Not Quite a Blog

Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Richard_Stallman_at_UC_Berkeley_12_Sep_2007.ogg

Richard Stallman gave the first UC Berkeley School of Information distinguished lecture of the year today on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". Here's the abstract:

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright power while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.

Here is the audio in Ogg format (courtesy of Don Marti, editor of LinuxWorld.com).

I was privileged to introduce RMS... here's what I said:

In meatspace, you might know our speaker as Richard Matthew Stallman; in the world of bits and bandwidth, where we spend an increasing amount of our time, he's known simply as RMS. He was raising hell and championing software freedom before I was born, and I'm almost 30. His accomplishments are vast in terms of numbers and magnitude. Stallman has received numerous awards, four honorary doctorates and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. He has long championed the notion of copyleft; a concept which promotes freedom by requiring modified works to be distributed under the same generous license under which the work was originally licensed. In 1989, the Free Software Foundation, which he founded, embodied this notion of copyleft in a general-purpose software license called The GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL has gone through three revisions since and remains the most widely used license for free and open source software. Richard Stallman stands out for consistenly arguing that, besides the oft-cited pragmatic reasons for free software, there exits a moral imperative that software should be free. So, to tell us more about all of this... without further ado, here's Richard Stallman to speak about "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks".