Free Software, Free Society by Richard M. Stallman

Author:Richard M. Stallman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor Boston, MA 02110-1335
Published: 2016-09-04T00:00:01+00:00

It’s possible, but the big companies really pushing e-books are doing it to attack our freedom, and we mustn’t stand for that. This is what governments are doing in cahoots with big business to attack our freedom, by making copyright harsher and nastier, more restrictive than ever before.

But what should they do? Governments should make copyright power less. Here are my specific proposals.

First of all, there is the dimension of time. I propose copyright should last ten years, starting from the date of publication of a work.

Why from the date of publication? Because before that, we don’t have copies. It doesn’t matter to us whether we would have been allowed to copy our copies that we don’t have, so I figure we might as well let the authors have as much time as it takes to arrange publication, and then start the clock.

But why ten years? I don’t know about in this country, but in the US, the publication cycle has got shorter and shorter. Nowadays almost all books are remaindered within two years and out-of-print within three. So ten years is more than three times the usual publication cycle—that should be plenty comfortable.

But not everybody agrees. I once proposed this in a panel discussion with fiction writers, and the award-winning fantasy writer next to me said, “Ten years? No way. Anything more than five years is intolerable.” You see, he had a legal dispute with his publisher. His books seemed to be out of print, but the publisher wouldn’t admit it. The publisher was using the copyright on his own book to stop him from distributing copies himself, which he wanted to do so people could read it.

This is what every artist starts out wanting—wanting to distribute her work so it will get read and appreciated. Very few make a lot of money. That tiny fraction face the danger of being morally corrupted, like JK Rowling.

JK Rowling, in Canada, got an injunction against people who had bought her book in a bookstore, ordering them not to read it. So in response I call for a boycott of Harry Potter books. But I don’t say you shouldn’t read them; I leave that to the author and the publisher. I just say you shouldn’t buy them.

It’s few authors that make enough money that they can be corrupted in this way. Most of them don’t get anywhere near that, and continue wanting the same thing they wanted at the outset: they want their work to be appreciated.

He wanted to distribute his own book, and copyright was stopping him. He realized that more than five years of copyright was unlikely to ever do him any good.

If people would rather have copyright last five years, I won’t be against it. I propose ten as a first stab at the problem. Let’s reduce it to ten years and then take stock for a while, and we could adjust it after that. I don’t say I think ten years is the exact right number—I don’t know.

What

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.