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107-418: The movement objects to what it considers over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that over-restrictive laws hinder creativity and create a " permission culture ", which they worry will shrink the public domain and fair use . They engage in political activism, mostly advocating for specific limits on copyright. The free-culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas,

214-408: A big step backward with respect to paper books by being less easy to use, copy, lend to others or sell, also mentioning that Amazon e-books cannot be bought anonymously. His short story " The Right to Read " provides a picture of a dystopian future if the right to share books is impeded. He objects to many of the terms within typical end-user license agreements that accompany e-books. He discourages

321-400: A cell phone due to the lack of phones running entirely on free software. He also avoids using a key card to enter his office building since key card systems track each location and time that someone enters the building using a card. He usually does not browse the web directly from his personal computer. Instead, he uses GNU Womb's grab-url-from-mail utility, an email-based proxy which downloads

428-507: A consequence, copyright legislation such as DMCA has enabled copyright owners to "censor academic discussions and online criticism". Selmer Bringsjord argues that all forms of copying are morally permissible (without commercial use), because some forms of copying are permissible and there is not a logical distinction between various forms of copying. Edwin Hettinger argues that natural rights arguments for intellectual property are weak and

535-476: A creator's death. The bill was heavily lobbied by music and film corporations like Disney , and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge sharing and technological innovation, and that private interests – as opposed to public good – determine law. He travelled the country in 1998, giving as many as a hundred speeches

642-518: A doctorate in physics for one year, but left the program to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory . While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman , Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system , called dependency-directed backtracking . The paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems . As of 2009 ,

749-449: A fellow AI Lab hacker, founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) to market Lisp machines , which he and Tom Knight designed at the lab. Greenblatt rejected outside investment, believing that the proceeds from the construction and sale of a few machines could be profitably reinvested in the growth of the company. In contrast, the other hackers felt that the venture capital -funded approach was better. As no agreement could be reached, hackers from

856-446: A gray zone of copyright (e.g. the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising). In contrast, others have pointed out that Google Books blocks out large sections of those same books, and they say that does not harm the legitimate interests of rightsholders. Groups such as Hipatia advance anti-copyright arguments in

963-700: A judge would ask whether it was "really" one program, rather than how the parts were labeled. Therefore, Stallman sent a message back to Jobs which said they believed Jobs' plan was not allowed by the GPL, which resulted in NeXT releasing the Objective-C front end under GPL. For a period of time, Stallman used a notebook from the One Laptop per Child program. Stallman's computer is a refurbished ThinkPad X200 with Libreboot (a free BIOS replacement), and Trisquel GNU/Linux . Before

1070-415: A market for their publications, and whose copyright is, as a result, virtually worthless, have in the past, and even in the present, continued to write." Liang points out that people produce works purely for personal satisfaction, or even for respect and recognition from peers. Liang argues that the 19th Century saw the prolific authorship of literary works in the absence of meaningful copyright that benefited

1177-484: A means of making sharing information easier or addressing the orphan works issue and the Swedish Pirate Party has advocated for limiting copyright to five year terms. There is an argument that copyright is invalid because, unlike physical property, intellectual property is not scarce and is a legal fiction created by the state. The argument claims that, infringing on copyright, unlike theft, does not deprive

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1284-405: A modified GCC in two parts, one part under GPL and the other part, an Objective-C preprocessor under a proprietary license. Stallman initially thought this would be legal, but since he also thought it would be "very undesirable for free software", he asked a lawyer for advice. The response he got was that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them, and

1391-521: A particular process of knowledge production where the emphasis on individual contribution and individual ownership takes precedence over the concept of "community knowledge". Relying on the concept of the author, copyright is based on the assumption that without an intellectual property rights regime, authors would have no incentive to further create, and that artists cannot produce new works without an economic incentive. Liang challenges this logic, arguing that "many authors who have little hope of ever finding

1498-453: A password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20 percent of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward. In

1605-488: A piece in a Swedish tabloid calling for the complete decriminalisation of file sharing ; they wrote that "Decriminalising all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It's the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet." In June 2015 a WIPO article, " Remix culture and Amateur Creativity: A Copyright Dilemma", acknowledged

