Stallman calls for file-sharing to be legalised

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 16 September 2010 17:08

IT Policy - Regulation

The chairman of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, has called for internet file-sharing to  be legalised in order that people could benefit from sharing material that they should rightly be able to.

Stallman was giving a talk at the RMIT University in Melbourne today on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks", one of the lectures he is giving during a six-week stay in Australia.

At the end of his talk, Stallman auctioned what he called "an adorable GNU" (pic below) - a soft toy - saying, "if you have a penguin (the Linux mascot) at home, you need a GNU because the penguin is useless without the GNU." This was a dig at people who refuse to acknowledge the contribution the GNU Project has made to GNU/Linux distributions.

Stallman said file-sharing should be made legal to allow people to share files on a non-commercial basis as they had done during earlier eras.

During the days when printing presses were the main tool for rolling off copies of books, people could still share these or leave them to the next generation if they so wished, he said.

But with the advent of e-books - he cited the case of the Amazon Kindle which he referred to as the Amazon Swindle - publishers had started imposing restraints on people, even to the extent of deleting books which they had already paid for.

(Amazon did this last year, with the supreme irony being that the e-book in question was George Orwell's 1984.)

And e-publishers no longer sold one a copy of a book; they provided a licence for use of a book and could impose limits of time as they wished, Stallman added. "If someone comes to your house can you give them a copy of your e-book?" he asked. "You can't, you can only give them the device with your whole library on it."