If you have reservations about the implications of copyright reform, go watch this talk, he gets all these questions from the audience.

The soundbite from Falkvinge’s talk for all you 24hour news media addicts:

Copyright, while written into law that it’s supposed to be for the benefit of the author, never was. It was for the benefit of the distributors.

I recall pondering the real purpose of the project, asking what is going to be achieved with these laptops. The OLPC project had a very good answer to this. They said the laptops will promote learning in areas where school books are a luxury. Furthermore, the laptop itself is completely tweakable, you press a special key and the source code of the current program pops up. This will promote learning through tweaking and experimentation, so that eventually an industry can be built on these foundations, in regions where little industry exists today and where perhaps the potential for one (in terms of natural resources) is bleak. A beautiful dream, one that could change the world in big ways.

Now Negroponte has changed his tune. Visionary that he is, he failed to convince the clients of the value of free software. So now he’s humming “forget open source, it’s all about the kids!” while preparing to run Windows on the laptop. There is a new smoke screen being constructed:

Negroponte says that the organization is working to ensure that Sugar can run smoothly on Windows.

Riiiight, running Sugar on Windows. Tell me, what exactly is the value of running Windows with an all free software stack? It’s completely useless, that’s what. The whole value of Windows is as a platform, not merely as an operating system. People buy Windows to run Windows applications, not for Windows itself. Or are we actually buying that Egyptian officials are eager to purchase Windows licenses in order to run the free software suite?

Congratulations, Negroponte, you’ve just become a licensed Windows vendor. The kids will no doubt have fun clicking on the Start menu and playing Solitaire. There is a great deal to learn from that, just nothing about the operating system or the applications, you know, actual learning.

OLPC in its original form was about empowering the users, with Windows that capability is entirely destroyed. The fact you cannot mix learning with trade secrets should be blindly obvious to anyone. Open souce is important, but it’s especially important when you want people to learn something.

Furthermore, learning doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s accelerated when it happens in a community of ideas and impulses that flow freely. Resigning OLPC president gets it when he says:

“What comes part and parcel with open source is a culture, and it’s the culture that I’m interested in,” he says. “It’s a culture of expression and critique, sharing, collaboration, appropriation.” And this culture can and should spill into classrooms, he says.

Both licensing models have been around for a very long time. I don’t know which predates which, but it really doesn’t matter. The spirit behind both licenses is very similar: free software is good. But they realize this idea in different ways.

In the GPL license you have the four freedoms: to run the software, to have the source code, to distribute the software, to distribute your modifications to the software. What this implies is that when you obtain the software, you have the *obligation* to ensure that these four things hold true for the next person you give it to. After all, someone had to go to the trouble of preserving these rights for *you*, so you have to do the same for the next guy.

The BSD license is different, because it gives *you* the right to distribute the software, but it does not oblige you to make sure that the next guy has any such right. Well, that’s not really a problem, the next guy can ignore you and get the software from the same source that you did (if that source is still available). But if you change it and you give it to him, you can forbid him from passing it on.

So who is right? Well, the BSD camp is. The BSD is no doubt a freer license, it gives you the right to decide what rights to bundle with the software. That is much closer to the absolute meaning of “freedom” than the GPL. Alas, it’s not “completely” free, because you can’t remove the name of the software’s author and replace it with “Leonardo da Vinci”.

What the GPL terms “freedom” is actually fairly subversive, because it *forces* you to do certain things. Most people who are forced to do something call that a “restriction” rather than a “freedom”. It’s true that you have certain freedoms when you get the software, but if you want to pass it on you have restrictions, so they could just as well call it the four freedoms and the four restrictions.

Therefore, if we take the philosophical ideal of freedom to heart, even though both of these licenses promote free software, none of them represent freedom, and the GPL is far less free than the BSD.

Harmless restrictions

Suppose you’re a parent and you give your kid a candy bar and say this is for you and your brother, you can have half of it, and when he comes home give him the other half. Do you think that is going to happen just as you instructed? How confident are you?

Well, your intentions were good. You tried to ensure fairness. But we humans are scheming devils, aren’t we? So our philosophy is a bit of an idealization, we just don’t live up to it.

