DAVID THORBURN, moderator:   Our speaker today, Richard Stallman, is a legendary figure in the computing world, and my experience in trying to find a respondent to share the podium with him was instructive. One distinguished MIT professor told me that Stallman needs to be understood as a charismatic figure in a biblical parable – a kind of Old Testament anecdote-lesson. “Imagine,” he said, “a Moses or a Jeremiah – better a Jeremiah.” And I said, “Well, that’s very admirable. 

Well, what does that mean?  Should you be free to copy it and change it?  Well, as for changing it, if you buy the microphone, nobody is going to stop you from changing it.  And as for copying it, nobody has a microphone copier.  Outside of “Star Trek,” those things don’t exist.  Maybe some day there’ll be nanotechnological analyzers and assemblers, and it really will be possible to copy a physical object, and then these issues of whether you’re free to do that will start being really important.  We’ll see agribusiness companies trying to stop people from copying food, and that will become a major political issue, if that technological capability will ever exist.  I don’t know if it will; it’s just speculation at this point. 

But for other kinds of information, you can raise the issue because any kind of information that can be stored on a computer, conceivably, can be copied and modified.  So the ethical issues of free software, the issues of a user’s right to copy and modify software, are the same as such questions for other kinds of published information.  Now I’m not talking about private information, say, personal information, which is never meant to be available to the public at all.  I’m talking about the rights you should have if you get copies of published things where there’s no attempt to keep them secret.

In order to explain my ideas on the subject, I’d like to review the history of the distribution of information and of copyright.  In the ancient world, books were written by hand with a pen, and anybody who knew how to read and write could copy a book about as efficiently as anybody else.  Now somebody who did it all day would probably learn to be somewhat better at it, but there was not a tremendous difference.  And because the copies were made one at a time, there was no great economy of scale.  Making ten copies took ten times as long as making one copy.  There was also nothing forcing centralization; a book could be copied anywhere. 

Now because of this technology, because it didn’t force copies to be identical, there wasn’t in the ancient world the same total divide between copying a book and writing a book.  There are things in between that made sense.  They did understand the idea of an author.  They knew, say, that this play was written by Sophocles but in between writing a book and copying a book, there were other useful things you could do.  For instance, you could copy a part of a book, then write some new words, copy some more and write some new words and on and on.  This was called “writing a commentary” -- that was a common thing to do – and these commentaries were appreciated.

Now copyright was developed along with the use of the printing press and given the technology of the printing press, it had the effect of an industrial regulation.  It didn’t restrict what readers could do; it restricted what publishers and authors could do.  Copyright in England was initially a form of censorship.  You had to get government permission to publish the book.  But the idea has changed.  By the time of the U.S. Constitution, people came to a different idea of the purpose of copyright, and I think that that idea was accepted in England as well.

For the U.S. Constitution it was proposed that authors should be entitled to a copyright, a monopoly on copying their books.  This proposal was rejected.  Instead, a crucially different proposal was adopted which is that, for the sake of promoting progress, Congress could optionally establish a copyright system that would create these monopolies.  So the monopolies, according to the U.S. Constitution, do not exist for the sake of those who own them; they exist for the sake of promoting the progress of science.  The monopolies are handed out to authors as a way of modifying their behavior to get them to do something that serves the public. 

So the goal is more written and published books which other people can then read.  And this is believed to contribute to increased literary activity, increased writing about science and other fields, and society then learns through this.  That’s the purpose to be served.   The creation of private monopolies was a means to an end only, and the end is a public end.

Now copyright in the age of the printing press was fairly painless because it was an industrial regulation.  It  restricted only the activities of publishers and authors.  Well, in some strict sense, the poor people who copied books by hand may have been infringing copyright, too.  But nobody ever tried to enforce copyright against them because it was understood as an industrial regulation.

Computer networks and digital information technology are bringing us back to a world more like the ancient world where anyone who can read and use the information can also copy it and can make copies about as easily as anyone else could make them.  They are perfect copies and they’re just as good as the copies anyone else could make.  So the centralization and economy of scale introduced by the printing press and similar technologies is going away.

And this changing context changes the way copyright law works.  You see, copyright law no longer acts as an industrial regulation; it is now a Draconian restriction on a general public.  It used to be a restriction on publishers for the sake of authors.  Now, for practical purposes, it’s a restriction on a public for the sake of publishers.  Copyright used to be fairly painless and uncontroversial.  It didn’t restrict the general public.  Now that’s not true.  If you have a computer, the publishers consider restricting you to be their highest priority.  Copyright was easy to enforce because it was a restriction only on publishers who were easy to find and what they published was easy to see.  Now the copyright is a restriction on each and everyone of you.  To enforce it requires surveillance – an intrusion – and harsh punishments, and we are seeing these being enacted into law in the U.S. and other countries.

