and borrowing it from
a public library. They're designed to turn public libraries into retail
outlets. And the reason they do this is they want to establish a pay-per-read
universe. They're following the twisted logic that says the most important
thing is how much money people pay and everybody who reads had a debt, now owes
money and he has to be made to pay. I think this is entirely twisted and I'm
against it, because the freedom to share must be respected. But I have other
proposals for ways to support artists. And remember the current system mostly
supports corporations, so I don't think it works very well. And it makes a few
authors quite rich, and those get treated with great deference by the
corporations, and the rest basically get ground into the dust. My proposals --
I have two, and another that combines them -- one proposal is support artists
using taxes, it could either be a specific tax on Internet connectivity or
general funds, it wouldn't be a tremendous amount of money by comparison with
other government expenditures, and then you divide this among artists by
measuring their popularity, but you don't divide it in linear proportion, 'cos
if you did that a large portion of this money would go to making superstars
richer and it's not needed, what I propose is take the cube root of the
popularity.
[KH] How do you asess their popularity?
[RMS] You could do it with polling.
[KH] How polling? Internet polling?
[RMS] All sorts of polling, there's public opinion polling and anything, use a
sample, the point is you don't ask everybody, nobody's required to participate.
But you use a sample, and you use that to measure popularity.
[KH] I'm just holding that thought, popularity. You're equating popularity with
merit?
[RMS] No I'm not, but I'm saying you don't want bureaucrats to be deciding who
gets these funds. So this is one way, you could do it by polling, after all the
current system bases it on popularity to some extent. Take the cube root, so if
A is a thousand times as popular as B, A will get ten times as much money as B,
so this way it's the counterpart to a progressive income tax. So this way, yes
if you're tremendously successful you do get more, but you don't get
tremendously more, and most of the money goes to support a large number of
artists of mid-range popularity.
[KH] And tell me again, where does the money come from?
[RMS] It comes from taxes. It comes from all of us.
[KH] General taxes.
[RMS] Could be general taxes, or a specific special tax. Either way is OK.
[28:42]
[KH] Why don't you just ask people, if you're basing it on popularity, why
don't you just ask people just to send in the money?
[RMS] Well that's my other proposal. If every player had a button to send a
dollar I think people would do it often, after all the main reason we don't do
it is how much trouble it is. It's not that you or I would miss a dollar, I
often would be glad to send a dollar to some artists, but how am I going to do
it? I need to use a credit card and identify myself and I need to find where to
send it to them and that's a lot of work. Well, this button, which I hope would
be implemented in an anonymous way, would take away all the work, it would be
totally painless to send a dollar, and then I think a lot of people would do
it.
[KH] What about getting rid of taxes entirely, and giving us all the power to
direct ...
[RMS] I'm not against taxes.
[KH] I'm not suggesting you are, but I'm asking you why not?
[RMS] Because we need to make sure that rich people pay their fair share, which
is a bigger share than what poor people have to pay, to keep society going. We
need a welfare state, at least at our current level of technology and the way
society works, we need a welfare state, and the rich shouldn't be exempt from
funding it.
[KH] Does it not matter that your popularity contest for artists may let the
rich completely off the hook?
[RMS] Well, I'm not sure it matters. Supporting artists is desireable but it's
not a matter of life and death in the same way that giving poor people food and
shelter and medical care is, whether they're artists or not.
[KH] I don't know, I think that if you look at society it's made up of all
sorts of things that are contingent on one another for the health of the
society.
[30:47]
[RMS] Yes, but I don't want to have one answer for every question in society.
I'm not a proponent of a very simpistic political philosophy, and I hope that
that's visible. There are such people.
[KH] Yes, I'm sure there are. No, God no, I would never ever accuse you of
being an advocate of a simplistic political philosophy :-)
[RMS] There are people who are totally opposed to copyright and criticise me
for not going far enough, but what I say is that works whose use is to do
practical jobs, these works must be Free in the sense of the Four Freedoms that
define Free Software. You've got to be free to republish them, to modify them,
publish your modified versions, because this is what the users of the works
need in their lives. But of couse there are lots of works that don't, that
contribute to society in other ways, they're not functional practical works.
Art for instance, the contribution of an artistic work is in the impact it
makes on your mind, not in whatever practical job you might figure out how to
do with it sometime. And then there are works that state people's opinions and
thoughts and what they've seen, which is a different way that works can
contribute to society, and I have different recommendations for these. But the
freedom to non-commercially share, that must be respected, and that's why the
new New Zealand Copyright Law and the old one were both unjust, and the purpose
of the new one is, specifically the punishing people by disconnecting them from
the Internet, the purpose of that is to stop people from sharing, and it's
wrong to stop people from sharing, so even if they work out a different way of
achieving this unjust goal, the goal is what's wrong, not only the nasty
methods that are, because only draconian methods can stop people from sharing.