Is there some way we can find a measure of freedom that is good enough? The fact is that we live with a lot of implicit restrictions without worrying too much about them. If you tell your kid you’re free to wear anything you want, eat anything you want, be anywhere you want, and do anything you want, except you can’t burn the house down most kids would find that a very satisfying degree of freedom, despite the restriction. They would probably say well I wasn’t going to do that anyway, all my toys would go up in smoke.

So what can we do about sustainability?

Freedom in its pure form is a wonderful thing, but it’s not inherently sustainable. You can take something and compare it up against freedom and tell if it’s free, but you can’t use freedom to enforce freedom. That would be absurd.

The GPL model is sustainable. It offers freedom, but with the pragmatic twist that there needs to be some kind of force to keep the freedom in place. In that sense it could even be said to be more free, because the *accumulated* freedom over all people involved is higher than when one person has all the freedom and everyone else has none.

GPL freedom is isomorphic. If OpenOffice needs a way to open jpeg files, and the gimp already has code for this, OpenOffice can just take it. Then two years later if OpenOffice reads jpegs much faster, the gimp can take the modified code from OpenOffice and use it. Both parties have the same degree of freedom, and no freedom is lost along the way, the process is “lossless”.

BSD freedom, on the other hand, is “lossy”. If I get BSD code I have a lot of freedom, but the next guy doesn’t. It’s fairly well known that there is BSD code in Windows. And obviously, whatever Microsoft did with that code, they have no obligation to release their changes. So the code *was* free at one point, but it didn’t *remain* free. Furthermore, even if they didn’t change it one bit, if the original author is no longer around, Microsoft is still sitting on BSD code that is free for *them*, but it’s no longer free for anyone else.

So what can we conclude from all this? Both license models make software free, but only GPL software is sustainably free. The BSD gives greater freedom, the GPL gives more freedom. Choose which one you value more.

For a more in-depth discussion see this essay, not only for itself, but also the many many references it contains to other relevant texts.

If you buy the overpriced cd, paying for 18 tracks while you’d only pay for 2 if you could cause the rest stink, you can rip the cd and put the mp3s on your mp3 player. Media companies have tried various things to cripple cds so you can’t rip them, but none of the methods have gained a foothold cause they’ve all sucked so far.

If you buy the album (or selected tracks) online, you might get it cheaper, but the media is crippled. If you buy through iTunes and you want to put the music on your iRiver, Apple’s message is fuck you for not buying our iPod. You could burn the music to a cd and then rip it, but again iTunes decides if you can (which can change at any time), how many tracks you can burn per month etc etc. Not to mention that it’s a complete hassle.

To put a new spin on things, Microsoft released their Zune mp3 player and it has some exciting new features. First of all, it’s not compatible with Windows Media Player, so all the music you have there you can throw away, you’re not gonna use it on the Zune. Secondly, obviously it’s not compatible with anything like iTunes, so if you use iTunes and you have a collection of music bought through iTunes, and you want this music on your Zune, you can re-buy it. Isn’t it convenient?

Before file sharing took off, the only way to get music was to buy cds. Almost ten years later, with the giant stir that file sharing has caused, the only real way to buy music is to buy cds. Apparently the technological revolution is blazing fast, but the ability of the music industry to leverage the internet to its advantage (that is, without completely alienating its customers) is zero.

Lots of people don’t realize why DRM is bad. Yet. But once Zunes become popular and the inability to combine iTunes with Zune becomes a real practical problem, we should hear a bit more noise about it.

Just to recap for a moment – patents are meant to protect new inventions, so that when you make a brilliant new discovery, like say, the light bulb, and someone wants to take that idea and get rich you can say “hang on, I was first, if you want to use the idea you’ll have to license it from me”.

Linked lists are as old as computer science itself, however. No, scratch that, they’re a fundamental principle, in fact. They are what the Pythagorean theorem is to mathematics. The patent claim in this case is not for linked lists in general, it’s for lists linked in more than one direction, which is just a common variant of linked lists. But here’s the kicker, the patent was granted. That means the data structure I was taught in college (and which every comp sci student is taught) is now to be considered hands off. So if I write an application using linked lists, I am liable for patent infringement. It’s a good thing patents are not backwards enforcable, or my old assignments in college would come into question.

