The Fear of Knowledge

I had the opportunity of listening to a presentation by a poorly-informed faculty member at my school regarding copyright laws.  This was an eye-opening experience for me into the way those who believe to have a solid grasp of copyright view it.  My class of 30+ students listened intently, believing everything they were told, as Mrs. Smith started her lecture…

This teacher (whom I’m referring to as Mrs. Smith) is very knowledgeable about what she does.  Her job mandates that she know a lot of “facts”  about copyright.  (“There’s a world of difference between truth and facts.  Facts can obscure the truth.” – Maya Angelou)  It is quite apparent that she learned about copyright from the same place as other teachers who are obsessed with “facts” about it.  Just do a Google search for “copyright for teachers” to see what I mean.

The presentation started with Mrs. Smith explaining to us a very basic overview of what copyright it, things even monkeys probably know. (Though, I admit, the class was not packed with monkeys.)  “Any violation of copyright law is called plagiarism,” she explained.  She went on to tell us a story about a woman from Duluth who was caught downloading only 24 songs illegally, and was charged over $200,000.  “You will get caught,” she exclaimed.  The truth behind this court case was obscured by her “facts”.  The lady in question, Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two, was sent a text message by the record companies telling her that they knew she was sharing at least 1,702 songs, and that she needed to stop immediately.  She didn’t.  She received a letter in the mail asking her to settle for a rather small amount of money.  She replaced her hard drive, and took the issue to court.  The lawsuit itself was over only 24 of those songs, for which she was charged $222,000.

“Do you know who you are stealing from?” she asked.  “The artists.  Every time you illegally download a song, those artists lose the money that is rightfully theirs.”  In reality, though, the artists only make about $1 from every full-length CD sold.  Online, it can be an even lower percentage.  It has been shown that illegal file sharing actually helps the artists, though no major media company will allow these types of stories on their news networks.  Think about it this way: the artists see so little of the money that their music sells for.  Sharing this music gets it out to more people, boosting the popularity of the artist.  If you were an artist, would you rather have your music reach everybody in the world and become extremely popular, or reach fewer people and make a small sum of money from the sales?  Most of an artist’s revenue comes from live concerts, and ticket prices are directly correlated with popularity.  “Some artists put their music in the public domain, just to get it out there, but almost all free downloads you find are illegal,” stated Mrs. Smith.  Artists don’t benefit from public domain music, which is probably the reason that very few public domain tracks exist.  Most prefer a Creative Commons (or another “some rights reserved”) license, which carries the attribution clause.  She made the assumption that anyone with a copyright will protect all of his/her rights.  This is not the case with the music I compose, nor is it the case with the thousands of people on Jamendo and similar sites.

Regarding academic copyright, Mrs. Smith explained the concept of “fair use”.  “If you are working for academic reasons, you get additional benefits from this system.  You can use any copyrighted material you find in schoolwork, as long as you cite the creator appropriately, and use only pieces small enough to be accepted as ‘fair use’.  Now, fair use includes…”  I raised my hand.  “What about the DMCA?”  “What about it?”  “If it comes from an encrypted source, we are not permitted to touch it, even for ‘fair use’.”  “You’re right.  Every now and then you come across a website that doesn’t allow you to right-click and copy.  Those sites are the exception to this rule, but for everything else, this rule is effective.”

The worst part about Mrs. Smith’s presentation, though, was that the only argument she gave was fear.  Her message can be summed up in a quote of hers: “Don’t do it – you will be caught.”  When her husband brought home illegal DVDs, she apparently told him, “You may not play those on our DVD player.  They are against the law, and we will be caught.”  She told us about how the computers at school were constantly being monitored, and how any administrator could view the screen of any computer at any time.  “Does anyone monitor your computer at home?” she asked random students throughout the class.  Mrs. Smith “explained” to us who was monitoring our computer at home; she claimed that the police, the government, and our ISPs are monitoring our desktops at all times.  The examples she cited mostly involved students getting seen with drugs/alcohol on their Myspace pages.  Our government is becoming more and more involved as a Big Brother every day, but it still cannot watch desktop activity.  It does have the ability to monitor packets from suspicious parties, but those parties are untouchable if they properly anonymity themselves.  Microsoft has the ability to do so much more than the government, so why didn’t she mention them?

Copyright infringement should not be based on fear.  Fear is a very powerful tool that is all to often exploited by governments and those in power to get the information they want stuffed into people’s minds.  Where do you think Mrs. Smith learned this information?  Was it a credible source?  Chances are it was, which brings up the question of who you can really trust.  If people stopped blindly trusting the government, what would happen to fear as a propaganda technique?  When discussing copyright, it is best to decide where your ethics are.  “Should I share an ogg (or mp3) of this out of print CD with my friend?”  “Should I consider a small violation of the DMCA a crime if I will only be using the content for what used to be called ‘fair use’?”  “Should I cite this public domain resource?”  “Should I tell my friends about this artist and give them this audio file to get them interested?”  “Should I download this BBC documentary I found on BitTorrent so I can learn about Elephant migration patterns for my report on African mammals?”  There are so many possibilities.  The government has drawn an unreasonably inhibitory line in the dirt, and used fear to enforce it.  As a result, the only way to figure out what is right or wrong is to make the ethical decision yourself.

What happened to Free and Open Knowledge?

Recently in US History class we have been studying The Gilded Age.  Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and other businessmen ruled the US with such power that it made the government useless.  When the government could do something about the problem with the cases that came through Supreme Court, it almost always sided with the corporations.  After many of the “successful” businessmen retired, they ran around doing philanthropy.  Are you starting to see a parallel to modern day society?

Yes, there are a bunch of parallels between the current monopolies of the software industry and the robber-barons of the Gilded Age, almost enough to make it scary.  They both made money by putting others through misery and hardships.  They did not care about their customers, as long as they continued to buy their products.  In the same way, many software companies today lock people into their platforms, making sure that once you use their product, you are never going back.  Back then, trusts were developed by the biggest railroad companies to ensure competition would not get in the way of money.  Now, this comes back as a deja vu in the form of software patents.  Huge companies allow other huge companies to use their patents, excluding the patent-less home user and small developer from the mix.  Both the businesses from the Gilded Age and those today managed to control the government as well.  Back then, they managed to get the government to go along with Laissez-faire economics, even though it was obvious that the common man was being trampled over as a result.  The government even issued huge land grants to the already gigantic railroad companies to build new lines.  In a similar way today, the DMCA “protects” “intellectual property” and DRM through law, software patents are given away like they are going out of style, and citizens are required to be subjected to these companies (in many cases) in order to interact with their own government.  Certain companies even have control of the ISO!

There is a major difference between these two time periods, though.  In the past, the most important thing in society was still free and open: information.  While monopolies back then could jack prices up, they couldn’t control the freedom of redistribution or modification.  If somebody wanted to resell the kerosene they bought from Standard Oil, nobody had any problem with that person doing so.  If that person wanted to try to use the kerosene in a new way, the companies would most likely encourage the practice, as new discoveries would increase the value and demand of the products created by Standard Oil.

Now, however, software companies “create knowledge”.  This practice is sort of like a restricted version of an encyclopedia.  Imagine what outrage the public would have been in years ago if some major encyclopedia company required that no information learned from their encyclopedia could be used or applied for any purpose without explicit written permission.  What would be the point in purchasing this encyclopedia set?  I can assure you the publisher would convince you of its importance anyway.  Notice how I said, “…the public would have been in years ago…” earlier though.  People have stopped appreciating the value of Free and Open Knowledge because companies today have convinced our consumer-based society that it isn’t important.  Ironically, the philanthropists from the Gilded Age gave huge amounts of money to spread Free and Open Knowledge by building libraries and founding universities, yet big business today relies on secrets and preventing the free flow of information.

What this does is create artificial barriers.  I am not saying that the tactics used by the captains of industry were necessarily moral, but they did not create artificial barriers.  The oil, steel, or whatever was only available through one company at high prices back then.  That is bad, but not horrible.  Once you got your hands on that product, you could do what you wanted with it.  Forget about that now.  The reason you can’t do what you want with that piece of computer software is because the corporation says you can’t.  There is nothing physically preventing you from spreading that knowledge.  Most computer users today are fully capable of sharing that knowledge with others, but the law gets in the way.

On a related note, I worked with another student on a music project recently.  We were discussing when we would be able to have a performance of a piece that we wrote.  I suggested, “If we are done in 2 weeks, we should be able to have it performed right after that.”  He said, “Well, you know, you can’t just print off a piece of music you made and put it in front of some people and say ‘Play this!’ [chuckle]  There is a copyright process you have to go through first.”  Even though this piece of music was 100% original, he believed that we still had to “get permission” to perform it.  This shows exactly how used to and accepting of this kind of thing my generation has become.  Before we do anything, we must “make sure it is okay” with a “higher power”.

People have been bullied through laws and propaganda into “helping” those corporations (and supposedly society as well) by treating abstract computer-readable files as physical objects.  This information could be shared freely and benefit all.  Advocates of this technique say that it is the only way to promote progress, but in reality, it does nothing but diminish its importance.  I suppose I can see how some could confuse “progress” and “private inside information”, as they look the same from the outside.  What is the purpose, however, of useful information if it cannot be built upon and actually used?  Think about if your grandma had a “secret recipe” for the greatest cookies in the world.  If she kept this recipe to herself, nobody but the people in your close family could enjoy these cookies.  Master chefs could, no doubt, fiddle with this recipe for years trying to find an improvement or inventing ways to adopt these cookies for other cultures.  If they were unable to improve perfection, they could still learn new techniques from your grandma and apply those to other recipes.  They are unable to do so, though, because your grandma has kept it a secret.  When she passes away, this recipe may or may not be saved, depending on whether she decided to share it with anyone.  The same thing may or may not happen with the “products” created by most “information” companies today.  It is really difficult to call something an “innovation” when the strides made by that something cannot be innovated upon.  Do we trust one company to do all of the innovation for it’s respective market?

I am not trying to insult your grandmother, but rather, get you to think about this from another angle.  In the whole scheme of the world, your grandma’s cookies are probably not the most important thing.  They do, however, represent a small model of a bigger problem.  Progress, especially in todays time, is one of the most important things in the world.  Small additions or changes to software unavailable for modification could mean significantly less carbon emissions to help the environment.  The company that “owns” these ideas may not think this environment-friendly change would increase sales, so they don’t bother to implement it.  Some piece of highly-urgent medical software could have a small bug in its core that stops doctors from accurately saving several lives.  Obviously these are extreme situations, but image what would happen if educational software was made open and freely modifiable!  Educators would be able to make the classrooms into what they should be, instead of training students through mouse clicks how to make a PowerPoint Presentation or an Excel Spreadsheet.  Educators could turn the classroom into that of a 21st century school, something most schools have yet to accomplish.

The main problem with the current approach is that the major companies today are guarding “knowledge” and “information”.  They are treating ideas as commodities, instead of as the ideas they really are.  If we both have apples, and exchange them, we each still have one apple.  If we both have ideas, and exchange them, we both now have two ideas.  Keeping ideas private will not help the world progress.  Did you appreciate the Wikipedia links I provided in this article?  It shows just how much Free and Open Knowledge is available now that we, as a consumer based society, tend to take for granted.  Wikipedia is not enough, though.  There is so much knowledge in the world that goes far beyond the scope of Wikipedia.  Our society could advance in ways we never thought possible if we could learn to collaborate.  So, whether you are J.P. Morgan, Richard Stallman, Joe the Plumber, or Steve Ballmer, please remember to keep in mind all of the ways Open and Free Information will benefit not only you, but society as a whole.

Is Free Software dependent on the Internet?

Is Free Software dependent on the Internet?  I have fantasized a (hopefully) comical situation that describes where I believe Free Software would be today if the Internet had never been invented.

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Once upon a time the was a man named Tommy.  Tommy’s loved his job as systems administrator for the grain distribution giant Garcill.  He never had to do any real work; he could get by fine by doing almost nothing at all.  Every now and then someone would have a problem with one of their computers.  No worries; it didn’t take any effort whatsoever to throw a new cd in the cd drive and wait for Windows to reinstall itself.  Other than occasional responsibilities, Tommy was free to sit at his desk all day, eat popcorn, and play hours worth of “Captain Comic”.

In order to make it seem like he was really motivationally driven to create the best possible technology system for Garcill, Tommy would occasionally attend technology conferences.  The Chicago Mid-summer IT Convention was one of his favorites.  You see, most of the people attending this conference were going for technology news and advice.  This was one of the few places these pieces of information could be obtained, other than the occasional newspaper or TV story.  Tommy thought differently.  He knew the tourist attractions in Chicago were plentiful, all of which could be paid for through company money.  Plus, the presenters never used microphones, so they couldn’t wake you up during a well-deserved nap.  Life was good, thought Tommy, as he loaded up his suitcase with the things he would need to have a blast roaming the streets of Chicago.
Tommy arrived at the convention ready for a good time.  Every year, he would compare the sessions he attended with the ones from the previous year to see what the worst one was.  So far, the most boring one was “Understanding the Security and Compliance Implications of Large Scale Data Management” from 2005.  Would this year be better or worse?  By the sound of the first session, it would be worse.  “GNU: The Operating System of Hackers”.  Wasn’t a gnu another name for the wildebeest, and what the heck was a hacker?
When he walked into this session, there was some hippie standing on the stage.  A hippie?  Why in the world was there a hippie standing on the stage?  What could he possibly lecture about, freedom?  Yeah right.  “Go back to the 70s,” Tommy thought to himself.  While waiting for the lecture to start, though, it started to bother him.  What could a hippie possibly lecture about.  He obviously wasn’t going to lecture about freedom.  What did freedom have to do with technology? “Maybe it has to do with saving the wildebeests,” he thought.  “But they aren’t endangered.”

Tommy’s mind kept ping-ponging until the hippie stepped up to the podium to begin his lecture.  He introduced himself and claimed he was the last true hacker, and that a hacker was someone who programs for fun.  When he wasn’t allowed to modify the source code to a printer during his days at MIT labs, he decided to make a complete operating system that allowed anybody to modify it.  He called this operating system “GNU”.  Releasing GNU this way allowed people to have the freedom (“uhhh”, Tommy moaned) to use the piece of software, make changes to it, and give away the original program with or without your changes.
The presenter went on to talk about how he created the GNU project.  In the 1980s, he started working on some of the basic components of GNU.  He continued working faithfully on it, and had a usable operating system by 2005.  Another benefit, he explained, was that it kept growing.  If somebody wanted to add a feature, they could add it, and then give away the new modified version to anyone interested.  Then this person could modify the modified version, and give that away again.  After explaining all of this, the speaker put an old computer disk on his head and said he was “Saint IGNUtious, of the church of Emacs, granting computer freedom to all.”

“That was different,” Tommy thought.  “Some of these presentations are really boring, but that was just plain stupid.  How many times am I going to find someone who just made the changes I need to a piece of software?”  As he walked out, he noticed that there were some demonstration computers set up.  Tommy thought he would try one out, just to see how powerful this GNU thing was.  Tommy sat down at the computer, and stared blankly at a screen that was, well, almost blank. It was a terminal.

“What does this thing do?” he asked the man next to him.  “Type ‘ls /usr/bin’,” he replied.  Tommy typed ‘ls /usr/bin’ and words were printed on the screen.  “Those are all of the files in the ‘/usr/bin’ directory.”  “What else does this do?  I can do that on any UNIX machine.”  “Not much.  I suppose, though, that no one person can program a good operating system all by himself.”  “I am sure there are a bunch of people out there who really want to work on GNU, but have no way of doing so.  How would that person get his/her changes integrated into the code?”

“I should have probably introduced myself.  I am Dan, from Indianapolis.  I work in the Garcill IT department.”  “You work for Garcill!”  Tommy exclaimed.  “Yeah.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I do a lot more work than you probably think.  The technology director in Minneapolis doesn’t exactly do what he is supposed to, so I am usually stuck cleaning up after him.  So, where do you work?”  “Uh… I…” Tommy stuttered.  “I am on the All-Mart IT staff in Kansas City,” Tommy lied.  “Sounds much more appealing than my job cleaning up after that buffoon,” Dan joked.

Not finding that joke very funny, Tommy quickly looked back at his computer screen.  It still had the output of the command he had typed earlier on it.  Among those words listed was word ‘emacs’.  “Wasn’t Emacs the name of that ‘church’ from the presentation?” asked Tommy, trying to change the subject. “Yeah, I think it was.”  Tommy typed ‘emacs’, expecting something amazing to happen.  A text editor popped up.  After a few minutes, the two men gave up trying to figure out how to actually type something into the text editor and left to go their the next presentation.

“What is your next session?” Tommy asked.  “Caldera UNIX Desktop Deployment for the Medium-sized Business.”  “I’ve got the same one.”  As the two men walked to their next session together, their conversation had nowhere to go but back to the previous presentation.

“So why would anyone ever use GNU over a more powerful version of UNIX?” “It seems to me that he has this insane dream of everyone working together to create software for the greater good.”  “Unless people printed out their changes and mailed them to a central developer, there is no way to communicate changes to the main developer.  It’s impossible for anything productive to ever happen.”  “Yeah, it’s not like computers can call each other up on the phone and have a conversation!”  They laughed, but the laughter was short-lived.  For the next seven hours, Tommy got to sit through session after session after session.

After the convention, and some fun roaming the streets of Chicago, Tommy caught the flight back to Minneapolis.  He forgot about the presentations he attended at the conference, but he didn’t forget about the fact that someone else had to clean up after him because of his laziness.  Tommy learned that the time he put into his job really did make a difference.  He had a good feeling that he was, ethically, doing the right thing.  He walked hastily down the hall to help some co-workers with their Windows computers.

Explaining Software Freedom to a Beginner

I needed a good way to explain software freedom to people who have little to no computer experience (possibly parents or grandparents, kids, stay-at-home moms/dads, etc.), so I created the following blog post.  Many of these people could benefit from free software, but aren’t going to learn about it through mainstream media.  These people are usually easy to convert to Free Software, because they don’t already have blind opinions about the benefits of proprietary software.  They also don’t resist with the “I don’t want to learn a new program” excuse, because they haven’t put much time into learning any software yet.

You are free to modify and distribute the following under the terms of the GNU FDL.  To redistribute this, you can download it in PDF format or ODT format.

What is Software Freedom?

Many years ago, when computers were just being invented, people really didn’t care about computer software. If a company or organization was lucky enough to own a computer, it would find or create a piece of software to use on it afterwards. Other companies or organizations with computers would be nice enough to give away the software they had written, because it really didn’t mean that much to them. People had all the freedom they could want with this system. They had the freedom to give away their own software, and to receive software from others. They had the freedom to change any piece of software to accomplish the task at hand. They even had the freedom to give their modified version of a piece of software away to someone else in need.

Since then, the times have changed. Now, many pieces of computer software are locked down in a way that prevents people from making changes, just so that the software can be sold for a profit.

What is wrong with most software?

The reason companies lock down their software is because know they can make money off something that should be shared among everyone. Under normal circumstances, there isn’t any problem with people trying to make money. There is a problem when people want to make money so badly that it interferes with progress and innovation.

Different companies and individuals had to keep reinventing the wheel in order to sell their software; they couldn’t just change someone else’s software to fit their needs. Lots of people spent a lot of time writing computer software that somebody else had already written. If these people had shared the software they wrote with everybody, all of the time spent duplicating an existing program could go to improving it.

Another problem with not sharing software is the fact that one company or individual maintains complete control over what that piece of software does. More often than not, that person or company will be interested in making money instead of making the software as powerful and useful as possible. Therefore, the program’s creator is free to put obtrusive or unobtrusive advertisements into the program.

Obtrusive advertisements are pop-ups, nagging screens asking you to buy the “full version”, and other advertisements that ask you to spend your money in a certain way. An example of an obtrusive advertisement that you may be familiar with is the MSN icon (the butterfly) on the bar at the top of Windows Media Player. Another example of obtrusive advertising is when the Apple iPhone adds the text “Sent from my iPhone” to the bottom of all emails sent.

Unobtrusive advertisements are certain features or the lack thereof that force you to use software from a certain company again in the future. Unobtrusive advertisements are far more common than obtrusive ones. An example of unobtrusive advertising is the fact that Microsoft Word saves in Microsoft’s “.doc” format instead of the international standard, “.odt”. This forces you to use Microsoft Word again in the future if you want to view or edit that file. It also forces anyone else who wants to view or edit that file to use Microsoft Word.

The History of Software Freedom

One of the first people to realize a problem existed was Richard Stallman. In the 1970s, Stallman became frustrated when he couldn’t make an improvement to a piece of software he had received at no cost. This made him start to think about the computer software market. He was talented at creating software himself, and he knew several other people who were as well. They decided to create all of the software that a computer needs to run, and then share it with anyone who wanted it. It would be free of cost, but more importantly, anyone would have the freedom to change and redistribute it. Stallman wanted to make sure that, if modifications were made to his software, other people would be able to benefit from those modifications as well. Therefore, he put a modest requirement on his software that stated, “If you make changes to this software, those changes need to be shared as well.” He called this collection of software “GNU”. In 1991, another component was added to GNU to complete it called “Linux”. Therefore, the complete system was called “GNU/Linux”.

What is is called?

Stallman called this form of software “Free Software”. Most people incorrectly call any software that is free of cost “Free Software”. In true Free Software, the “Free” part refers to freedom, not cost. While it is true that most Free Software is free of cost, not all software that is free of cost can be called “Free Software”. Many times, applications that are free of cost are marketed as Free Software. There have been other names given to Free Software to help differentiate it, including “Freedomware”, “FOSS”, and “FLOSS”. Often, is is also called “Open Source Software”, or “OSS” for short. (Open Source Software has a few very minor differences from Free Software, but for our purposes, they are the same concept.)

Stallman also called any piece of software that wasn’t Free Software “Proprietary Software”. He carefully chose not to use the term “Commercial Software”, because he knew that some companies have indeed found ways to make money off Free Software. Calling freedom-subtracted software “Commercial Software” would give the impression that Free Software can’t be used in the industry, which is far from the truth.

Why Free Software is great

Free Software is generally much higher quality than Proprietary Software for several reasons. Many of the people who create Free Software do not get paid for doing so; it is created completely in their free time. These people obviously have a passion for creating software, since they are willing to do it in their free time. This gives the free software community the cream of the crop developers. There isn’t anyone working on Free Software who does it just for the paycheck.

In addition, all software is shared. This means that, unlike proprietary software, the wheel is never reinvented. Let’s say an German developer spends several years of his life creating a computer program that does the user’s yard work, and decides to make it Free Software. Now let’s say that a Russian software developer wants to create the same program, but in Russian. All that Russian developer has to do is go through and translate the existing piece of software. In the world of Proprietary Software, that Russian developer would have to start from scratch and recreate the whole application. Free Software just saved this person years of work. After a while, you can see everyone’s hours, days, and years start to add up to a considerable amount of time saved. This time saved directly translates into quality and progress

Free Software won’t always do everything people want, but it is guaranteed not to do the things people don’t want. If there is anything that the world as a whole does not like inside a piece of Free Software, it will eventually be removed by someone who feels strongly about its removal. This system of checks and balances is one of, if not the best, system of quality control ever created.

Final Comments

Free Software is any software the gives people the freedom to do what they want with it. Proprietary Software is any piece of software that is not Free Software. Free Software offers a massive number of advantages over Proprietary Software, because it is created by people, for people. Features are not added to or subtracted from Free Software based on how much money they will generate, but instead on how useful they will make the software.

One of the reasons not many people know about Free Software is because Free Software projects usually don’t advertise. The creators of software usually prefer to use all of the money available to them to improve the software. The only advertising these projects get is word of mouth.

To help promote the spread of Software Freedom and the advancement of technology, try using some pieces of Free Software instead of Proprietary Software. Two very well known pieces of Free Software you may want to try are the Firefox Web Browser (http://mozilla.com/firefox) and the OpenOffice Productivity Suite (http://openoffice.org). There are Free Software applications to replace most Proprietary Software. Two good sites to go to to find more free software are Osalt (http://www.osalt.com) and the Free Software Foundation Directory (http://directory.fsf.org). Together, we can help spread Software Freedom.