On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM, Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net
<mailto: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_
res/ist./ 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