Copyright and Community (Richard Stallman)
From MapbenderWiki
Richard Stallmann's rant was as they most always are: Most encouraging and enlightening to all people enganged in Free(dom) Thinking.
He started off with the clear statement that non-free licensed software is morally and ethically bad and has to be eradicated. Having said that anybody who was not of that opinion could have left but non did.
In the following talk he traced the development of copyrights for printed works starting off in the medievals when copying meant copying by hand. With the invention of printing machines this changed dramatically. Now the process of copying changed to that of duplicating works, much less error prone and tedious than copying but involving a large set of machinery and specialized know-how. This technical evolution imposed deep changes and consequences for the process of disseminating information with written words. Copyright issues evolved for the first time and they did make a lot of sense.
(I have been dreaming of medieval times and missed some of this part, sorry 'bout that)
Nowadays Copyright still makes sense, but only to large publishing companies (that is especially the large media companies). The authors and artists do not profit from copyright in any means.
Again - when RMS says this, it is not debatable but a well considered conclusion. Full stop.
This guy is cool and we can be happy that he is around. Obviously he can be very annoying and fundamental but that is his job. We need that.
