Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 01:06:14 +0000 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: "G. Adam Stanislav" <redprince@redprince.net> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <20000514010614.A16058@happy.checkpoint.com> In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20000513143506.00895650@mail85.pair.com>; from redprince@redprince.net on Sat, May 13, 2000 at 02:35:06PM -0500 References: <391D71FE.1570F551@asme.org> <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005130735370.20100-100000@hydrant.intranova.net> <391D4DAD.FD80980A@picusnet.com> <003b01bfbcdc$6059fb40$a164aad0@kickme> <391D71FE.1570F551@asme.org> <20000513205610.A22103@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <3.0.6.32.20000513143506.00895650@mail85.pair.com>
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On Sat, May 13, 2000 at 02:35:06PM -0500, G. Adam Stanislav wrote: > >You may hate everything he says but you can't call him a communist unless > >you have no idea what he's about or what communism is about. > > As someone who spent the first 29 years under Communism, I have a good idea > of what Communism is about. Stallman's ideas are quite Communist. No, they are not. And frankly, I wish you'd lose that "I lived in a Communist country, I know what it is and you don't" attitude that you're displaying: > You have some theoretical ideas about Communism, but clearly no direct > experience. We have no common ground for any further discussion. I was born and raised in THE Communist country, and I don't lack first-hand experience. Stallman has never insisted on anything resembling communist ideas in anything I've read written by him. The primary "radical" idea espoused by Stallman is his rejection of the idea of intellectual property. He belives that intellectual property is just plain wrong, and detrimental to the society. This opinion is certainly far from being mainstream; however, it is certainly not "communist" or "anti-capitalist". Intellectual property, unlike material property, is a fairly new idea, born in the 18th-century England. Surprising as it may be to you, anyone could "pirate" Shakespeare's First Folio when it appeared in 1623, re-publish it and sell it, and noone would have any legal or moral problems with that (including Shakespeare, if he lived to see that; he would've been pretty happy, I imagine). Human culture: prose, music, drama, poetry -- had flourished for thousands of years without any idea of property being attached to it. Somehow Greeks and Romans got along very nicely without it. Of course, the main difference between intellectual objects and material objects is that you can give someone an intellectual object without depriving yourself of it. From that point of view, it makes perfect sense to consider bread a kind of property and not to consider a poem a kind of property: noone loses anything if someone copies a poem for someone else (a faulty argument "the owner loses because he can't sell it now to that person" is a vicious circle argument which presupposes that a poem is property). In 18th-century England, the original intention of intellectual property -- copyright -- was to encourage creation of cultural artifacts by granting an *artificial* and *very limited in time* monopoly to the author of the right to sell and control the distribution of his work. The same idea of copyright appears in the US Constitution. Copyright was thought to be a state-imposed artificial kind of temporary property designed to encourage creation of new books, symphonies, et cetera. It is reasonable to argue that today's legal view of copyright -- *grossly* extended beyond that envisaged in the 18th century when it was created, in many ways -- is in fact detrimental to the society in many cases. The culture of the 21th century will not be able to build itself on the culture of the 20th in the same way as the culture of the 20th century built itself on the culture of the 19th -- because much of 20th century culture will be copyrighted and its use will be restricted throughout the next century. The lack of a large body of public-domain literature, for example, *will* have a detrimental effect on the next generation of writers (if they be any good) -- they won't be able to freely parodize/reuse/quote/utilize the work of their predecessors. So it is not unreasonable to argue against today's conception of copyright; it is not unreasonable to argue that it may hurt, rather than help, our culture; it is very reasonable to argue that intellectual property is not a "natural right" the way material property is, but rather is a privilege *we all* conspire to give the Author in order to encourage him to produce; and it is not unreasonable, although radical, to argue that given its faults intellectual property ought to be abolished or sidestepped in many cases. I don't think that abolishing intellectual property would be a good thing to do (restricting it would); yet identifying the argument for such abolishment as anti-capitalist is a knee-jerk reaction that is not founded in reality. Stallman has never argued, AFAIK, for abolishing *material* property (which is actually *the* Communist idea; Communism as an ideology is rather indifferent to intellectual property and its special status); he has never argued against democracy, or capitalism, or free market, or any other Western capitalist ideal. He has argued against intellectual property, in particular its restrictions in software; and that is a radical and doubtable idea, but to claim it's Communist is to make a fool of oneself, IMHO. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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