OneAndOneIs2

Yesterday, I was late home. Because I came back via Sussex University. Because I was attending a talk by RMS, who's on our side of The Pond for a while.

If you're a true geek, you know exactly who RMS is. If not, this is my favourite cartoon on the subject:

There were a few hundred people there - not a bad turnout. Including a few faces I recognised from the local LUG, which is where I'd heard about the talk in the first place.

The subject was Copyright & Culture. The basic views were pretty much what you'd expect if you know anything at all about RMS.

He's very different to what I'd imagined. He's such a large (and vocal) part of the GNU/Linux/FOSS story, I had always imagined him as a Brian Blessed kind of figure.

But he's really not: He's far more the soft-spoken idealist than the overbearing zealot that some accuse him of being.

I was impressed that he was aware of the so-called anti-terrorism law that was passed very quietly in England a while ago that makes it legal for you to be arrested and locked up just for being in possession of a book - that's more that a lot of people in the audience were.

But then, there were a fair number of people who were taken by surprise when told that Amazon had actually deleted e-books that people had bought from their Kindles - ironically enough, the book in question was '1984'

A few members of the audience were, in fact, somewhat disappointing. I mean, who goes to hear a talk by Richard Stallman without a working knowledge of how the GPL functions?? Seriously..

As for the actual content, it was mostly nothing new - copyright lasts too long, it's being extended for the benefits of already-rich corporations, it should be reduced; the breadth of what copyright covers is too broad; politics is corrupt; etc. etc.

The only thing that I didn't agree with was his view that "howto" books - like cookbooks, textbooks, Haynes manuals, programming guides, etc - should not be copyrightable. It *is* consistent with the Four Freedoms and the general Free Software principles, I suppose. But I think it's taking it too far: Howto's are the hardest type of book to write, or at least to write well, of the three categories he divided books into (Instructional books, representational books, and creative/fiction books) - and I know, I've read lots of howto's and written quite a few. I have several howto's I'm reading right now, in fact - two are incredibly hard to read, to the point that I can barely make a single page in one sitting. One is superb, and I can read 20 pages in a sitting.

Fiction, on the other hand, I can (and have) sit down and churn out prizewinning stuff in half an hour. There's nothing to it.

So sure, I can see his view that useful texts should be open so that as many people as possible can benefit from them. But I can't agree that people are as likely to pay for howto's as they are for fiction if they have the option of getting it free; and it makes no sense to me to give the hardest books to write the least opportunity to make money from.

Other than that, I had no real arguments with anything he said, and most of it was interesting. On the whole, it was very worth attending. If you get the chance, I'd recommend going to one of his talks.

Just make sure you take plenty of cash to the 'free' talk - The guy *did* manage to auction off a plush gnu for a hundred quid... ;)