1712-456: A return on their creative investment. Scholars and commentators in this field include Lawrence Liang , Jorge Cortell , Rasmus Fleischer , Stephan Kinsella , and Siva Vaidhyanathan . Traditional anarchists , such as Leo Tolstoy , expressed their refusal to accept copyright. Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( / ˈ s t ɔː l m ən / STAWL -mən ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms ,

1819-489: A summer camp, he read manuals for the IBM 7094 . From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students. He was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University . Although he was interested in mathematics and physics , his supervising professor at Rockefeller thought he showed promise as a biologist. His first experience with actual computers

1926-592: A text editor in APL and a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360 . As a first-year student at Harvard University in fall 1970, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55 . He was happy, "For the first time in my life, I felt I had found a home at Harvard." In 1971, near the end of his first year at Harvard, he became a programmer at

2033-404: A user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users waiting for print jobs if the printer was jammed. Not being able to add these features to the new printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be able to freely modify the software they use. Richard Greenblatt ,

2140-452: A world of spin-meisters and multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns. In 2018, Stallman instituted "Kind Communication Guidelines" for the GNU project to help its mailing list discussions remain constructive while avoiding explicitly promoting diversity. In October 2019, a public statement signed by 33 maintainers of the GNU project asserted that Stallman's behaviour had "undermined a core value of

2247-772: A year at college campuses, and sparked the movement. It led to the foundation of the first chapter of the Students for Free Culture at Swarthmore College . In 1999, Lessig challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court . Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution's plain language about "limited" copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens . In 2001, Lessig initiated Creative Commons , an alternative "some rights reserved" licensing system to

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2354-400: Is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig . CC promotes sharing creative works and diffusing ideas to produce cultural vibrance, scientific progress and business innovation. QuestionCopyright.org is another organization whose stated mission is "to highlight the economic, artistic, and social harm caused by distribution monopolies, and to demonstrate how freedom-based distribution

2461-658: Is a crime, not the issue of charging for software. Stallman's texinfo is a GPL replacement, loosely based on Scribe; the original version was finished in 1986. In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly installed laser printer , the Xerox 9700 . Stallman had modified the software for the Lab's previous laser printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged

2568-552: Is a development model." Thus, he believes that the use of the term will not inform people of the freedom issues, and will not lead to people valuing and defending their freedom. Two alternatives which Stallman does accept are software libre and unfettered software , but free software is the term he asks people to use in English. For similar reasons, he argues for the term proprietary software or non-free software rather than closed-source software , when referring to software that

2675-430: Is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critics often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of

2782-484: Is aligned with the free and open-source-software movement , as well as other movements and philosophies such as open access (OA), the remix culture , the hacker culture , the access to knowledge movement , the copyleft movement and the public domain movement. In the late 1960s, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. He coined

2889-694: Is an American free software movement activist and programmer . He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software . Stallman launched the GNU Project , founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs , and wrote all versions of

2996-453: Is associated with proponents of strong copyright), or a convenient anonymous micropayment system for people to support authors directly. He indicates that no form of non-commercial sharing of copies should be considered a copyright violation. He has advocated for civil disobedience in a comment on Ley Sinde . He has reportedly refused to autograph anything bearing a '©' symbol, in line with his views. Stallman has helped and supported

3103-515: Is best summed up by the FSF Defective by Design campaign. In the talks, he makes proposals for a "reduced copyright" and suggests a 10-year limit on copyright. He suggests that, instead of restrictions on sharing, authors be supported using a tax, with revenues distributed among them based on cubic roots of their popularity to ensure that "fairly successful non-stars" receive a greater share than they do now (compare with private copying levy which

3210-538: Is better for artists and audiences." QuestionCopyright may be best known for its association with artist Nina Paley , whose multi-award-winning feature length animation Sita Sings The Blues has been held up as an extraordinarily successful example of free distribution under the aegis of the "Sita Distribution Project". The web site of the organization has a number of resources, publications, and other references related to various copyright, patent, and trademark issues. The student organization Students for Free Culture

3317-484: Is meant for appreciation, not for practical use." In a follow-up Stallman differentiated three classes: works of practical use should be free, works representing points of view should be shareable but not changeable and works of art or entertainment should be copyrighted (but only for 10 years). In an essay in 2012 Stallman argued that video games as software should be free but not their artwork. In 2015 Stallman advocated for free hardware designs. Vocal criticism against