And copyright used to be, arguably, an advantageous trade for the public to make because the public was trading away freedoms it couldn’t exercise.  Well, now it can exercise these freedoms.  What do you do if you have been producing a byproduct which was of no use to you and you were in the habit of trading it away and then, all of a sudden, you discover a use for it?  You can actually consume it, use it.  What do you do?  You don’t trade at all; you keep some.  And that’s what the public would naturally want to do.  That’s what the public does whenever it’s given a chance to voice its preference; it keeps some of this freedom and exercises it.  Napster is a big example of that, the public deciding to exercise the freedom to copy instead of giving it up.  So the natural thing for us to do to make copyright law fit today’s circumstances is to reduce the amount of copyright power that copyright owners get, to reduce the amount of restriction that they place on the public and to increase the freedom that the public retains. 

We see at the same time efforts to take away people’s freedom in using other kinds of published works.  For instance, movies that are on DVDs are published in an encrypted format that used to be secret – it was meant to be secret – and the only way the movie companies would tell you the format, so that you could make a DVD player, was if you signed a contract to build certain restrictions into the player, with the result that the public would be stopped even from fully exercising their legal rights.  Then a few clever programmers in Europe figured out the format of DVDs and they wrote a free software package that would read a DVD.  This made it possible to use free software on top of the GNU Plus Linux operating system to watch the DVD that you had bought, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.  You ought to be able to do that with free software.

But the movie companies objected and they went to court.  You see, the movie companies used to make a lot of films where there was a mad scientist and somebody was saying, “But, Doctor, there are some things Man was not meant to know.”  They must have watched their own films too much because they came to believe that the format of DVDs is something that Man was not meant to know.  And they obtained a ruling for total censorship of the software for playing DVDs.  Even making a link to a site where this information is legally available outside the U.S. has been prohibited.  An appeal has been made against this ruling.  I signed a friend-of-the-court brief in that appeal, I’m proud to say, although I’m playing a fairly small role in that particular battle.

The U.S. government intervened directly on the other side.  This is not surprising when you consider why the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in the first place.  The reason is the campaign finance system that we have in the U.S., which is essentially legalized bribery where the candidates are bought by business before they even get elected.  And, of course, they know who their master is – they know whom they’re working for – and they pass the laws to give business more power. 

What will happen with that particular battle, we don’t know.  But meanwhile Australia has passed a similar law and Europe is almost finished adopting one; so the plan is to leave no place on earth where this information can be made available to people.  But the U.S. remains the world leader in trying to stop the public from distributing information that’s been published.

And fourth, collective responsibility.  In the U.S., this has been done by conscripting Internet service providers, making them legally responsible for everything their customers post.  The only way they can avoid always being held responsible is if they have an invariable procedure to disconnect or remove the information within two weeks after a complaint.  Just a few days ago, I heard that a clever protest site criticizing City Bank for some of its nasty policies was disconnected in this way.  Nowadays, you don’t even get your day in court; your site just gets unplugged.

And, finally, propaganda, starting in childhood.  That’s what the word “pirate” is used for.  If you’ll think back a few years, the term “pirate” was formerly applied to publishers that didn’t pay the author.  But now it’s been turned completely around.  It’s now applied to members of the public who escape from the control of the publisher.  It’s being used to convince people that only a nasty enemy of the people would ever do this forbidden copying.  It says that “sharing with your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship.”  I hope that you don’t agree with that and if you don’t, I hope you will refuse to use the word in that way.

So the publishers are purchasing laws to give themselves more power.  In addition, they’re also extending the length of time the copyright lasts.  The U.S. Constitution says that copyright must last for a limited time, but the publishers want copyright to last forever.  However, getting a constitutional amendment would be rather difficult, so they found an easier way that achieves the same result.  Every 20 years they retroactively extend copyright by 20 years.  So the result is, at any given time, copyright nominally lasts for a certain period and any given copyright will nominally expire some day.  But that expiration will never be reached because every copyright will be extended by 20 years every 20 years; thus no work will ever go into the public domain again.  This has been called “perpetual copyright on the installment plan.”

