Re: FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital Restrictions Management

[Lee Winter <lee.j.i.winter@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net> wrote:

A lot of people responding to this post don't seem to understand that freedom applies to more than just personal choice. The United States was not a free nation while it accepted slavery and Firefox is not free software while it accepts digital restrictions management.

Just as no one forced Americans to own slaves, the fact that slavery was allowed was an insult to notion of freedom. Arguing that the "freedom" to choose whether to own slaves or not made Americans freer would be called ridiculous by any sane person, yet the same argument is being bandied about in this discussion as if it made any sense.

The Free Software Foundation got this one right.

The above message contains good rhetoric and execrable reasoning.

The above dogma confuses two basic categories of freedoms "freedom from" and"freedom to".  Freedom from is the ability to avoid undesirable situations. Freedom to is the ability to pursue desirable situations.

Being a slavery is something that people tend to avoid.  So the freedom (or lack thereof) must be assessed from the perspective of the slave).  If one believes otherwise then, in the vein of the above statements, America_was_ free because the slave _owners_ were free to own other human beings.  Is that the freedom you are trying to promote?

DRM is two things: a legal doctrine and a technical implementation.  While I believe in protecting the rights of owners of intellectual property, both the existing DRM legal doctrine and the original and  existing DRM implementations are flawed. So badly that I will not abide by them, rely upon them, nor tolerate their existence within my areas of control.

DRM is not about freedom of any kind.  It is about control of ones property.  Owners of intellectual property are free (in all senses of the term, including Stallman's) to attach such restriction on the property they sell/lend/rent/gift..  Potential customers are free (in all senses of the term, including Stallman's) to buy/borrow/rent/accept (or not) that property based on its own merits or based on the fact of DRM restrictions.

The real argument is not about DRM restrictions.  Those restrictions are irrelevant.  The real argument is whether to allow DRM-restricted property (often called content) into one's own domain.

Anyone who proposes to restrict my ability to choose, for or against, DRM-restricted property is making a proposition that I will _always_ resist.  After all, it is about freedom.  Mine.  Not some wacko theoretical objection based on alleged principles, but a fully personal decision on a care-by-case basis about the property in question.

And, for the record, I do not consider intellectual property to be morally equivalent to a human being.  Owning property has been around for million of years.  And I approve of that practice (see Locke).  The distinction is that people are not and never have been property, much as some would like to think of other people as property.

But, contrary to Stallman's arguments, intellectual property is real and worth protecting.  Otherwise I would consider every GPL "protected" product to have a BSD or an MIT license.  It is my respect for the owner's ability to set terms of use for their property that protects GPL'd products. Not the terms of that or any other license.

Lee Winter

Nashua, New Hampshire

United States of America