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3424-473: Is not free software. Stallman asks that the term GNU/Linux , which he pronounces / ɡ n uː s l æ ʃ ˈ l ɪ n ə k s / GNOO SLASH LIN -əks , be used to refer to the operating system created by combining the GNU system and the kernel Linux. Stallman refers to this operating system as "a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer". He claims that the connection between

3531-453: Is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value , and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software. Eric S. Raymond , one of the creators of the open-source movement , argues that moral arguments, rather than pragmatic ones, alienate potential allies and hurt

3638-625: Is sometimes confusingly called "the Free Culture Movement", but that is not its official name. The organization is a subset of the greater movement. The first chapter was founded in 1998 at Swarthmore College, and by 2008, the organization had 26 chapters. The free-culture movement takes the ideals of the free and open-source software movement and extends them from the field of software to all cultural and creative works. Early in Creative Commons' life, Richard Stallman (the founder of

3745-534: The Alternative Law Forum , argues that current copyright is based on a too narrow definition of "author", which is assumed to be clear and undisputed. Liang observes that the concept of "the author" is assumed to make universal sense across cultures and across time. Instead, Liang argues that the notion of the author as a unique and transcendent being, possessing originality of spirit, was constructed in Europe after

3852-607: The CC0 ). Creative Commons licenses with restrictions on commercial use or derivative works were not approved. In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation described their definition of "open", for open content and open knowledge , as synonymous to the definition of "free" in the "Definition of Free Cultural Works", noting that both are rooted in the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition . Therefore,

3959-618: The Copyleft attitude team in France since 2001 (named free art license ). It was then developed in Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture in 2004. In August 2003 the Open Content Project , a 1998 Creative Commons precursor by David A. Wiley , announced the Creative Commons as successor project and Wiley joined as director. In 2005/2006 within the free-culture movement, Creative Commons

4066-405: The Free Software Foundation and the free software movement) supported the organization. He withdrew his support due to the introduction of several licenses including the developing nations (retired in 2007) and sampling licenses. Stallman later restored some support when Creative Commons retired those licenses. The free music movement, a subset of the free-culture movement, started out just as

4173-657: The GNU General Public License . Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With that he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger , and GNU Emacs text editor. Stallman pioneered

4280-521: The GNU Manifesto , which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix . The name GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix". Soon after, he started a nonprofit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman was

4387-529: The Industrial Revolution , to distinguish the personality of the author from the expanding realm of mass-produced goods. Hence works created by "authors" were deemed original, and merges with the doctrine of property prevalent at the time. Liang argues that the concept of "author" is tied to the notion of copyright and emerged to define a new social relationship—the way society perceives the ownership of knowledge. The concept of "author" thus naturalised

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4494-574: The International Music Score Library Project get back online, after it had been taken down on October 19, 2007, following a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition . Stallman mentions the dangers some e-books bring compared to paper books, with the example of the Amazon Kindle e-reader that prevents the copying of e-books and allows Amazon to order automatic deletion of a book. He says that such e-books present

4601-567: The Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Stallman remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors and others. Stallman was born March 16, 1953 in New York City , to a family of Jewish heritage. He had a troublesome relationship with his parents and did not feel he had a proper home. He was interested in computers at a young age; when he was a pre-teen at

4708-646: The Lisp machine operating system (the CONS of 1974–1976 and the CADR of 1977–1979—this latter unit was commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines , Inc. (LMI) starting around 1980). He became an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ). When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed

4815-580: The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, RMS , which he used in his computer accounts. Stallman received a bachelor's degree in physics ( magna cum laude ) from Harvard in 1974. He considered staying on at Harvard, but instead decided to enroll as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He pursued

4922-564: The "age of remixing" and the need for a copyright reform while referring to recent law interpretations in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. and Canada's Copyright Modernization Act . Groups that argue for using existing copyright legal framework with special licences to achieve their goals, include the copyleft movement and Creative Commons . Creative Commons is not anti-copyright per se, but argues for use of more flexible and open copyright licences within existing copyright law. Creative Commons takes

