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.

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Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/451774