I have to post this again in response. The future?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The Right to Read
by Richard Stallman
This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the
ACM (Volume 40, Number 2). Updated in 2007, notes can be found at the
original url.
(from "The Road To Tycho", a collection of articles about the
antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)
For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in collegewhen Lissa Lenz asked to
borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow
another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask,
except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help herbut if he lent her his
computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to
prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very
idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since
elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrongsomething that only
pirates would do.
And there wasn't much chance that the SPAthe Software Protection
Authoritywould fail to catch him. In his software class, Dan had learned
that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was
read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to
catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to
retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing
would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest
punishmentfor not taking pains to prevent the crime.
Of course, Lissa did not necessarily intend to read his books. She might
want the computer only to write her midterm. But Dan knew she came from a
middle-class family and could hardly afford the tuition, let alone her
reading fees. Reading his books might be the only way she could graduate. He
understood this situation; he himself had had to borrow to pay for all the
research papers he read. (10% of those fees went to the researchers who
wrote the papers; since Dan aimed for an academic career, he could hope that
his own research papers, if frequently referenced, would bring in enough to
repay this loan.)
Later on, Dan would learn there was a time when anyone could go to the
library and read journal articles, and even books, without having to pay.
There were independent scholars who read thousands of pages without
government library grants. But in the 1990s, both commercial and nonprofit
journal publishers had begun charging fees for access. By 2047, libraries
offering free public access to scholarly literature were a dim memory.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing.
They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank
Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip
over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many
friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward
(students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank
was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging
tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable
over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright
monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal
use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers'
developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in
2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and
bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind
a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a
modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free
kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the
turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggersyou
could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root
password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Dan concluded that he couldn't simply lend Lissa his computer. But he
couldn't refuse to help her, because he loved her. Every chance to speak
with her filled him with delight. And that she chose him to ask for help,
that could mean she loved him too.
Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkablehe lent
her the computer, and told her his password. This way, if Lissa read his
books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was still a
crime, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it. They would
only find out if Lissa reported him.
Of course, if the school ever found out that he had given Lissa his own
password, it would be curtains for both of them as students, regardless of
what she had used it for. School policy was that any interference with their
means of monitoring students' computer use was grounds for disciplinary
action. It didn't matter whether you did anything harmfulthe offense was
making it hard for the administrators to check on you. They assumed this
meant you were doing something else forbidden, and they did not need to know
what it was.
Students were not usually expelled for thisnot directly. Instead they were
banned from the school computer systems, and would inevitably fail all their
classes.
Later, Dan would learn that this kind of university policy started only in
the 1980s, when university students in large numbers began using computers.
Previously, universities maintained a different approach to student
discipline; they punished activities that were harmful, not those that
merely raised suspicion.
Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to their
marriage, and also led them to question what they had been taught about
piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of copyright,
about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and even the
original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they found
others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of the SPA. When
the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to read soon became
one of its central aims.
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Jerry Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4298&tag=nl.e019
>
> RIAA _and_ BSA lawyers running the place?
>
> That is not a good trend.
>
> (Unless, the secret plan is to keep them too busy doing _real_ law
> enforcement to muck with the common folk)
>
>
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to
date
Get the Free Trial
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f
Archive:
http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:286772
Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm
Unsubscribe:
http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