5029-434: The FSF call it GNU/Linux . This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project. Stallman's influences on hacker culture include

5136-438: The GNU project's philosophy and its software is broken when people refer to the combination as merely Linux. Starting around 2003, he began also using the term GNU+Linux , which he pronounces / ɡ n uː p l ʌ s ˈ l ɪ n ə k s / GNOO PLUS LIN -əks , to prevent others from pronouncing the phrase GNU/Linux as / ɡ n uː ˈ l ɪ n ə k s / GNOO LIN -əks , which would erroneously imply that

5243-469: The GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users" and called for "GNU maintainers to collectively decide about the organization of the project". The statement was published soon after Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his "visiting scientist" role at MIT in September 2019. In spite of that, Stallman remained head of the GNU project. Stallman has written many essays on software freedom, and has been an outspoken political campaigner for

5350-407: The GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor ( GNU Emacs ), compiler ( GCC ), debugger ( GNU Debugger ), and a build automator ( GNU make ). The notable omission was a kernel . In 1990, members of the GNU project began using Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel in a project called GNU Hurd , which has yet to achieve

5457-660: The Internet era. Initially, Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman did not see the importance of free works beyond software. For instance for manuals and books Stallman stated in the 1990s: As a general rule, I don't believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don't think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views. Similarly, in 1999 Stallman said that he sees "no social imperative for free hardware designs like

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5564-680: The ThinkPad X200, Stallman used a Thinkpad T400s with Libreboot and Trisquel GNU/Linux. And before the T400s, Stallman used a ThinkPad X60, and even further back in time, a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because, like the X200, X60 and the T400s, it could run with free software at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for

5671-483: The United States government may encourage the use of software as a service because this would allow them to access users' data without needing a search warrant . He denies being an anarchist despite his wariness of some legislation and the fact that he has "advocated strongly for user privacy and his own view of software freedom". Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about

5778-528: The Web rose in popularity with the Free Music Philosophy by Ram Samudrala in early 1994. It was also based on the idea of free software by Richard Stallman and coincided with nascent open art and open information movements (referred to here as collectively as the "free-culture movement"). The Free Music Philosophy used a three-pronged approach to voluntarily encourage the spread of unrestricted copying, based on

5885-416: The album with some protesters stating that The Grey Album illustrates a need for revisions in copyright law to allow sampling under fair use of copyrighted material, or proposing a system of fair compensation to allow for sampling. French group Association des Audionautes is not anti-copyright per se, but proposes a reformed system for copyright enforcement and compensation. Aziz Ridouan, co-founder of

5992-591: The argument over peer-to-peer file sharing , digital freedom , and freedom of information ; these include the Association des Audionautes and the Kopimism Church of New Zealand . In 2003, Eben Moglen , a professor of Law at Columbia University, published The dotCommunist Manifesto, which re-interpreted the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in the light of the development of computer technology and

6099-623: The author. In fact, Liang argues, copyright protection usually benefited the publisher, and rarely the author. The Center for the Study of Public Domain has raised concerns on how the protracted copyright terms in the United States have caused historical films and other cultural works to be destroyed due to disintegration before they can be digitized. The center has described the copyright terms as "absurdly long" which hold little economic benefit to rights holders and prevents efforts to preserve historical artefacts. Director Jennifer Jenkins has said that by

6206-723: The concept of copyleft , which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software. He is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license. In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom . Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents , digital rights management (which he refers to as digital restrictions management, calling

6313-513: The default "all rights reserved" copyright system. Lessig focuses on a fair balance between the interest of the public to use and participate into released creative works and the need of protection for a creator's work, which still enables a "read-write" remix culture . The term "free culture" was originally used since 2003 during the World Summit on Information Society to present the first free license for artistic creation at large, initiated by

6420-549: The end goal of removing code secrecy. In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983. Since then, he had remained affiliated with MIT as an unpaid "visiting scientist" in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory . Until "around 1998", he maintained an office at the Institute that doubled as his legal residence. Stallman announced

6527-423: The fact that copies of recordings and compositions could be made and distributed with complete accuracy and ease via the Internet. The subsequent free music movement was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard , Forbes , Levi's Original Music Magazine , The Free Radical , Wired and The New York Times . Along with the explosion of the Web driven by open source software and Linux ,

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6634-431: The form of large scale intentional copyright infringement occurred on February 24, 2004, in an event called Grey Tuesday . Activists intentionally violated EMI 's copyright of The White Album by distributing MP3 files of a mashup album called The Grey Album , in an attempt to draw public attention to copyright reform issues and anti-copyright ideals. Reportedly over 400 sites participated including 170 that hosted

6741-486: The free culture ideas in his book, Cult of the Amateur , describing Lessig as an "intellectual property communist". The decline of the news media industry's market share is blamed on free culture but scholars like Clay Shirky claim that the market itself, not free culture, is what is killing the journalism industry. The free art movement is distinct from the free culture movement as the artist retains full copyright for

6848-523: The free software movement since the early 1990s. The speeches he has regularly given are titled The GNU Project and the Free Software Movement , The Dangers of Software Patents , and Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks . In 2006 and 2007, during the eighteen month public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he added a fourth topic explaining

6955-416: The free-culture movement comes from copyright proponents. Prominent technologist and musician Jaron Lanier discusses this perspective of free culture in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget . Lanier's concerns include the depersonalization of crowd-sourced anonymous media (such as Misplaced Pages) and the economic dignity of middle-class creative artists. Andrew Keen , a critic of Web 2.0 , criticizes some of

7062-566: The government of the Indian State of Kerala , he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft's, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows to a free software operating system. After personal meetings, Stallman obtained positive statements about the free software movement from the then-president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam , French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal , and

7169-486: The group, proposes for France to legalise peer-to-peer file sharing and to compensate artists through a surcharge on Internet service provider fees (i.e. an alternative compensation system ). Wired magazine reported that major music companies have equated Ridouan's proposal with legitimising piracy. In January 2008, seven Swedish members of parliament from the Moderate Party (part of the governing coalition), authored

7276-576: The imperative for free software". Other authors, such as Joshua Pearce , have argued that there is an ethical imperative for open-source hardware , specifically with respect to open-source-appropriate technology for sustainable development . Later, Stallman changed his position slightly and advocated for free sharing of information in 2009. But, in 2011 Stallman commented on the Megaupload founder's arrest, "I think all works meant for practical uses must be free, but that does not apply to music, since music

7383-415: The importance of terminology, are a source of regular misunderstanding and friction with parts of the free software and open-source communities . After initially accepting the concept, Stallman rejects a common alternative term , open-source software , because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom . He wrote, "Free software is a political movement; open source

7490-420: The inaccurate wording. Minsky was not accused of "assault", and from the victims' testimonies it was not clear whether Minsky had committed "assault", and Stallman argued that "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to conceal that from most of his associates". When challenged by other members of

7597-504: The internet; much of the re-interpreted content discussed copyright law and privilege in Marxist terms. Recent developments related to BitTorrent and peer-to-peer file sharing have been termed by media commentators as "copyright wars", with The Pirate Bay being referred to as "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright—or pro-piracy—movement". One well-publicised instance of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) in

7704-518: The kernel Linux is maintained by the GNU project. The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds , has publicly said that he objects to modification of the name and that the rename "is their [the FSF ] confusion not ours". Stallman professes admiration for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden . He has spoken against government and corporate surveillance on many occasions. He refers to mobile phones as "portable surveillance and tracking devices ", refusing to own

7811-588: The lab's community. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers. Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to share with their neighbors and be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He maintains that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are antisocial and unethical. The phrase "software wants to be free"

7918-421: The late 1970s and early 1980s, the hacker culture which Stallman thrived on began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become

8025-403: The latter camp founded Symbolics , with the aid of Russ Noftsker , an AI Lab administrator. Symbolics recruited most of the remaining hackers including notable hacker Bill Gosper , who then left the AI Lab. Symbolics also forced Greenblatt to resign by citing MIT policies. While both companies delivered proprietary software, Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting

8132-402: The maturity level required for full POSIX compliance. In 1991, Linus Torvalds , a Finnish student, used the GNU's development tools to produce the free monolithic Linux kernel . The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform. Most sources use the name Linux to refer to the general-purpose operating system thus formed, while Stallman and

8239-649: The means of inviting the public to contribute articles. The resulting GNUPedia was eventually retired in favour of the emerging Misplaced Pages , which had similar aims and was enjoying greater success. Stallman was on the Advisory Council of Latin American television station teleSUR from its launch but resigned in February 2011, criticizing pro-Gaddafi propaganda during the Arab Spring . In August 2006, at his meetings with

8346-467: The more common term misleading), and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms. That includes software license agreements , non-disclosure agreements , activation keys , dongles , copy restriction , proprietary formats , and binary executables without source code . In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his visiting scientist role at MIT after making controversial comments about

8453-580: The name POSIX and the Emacs editor. On Unix systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi , spawning an editor war . Stallman's take on this was to canonize himself as St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast ", while "using a free version of vi is not a sin ; it is a penance ". In 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked

8560-602: The name of "freedom of knowledge" and argue that knowledge should be "shared in solidarity". Such groups may perceive "freedom of knowledge" as a right, and/or as fundamental in realising the right to education , which is an internationally recognised human right , as well as the right to a free culture and the right to free communication. They argue that current copyright law hinders the realisation of these rights in today's knowledge societies relying on new technological means of communication and see copyright law as preventing or slowing human progress. Lawrence Liang , founder of

8667-555: The nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in Massachusetts . Stallman popularized the concept of copyleft , a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of

8774-536: The norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software was a consequence triggered by the US Copyright Act of 1976 . When Brian Reid in 1979 placed time bombs in the Scribe markup language and word processing system to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed it "a crime against humanity". During an interview in 2008, he clarified that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes

8881-408: The philosophical tradition justifying property can not guide us in thinking about intellectual property. Shelly Warwick believes that copyright law as currently constituted does not appear to have a consistent ethical basis. Pirate Cinema and groups like The League of Noble Peers advance more radical arguments, opposing copyright per se. A number of anti-copyright groups have recently emerged in

8988-532: The plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPANET mailing lists and USENET . He started the project on his own and describes: "As an operating system developer, I had the right skills for this job. So even though I could not take success for granted, I realized that I was elected to do the job. I chose to make the system compatible with Unix so that it would be portable, and so that Unix users could easily switch to it." In 1985, Stallman published

9095-418: The police being called. AMD has since acquired ATI and has taken steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community. Stallman has characterized Steve Jobs as having a "malign influence" on computing because of Jobs' leadership in guiding Apple to produce closed platforms . According to Stallman, while Jobs was at NeXT , Jobs asked Stallman if he could distribute

9202-448: The policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like fair use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself. Opposition to copyright is often a portion of platforms advocating for broader social reform. For example, Lawrence Lessig , a free-culture movement speaker, advocates for loosening copyright law as

9309-476: The position that there is an unmet demand for flexibility that allows the copyright owner to release work with only "some rights reserved" or even "no rights reserved". According to Creative Commons many people do not regard default copyright as helping them in gaining the exposure and widespread distribution they want. Creative Commons argue that their licences allow entrepreneurs and artists to employ innovative business models rather than all-out copyright to secure

9416-447: The president of Ecuador Rafael Correa . Stallman has participated in protests about software patents, digital rights management , and proprietary software . Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI , enemy of your freedom" placard at an invited talk given by an ATI compiler architect in the building where Stallman worked, resulting in

9523-488: The proposed changes. Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired the creation of the Virtual Richard M. Stallman ( vrms ), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and reports those that are from the non-free tree. Stallman disagrees with parts of Debian's definition of free software. In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free online encyclopedia through

9630-605: The rise of P2P and lossy compression , and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely a reality in the early 21st century. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavors of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in

9737-460: The sake of a more convenient computer." Stallman's Lemote was stolen from him in 2012 while he was in Argentina. Before Trisquel, Stallman has used the gNewSense operating system. Stallman has regularly given a talk entitled "Copyright vs. Community" where he reviews the state of digital rights management (DRM) and names many of the products and corporations which he boycotts. His approach to DRM

9844-730: The same three creative commons licenses are recommended for open content and free content, CC BY , CC BY-SA , and CC0 . The Open Knowledge foundation additionally defined three specialized licenses for data and databases, previously unavailable: the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL), the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) and the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). The organization commonly associated with free culture