Software patents, of course, are only applicable in the one country crazy enough to accept them, the United States. The idea was rejected by the EU some time ago, but another round of lobbying over patents in Europe is on the cards.

The point of a patent is to protect innovation. In this case, the holder of the patent is able to sue any company or individual for using linked lists, but that kind of case would be completely useless, because of the prior art principle. If a patent is granted and it is then proven that someone has used the idea before the patent was issued, then the patent is invalidated.

Other ideas already patented are Adobe’s tabbed window panes (as used in Photoshop) and Amazon’s one-click shopping.

Unlike DRM, patents are not such a big consumer problem, they apply more to developers. But it means that if a company is granted a patent for “lossy compressed music files” (mp3), and uses this idea in a program (Windows Media Player), then anyone else wanting to play back these mp3s can’t, in any way, make this happen. Because the limitation isn’t on the format itself, it’s on the idea that such a format can exist. So noone can even come up with a different format for music files, the whole thing is restricted. This is not a good example, because a) there’s lots of prior art for music compression and b) I took this from thin air, so it may not be that realistic or representative. Nevertheless, this is how the mechanism works and so for open source software, which often strives to provide alternatives for common commercial software, software patents is a minefield.

Another most welcome development is iriver deciding to abandom the DRM on their mp3 players, which places them back in my good graces. Their newest players state the system requirements as Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, no more Windows Media Player baloney. Which means that when the time comes to replace my ifp 895, I probably will go with a third iriver. And that’s five sales in all, including recommendations I’ve given to other people.

And here’s a very well written article about why DRM is bad, including an instructive video by the people at Defectivebydesign.org. Last but not least, Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on free culture and the evolution of cultural freedoms.

If you’re more into books than music, Telltale Weekly has a collection of cheap audiobooks you can download in mp3 format. Some are indeed free, and if you read my impressions on Kafka’s Metamorphosis on this blog in the future, you’ll know why.

Finally, this isn’t a DRM issue, but it’s closely connected to it. Record companies lament about losing money lately, and they try to make you care about their profits by saying that the artists you love are not getting paid for their work. Well apparently, it’s true that artists aren’t being paid, but that this is not a recent development, and has little to do with profits and all to do with their corporate policies. In contrast, Magnatune (and possibly others) pay artists 50% of every sale, so for those who care about artists, it’s a pretty good incentive to shop there instead.

So today people can play DVDs on linux, but not in a legal way (depending on where you live, hopefully not in the US). Jon’s work has also given rise to projects like divx, xvid and the general mass distribution of movie titles, because he released the code openly (which made it possible to read DVD discs), and not just in a ready-made application. So much for DVDs.

Let’s switch to music. If you buy and mp3 player today, most likely it will only work with the egregious Windows Media Player and put all kinds of restrictions on how you can transfer songs to it and how you can transfer songs from it. Not to mention that it completely kills your choice of what music player to use with your mp3 player. Not only that, most players don’t support a free and open format like ogg vorbis, they will support mp3, wma and whatever proprietary bs.

If you buy and iPod, you can use it with iTunes (and probably Windows Media Player), but you certainly cannot use it on linux. That is, until someone wrote the code to allow you access to it. You also don’t get to play ogg files. iRiver, the manufacturer I have given much credit (and a couple of sales through recommendations, in fact) switched their newest product lines to the Windows Media Player hell, so now if I buy a new player from them, I can’t use it on linux anymore. There are companies that do support (or at least not block) linux on their players, but they’re few.

So you see, when you buy a song from iTunes today (which you shouldn’t, if you value your freedom), you don’t actually own the song. You own it on iTunes and your iPod (and probably Windows Media Player), but no further. Not on your iRiver, not on another device or even music player software. I read a blog entry where someone described how they bought a Seinfeld DVD only to find out it was completely useless to them as the person could not play it in linux, because of DRM restrictions.

DRM (Digital Rights Management), ie. restrictions on how you can use digital content, is an abomination and I encourage anyone buying any kind of digital content to be very vigilant about what exactly they are paying for. Check all labels on the box, ask the salesman if necessary (chances are he won’t know much). If you buy online, check the licence agreement (or simply google/wikipedia for an opinion on the company’s restriction policy). Above all: research, research, research. Or be stuck with a product you can’t use and a store that won’t let you return it.