Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how “I despise DRM…I don’t want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM.” (So he doesn’t use Spotify or Netflix…)
This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy… First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, “forbidden sharing”…
I won’t use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice.
Stallman said “I don’t hesitate to share copies of anything,” but added that “I don’t have copies of non-free software, because I’m disgusted by it.” After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn’t mean breaking that law becomes wrong…
Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty.
And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he’s opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? “The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else.”
Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil.
Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/451774
The same way people who make millions ensure I’m able to afford food and housing. They don’t. We don’t. Everyone’s in it for themselves to some extent, because in some situations, nobody’s going to reach out and lift you up if you need it. We’re all just trying to survive.
There are a lot of people who make movies, music, and games who bust their ass and deserve to eat and be sheltered. That’s fine, but those people, just like you and me, have the means of taking care of themselves. You are not ethically or morally obligated to care about a stranger’s welfare, especially if the stranger does not care about yours. It’s fine to be altruistic; I’m not saying it isn’t, but it’s not an ethical imperative either.
Most people buy what they can and share/borrow what they can’t.
If someone working in entertainment goes without a meal because I bought my meal rather than starving to buy a Blu-ray they were in, I’m not their problem. That one sale isn’t going to put a meal on their table. A hundred Blu-ray sales might not even do that.