The law in 1998 that extended copyright by 20 years is known as the “Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act” because one of the main sponsors of this law was Disney.  Disney realized that the copyright on Mickey Mouse was going to expire, and they don’t want that to ever happen because they make a lot of money from that copyright.

When the U.S. was a developing country in the 1800s, the U.S. did not recognize foreign copyrights.  This was a decision made carefully, and it was an intelligent decision.  It was acknowledged that for the U.S. to recognize foreign copyrights would just be disadvantageous, that it would suck money out and wouldn’t do much good.

The same logic would apply today to developing countries but the U.S. has sufficient power to force them to go against their interests.  Actually, it’s a mistake to speak of the interests of countries in this context.  In fact, I’m sure that most of you have heard about the fallacy of trying to judge the public interest by adding up everybody’s wealth.  If working Americans lost $1 billion and Bill Gates gained $2 billion, would Americans generally be better off?  Would this be good for America?  Or if you look only at the total, it looks like it’s good.  However, this example really shows that the total is the wrong way to judge because Bill Gates really doesn’t need another $2 billion, but the loss of the $1 billion by other people who don’t have as much to start with might be painful.  Well, in a discussion about any of these trade treaties, when you hear people talk about the interests of this country or that country, what they’re doing, within each country, is adding up everybody’s income.  The rich people and the poor people are being added up.  So it’s actually an excuse to apply that same fallacy to get you to ignore the effect on the distribution of wealth within the country and whether the treaty is going to make that more uneven, as it has done in the U.S.

So it’s really not the U.S. interest that is being served by enforcing copyright around the world.  It’s the interests of certain business owners, many of whom are in the U.S. and some of whom are in other countries.  It doesn’t, in any sense, serve the public interest.

But what would make sense to do?  If we believe in the goal of copyright stated, for instance in the U.S. Constitution, the goal of promoting progress, what would be intelligent policies to use in the age of the computer network?  Clearly, instead of increasing copyright powers, we have to pull them back so as to give the general public a certain domain of freedom where they can make use of the benefits of digital technology, make use of their computer networks.  But how far should that go?  That’s an interesting question because I don’t think we should necessarily abolish copyright totally.  The idea of trading some freedoms for more progress might still be an advantageous trade at a certain level, even if traditional copyright gives up too much freedom.  But in order to think about this intelligently, the first thing we have to recognize is, there’s no reason to make it totally uniform.  There’s no reason to insist on making the same deal for all kinds of work. 

So that’s one class of work.   The second class of work is works whose purpose is to say what certain people think.  Talking about those people is their purpose.  This includes, say, memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of goods for sale.  The whole point of those works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes.  To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity.   And so verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.

The next question is:  Should people have the right to do commercial verbatim copying?  Or is non-commercial enough?  You see, these are two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider the questions separately – the right to do non-commercial verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying.  Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do non-commercial verbatim copying.  This way, the copyright on the commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions – only the author could approve a modified version – would still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the writing of these works, to whatever extent it does. 

By allowing the non-commercial verbatim copying, it means the copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody’s home. It becomes an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no longer requiring Draconian punishments and informers for the sake of its enforcement.  So we get most of the benefit – and avoid most of the horror – of the current system.

So if you love the work that you’re reading or listening to, eventually you’re going to say, “Why shouldn’t I give these people a dollar?  It’s only a dollar.  What’s that?  I won’t even miss it.”  And people will start sending a dollar.  The good thing about this is that it makes copying the ally of the authors and musicians.  When somebody e-mails a friend a copy, that friend might send a dollar, too.  If you really love it, you might send a dollar more than once and that dollar is more than they’re going to get today if you buy the book or buy the CD because they get a tiny fraction of the sale.  The same publishers that are demanding total power over the public in the name of the authors and musicians are giving those authors and musicians the shaft all the time. 

I recommend you read Courtney Love’s article in “Salon” magazine, an article about pirates that plan to use musicians’ work without paying them.  These pirates are the record companies that pay musicians 4% of the sales figures, on the average.  Of course, the very successful musicians have more clout.  They get more than 4% of their large sales figures, which means that the great run of musicians who have a record contract get less than 4% of their small sales figures. 

Here’s the way it works: The record company spends money on publicity and they consider this expenditure as an advance to the musicians, although the musicians never see it.  So nominally when you buy a CD, a certain fraction of that money is going to the musicians, but really it isn’t.  Really, it’s going to pay back the publicity expenses, and only if the musicians are very successful do they ever see any of that money.