[32:51]
[KH] How do you mke your income, if you don't mind me asking?
[RMS] From speeches; not all my speeches, a lot of them I give unpaid, and a
lot of them I get paid.
[KH] And that's how you make your income?
[RMS] Yes. I don't spend a lot of money.
[KH] And you wouldn't consider that being paid for something you should share
happily? It's a donation.
[RMS] I'd generally try to avoid having any admission charges. Once in a while
I do agree to give a speech at a conference where they're charged people to
register but often I will ask them to let the public in to my speech. So, in
general I try to have it open to the public without charge because I want as
many people as possible to come because I'm working for a cause, after all, and
I want to do as much good as I can for this cause.
[33:48]
[KH] Do you think that you're winning?
[RMS] You know, gradually we are. But of course we still have a lot of
opposition, we still have a lot to fight. You know, there's something else in
the New Zealand Copyright Law that was dopted a year ago, which is unjust, and
it prohibits in some cases the distribution of Free Software that can break
digital handcuffs. More and more products are designed with digital handcuffs,
that is features to stop the user from doing things. So nowadays when I hear
about a new product or a new service my first thought is "what's malicious in
that?", "how is it designed to restrict what you can do?". And these products
are very malicious, for instance there is the Amazon Kindle, it's an e-book
reader, and they call it the Kindle to express what it's designed to do to our
books.
[KH] That's not true :-)
[RMS] But it does express what it will do with our books. The point is this
product does surveillance, it forces the user to identify herself to buy a
book, and Amazon has a list, knows exactly what everybody has bought. Then it
is also designed to restrict the user, to stop people from sharing, from
lending books to their friends, from selling them to a used bookstore, and
various things that with printed books we can lawfully do. Even worse, it has
a back door, that is Amazon can send commands remotely and do things to you, we
found out about this a few months ago.
[KH] Do what to you?
[RMS] Well Amazon sent a command to all the Kindles, ordering them to erase all
copies of a particular book, namely "1984" by George Orwell. Somebody said that
they had burned up the year's supply of irony by choosing that book. So now we
know Amazon can remotely erase your books. Now Amazon, after doing this,
promised it would never do that again, but our freedom to keep a book for as
long as we want, and read it as many times as we want, should not be dependant
on any company's goodwill.
[KH] Where do you get your books from?
[36:13]
[RMS] I buy books from bookstores, yes I go to a store and I say "I want that
one".
[KH] And you hand money over for it? Even though you think that that's not
particularly a good system?
[RMS] Well I didn't say that's a bad system.
[KH] Well aren't you handing money over to the corporates rather than the
author?
[RMS] To a large extent yes, but I'm not going to refuse to buy just because of
that, with books actually typically some of the authors do get some money. With
academic textbooks they generally don't.
[KH] As a matter of interest we've been talking about freedoms, surveillance
and digital monitoring, does the extraordinary rise of social networking ...
[RMS] I buy CDs of music as well even though in that case I know the musicians
are not going to get paid, so I'd rather send them some money.
[KH] OK. And do you?
[RMS] I wish I could, I don't have a way, so I try to convince people to set up
the system to make it easy.
[37:16]
[KH] I'm sure they're sending us their addresses as you speak. Very briefly,
the rise of social networking, is that a concern in terms of privacy for you?
[RMS] It is, and I don't use those sites, it's more because I don't have time,
I'm busy doing other things. I don't think social network sites are necessarily
bad but they lead people into foolish activities. So I think an ethical social
network site should warn people, and every time you connect to it it should
warn you, "anything you post here might get known to the public no matter how
you set up settings about supposed privacy. So if you don't want it published,
you shouldn't say it here."
[KH] That's a nice warning. Thank you, it's very nice to talk to you Richard
Stallman.
[38:08]
[RMS] We didn't even mention ACTA, the secret treaty that New Zealand is
negotiating to restrict its citizens, and they won't; they tell publishers
what's in the text that they're working on, but they won't tell the public. So
the point is that the; many governments, including of course the US are
conspiring in secret to impose new restrictions on us relating to copyright and
part of their latest propaganda is they call sharing quote "counterfeiting"
unquote. But the point is that this treaty will have provisions to restrict the
public, we think, but they won't tell us. This is called Policy Laundering,
this general practice; instead of democratically considering a law, which means
the public gets to know what's being considered, gets to talk to the
legislators, sees how they voted and so on, in secret they negotiate a treaty
and then they come back and they say "we can't change the treaty and we
obviously can't refuse it, so we're all now, we've just arranged for our
country to be stuck with this law."
[KH] And we may well look at that law in a couple or three weeks time.
--------------------
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