9951-600: The slogan " Information wants to be free " in 1984 to advocate against limiting access to information by governmental control, preventing a public domain of information. In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act , which President Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy years after

10058-495: The software into what would become XEmacs . The technology journalist Andrew Leonard has characterized what he sees as Stallman's uncompromising stubbornness as common among elite computer programmers: There's something comforting about Stallman's intransigence. Win or lose, Stallman will never give up. He'll be the stubbornest mule on the farm until the day he dies. Call it fixity of purpose, or just plain cussedness, his single-minded commitment and brutal honesty are refreshing in

10165-540: The technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The technique of constraint recording , wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper. As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO and Emacs for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), as well as

10272-570: The term intellectual property is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright , patent , trademark , and other areas of law by lumping together things that are more dissimilar than similar. He also argues that by referring to these laws as property laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues, writing: These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. Copyright law

10379-459: The time artefacts enter the public domain in the United States after 95 years, many culturally significant works such as old films and sound recordings have already been lost as a consequence of the long copyright terms. The institution of copyright brings up several ethical issues. Critics of copyright argue that copyright has been abused to suppress free speech , as well as business competition, academic research and artistic expression. As

10486-552: The uncertain status of the very idea of "stealing" itself, and that instead business models need to adapt to the reality of the Darknet . He argues that in an attempt to rein in Web 2.0, copyright law in the 21st century is increasingly concerned with criminalising entire technologies, leading to recent attacks on different kinds of search engines , solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. Fleischer points out that Google, while still largely uncontested, operates in

10593-531: The use of several storage technologies such as DVD or Blu-ray video discs because the content of such media is encrypted. He considers manufacturers' use of encryption on non-secret data ( to force the user to view certain promotional material ) as a conspiracy. Stallman recognized the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal to be a criminal act by Sony and supports a general boycott of Sony for its legal actions against George Hotz . Stallman has suggested that

10700-445: The victim of the original item. It is unclear if copyright laws are economically stimulating for most authors, and it is uncommon for copyright laws to be evaluated based on empirical studies of their impacts. One of the founders of Piratbyrån , Rasmus Fleischer , argues that copyright law simply seems unable to cope with the Internet, and hence is obsolete. He argues that the Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 have brought about

10807-439: The webpage content and then emails it to the user. More recently, he said that he accesses all websites via Tor , except for Misplaced Pages (which generally disallows editing from Tor unless users have an IP block exemption ). In September 2019, it was learned that Jeffrey Epstein had made donations to MIT, and in the wake of this, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito resigned. An internal MIT CSAIL listserv mailing list thread

10914-574: The work. The free art movement is the practice of artists leaving art in public places for the public to remove and keep. The artwork is usually tagged with a notice stating it is free art, and either with the artist's name or left anonymously. The movement was reinvigorated by British street art practitioner My Dog Sighs coining the term "Free Art Fridays". Clues to the location of artworks are sometimes left on social media to combine treasure hunting with art. Copyright reform movement Criticism of copyright , or anti-copyright sentiment,

11021-401: The world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux , and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copying not approved by the publisher). One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agrees to use his terminology throughout the article. Stallman argues that

11128-521: Was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer in 1970 after his senior year of high school, to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran . He completed the task after a couple of weeks ("I swore that I would never use FORTRAN again because I despised it as a language compared with other languages") and spent the rest of the summer writing

11235-529: Was criticized by Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill for lacking minimum standards for freedom. Following this, the " Definition of Free Cultural Works " was created as collaborative work of many, including Erik Möller , Lawrence Lessig , Benjamin Mako Hill and Richard Stallman . In February 2008, several Creative Commons licenses were "approved for free cultural works", namely the CC BY and CC BY-SA (later also

11342-490: Was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas–a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others. Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying. His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of

11449-560: Was started to protest the coverup of MIT's connections to Epstein. In the thread, discussion had turned to deceased MIT professor Marvin Minsky , who was named by Virginia Giuffre as one of the people that Epstein had forced her to have sex with. Giuffre, a minor at the time, had been caught in Epstein's underage sex trafficking ring. In response to a comment saying that Minsky "is accused of assaulting one of Epstein's victims", Stallman objected to

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