The musicians, of course, sign their record contracts because they hope they’re going to be one of those few who strike it rich.  So essentially a rolling lottery is being offered to the musicians to tempt them.  Although they’re good at music, they may not be good at careful, logical reasoning to see through this trap.  So they sign and then probably all they get is publicity.  Well, why don’t we give them publicity in a different way, not through a system that’s based on restricting the public and a system of the industrial complex that saddles us with lousy music that’s easy to sell.  Instead, why not make the listener’s natural impulse to share the music they love the ally of the musicians?  If we have this box that appears in the player as a way to send a dollar to the musicians, then the computer networks could be the mechanism for giving the musicians this publicity, the same publicity which is all they get from record contracts now.

RESPONSE:

THORBURN:   We’ll turn to the audience for questions and comments in a moment.  But let me offer a brief general response.  It seems to me that the strongest and most important practical guidance that Stallman offers us has two key elements.  One is the  recognition that old assumptions about copyright, old usages of copyright are inappropriate; they are challenged or undermined by the advent of the computer and computer networks.  That may be obvious, but it is essential.

Second is the recognition that the digital era requires us to reconsider how we distinguish and weigh forms of intellectual and creative labor.  Stallman is surely right that certain kinds of intellectual enterprises justify more copyright protection than others. Trying to identify systematically these different kinds or levels of  copyright protection seems to me a valuable way to engage with the problems for intellectual work posed by the advent of the computer.

But I think I detect another theme that lies beneath what Stallman has been saying and that isn’t really directly about computers at all, but more broadly about questions of democratic authority and the power that government and corporations increasingly exercise over our lives.  This populist and anti-corporate side to Stallman’s discourse is nourishing but also reductive, potentially simplifying.  And it is also perhaps overly idealistic.   For example, how  would a  a novelist or a poet or a songwriter or a musician or the author of an academic textbook surivive in this brave new world where people are encouraged but not required to pay authors.  In other words, it seems to me, the gap between existing practice and  the  visionary possibilities Stallman speculates about is still immensely wide. 

So I’ll conclude by asking if Stallman would like to expand a bit on certain aspects of his talk and, specifically, whether he has further thoughts about the way in which what we’ll call “traditional creators” would be protected under his copyright system.

DISCUSSION:

QUESTION:  [A comment and and question about free downloading and about Stephen King’s attempt to market one of his novels serially over the web.]

STALLMAN:  Yes, it’s interesting to know what he did and what happened.  When I first heard about that, I was elated.  I thought, maybe he was taking a step towards a world that is not based on trying to maintain an iron grip on the public.  Then I saw that he had actually written to ask people to pay.  To explain what he did, he was publishing a novel as a serial, by installments, and he said, “If I get enough money, I’ll release more.”  But the request he wrote was hardly a request.  It brow-beat the reader.  It said, “If you don’t pay, then you’re evil.  And if there are too many of you who are evil, then I’m just going to stop writing this.”

Well, clearly, that’s not the way to make the public feel like sending you money.  You’ve got to make them love you, not fear you.

SPEAKER:  The details were that he required a certain percentage – I don’t know the exact percentage, around 90% sounds correct. – of people to send a certain amount of money, which, I believe, was a dollar or two dollars, or somewhere in that order of magnitude  You had to type in your name and your e-mail address and some other information to get to download it and if that percentage of people was not reached after the first chapter, he said that he would not release another chapter.  It was very antagonistic to the public downloading it.

QUESTION:  I see.  So you’re still imagining a world in which there is copyright?

STALLMAN:  Yes.  As I’ve said, for those kinds of works.  I’m not saying that everything should be permitted.  I’m proposing to reduce copyright powers, not abolish them.

THORBURN:  I guess one question that occurred to me while you were speaking, Richard, and, again, now when you’re responding here to this question is why you don’t consider the ways in which the computer, itself, eliminates the middle men completely – in the way that Stephen King refused to do – and might establish a personal relationship.

STALLMAN:  Well, they can and, in fact, this voluntary donation is one –

THORBURN:  You think of that as not involving going through a publisher at all?

STALLMAN:  Absolutely not.  I hope it won’t, you see, because the publishers exploit the authors terribly.  When you ask the publishers’ representatives about this, they say, “Well, yes, if an author or if a band doesn’t want to go through us, they shouldn’t be legally required to go through us.”  But, in fact, they’re doing their utmost to set it up so that will not be feasible.  For instance, they’re proposing restricted copying media formats and in order to publish in these formats, you’ll have to go through the big publishers because they won’t tell anyone else how to do it.  So they’re hoping for a world where the players will play these formats, and in order to get anything that you can play on those players, it’ll have to come through the publishers.  So, in fact, while there’s no law against an author or a musician publishing directly, it won’t be feasible.  There’s also the lure of maybe hitting it rich.  They say, “We’ll publicize you and maybe you’ll hit it as rich as the Beatles.”  Take your pick of some very successful group and, of course, only a tiny fraction of musicians are going to have that happen.  But they may be drawn by that into signing contracts that will lock them down forever. 

Publishers tend to be very bad at respecting their contracts with authors.  For instance, book contracts typically have said that if a book goes out of print, the rights revert to the author, and publishers have generally not been very good about living up to that clause.  They often have to be forced.  Well, what they’re starting to do now is use electronic publication as an excuse to say that it’s never going out of print; so they never have to give the rights back.  Their idea is, when the author has no clout, get him to sign up and from then on, he has no power; it’s only the publisher that has the power.

QUESTION:  With regard to the functional works, how do you, in your own thinking, balance out the need for abolishing the copyright with the need for economic incentives in order to have these functional works developed?

STALLMAN:  Well, what we see is, first of all, that this economic incentive is a lot less necessary than people have been supposing.  Look at the free software movement where we have over 100,000 part-time volunteers developing free software.  We also see that there are other ways to raise money for this which are not based on stopping the public from copying and modifying these works.  That’s the interesting lesson of the free software movement.  Aside from the fact that it gives you a way you can use a computer and keep your freedom to share and cooperate with other people, it also shows us that this negative assumption that people would never do these things unless they are given special powers to force people to pay them is simply wrong.  A lot of people will do these things.  Then if you look at, say, the writing of monographs which serve as textbooks in many fields of science except for the ones that are very basic, the authors are not making money out of that.  We now have a free encyclopedia project which is, in fact, a commercial-free encyclopedia project, and it’s making progress.  We had a project for a GNU encyclopedia but we merged it into the commercial project when they adopted our license.  In January, they switched to the GNU-free documentation license for all the articles in their encyclopedia.   So we said, “Well, let’s join forces with them and urge people to contribute to them.”  It’s called “NUPEDIA,” and you can find a link to it, if you look at http:// www.gnu.org/encyclopedia.  So here we’ve extended the community development of a free base of useful knowledge from software to encyclopedia.  I’m pretty confident now that in all these areas of functional work, we don’t need that economic incentive to the point where we have to mess up the use of these works.

THORBURN:  Well, what about the other two categories.

STALLMAN:  For the other two classes of work, I don’t know.  I don’t know whether people will write some day novels without worrying about whether they make money from it.  In a post-scarcity society, I guess they would.  Maybe what we need to do in order to reach the post-scarcity society is to get rid of the corporate control over the economy and the laws.  So, in effect, it’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem, you know.  Which do we do first?  How do we get the world where people don’t have to desperately get money except by removing the control by business?  And how can we remove the control by business except --  Anyway, I don’t know, but that’s why I’m trying to propose first a compromise copyright system and, second, the voluntary payment supported by a compromise copyright system as a way to provide a revenue stream to the people who write those works.

QUESTION:.  How do you fight the corporate control?  Because when you look at these sums of money going into corporate lobbying in the court case, it is tremendous.  I think the DECS case that you’re talking about is costing something like a million-and-a-half dollars on the defense side.  Lord knows what it’s costing on the corporate side.  Do you have any idea how to deal with these huge sums of money?

STALLMAN:  I have a suggestion.  If I were to suggest totally boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion.  They might consider it too radical.  So I would like to make a slightly different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end, and that is, don’t go to a movie unless you have some substantial reason to think it’s good.  Now this will lead in practice to almost the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies.  In extension, it’s almost the same but, in intention, it’s very different.  Now I’ve noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they think the movies are good.  So if you change that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason to think it’s good, you’ll take away a lot of their money.

THORBURN:  One way to understand all of this discourse today, I think, is to recognize that  whenever radical, potentially transforming technologies appear in society, there’s a struggle over who controls them.   We today are repeating what has happened in the past.  So from this angle, there may not be a reason for despair, or even pessimism, about what may occur in the longer run.  But, in the shorter term, struggles over the control of text and images, over all forms of information are likely to be painful and extensive.  For example, as a teacher of media, my access to images has been restricted in recent years in a way that had never been in place before.  If I write an essay in which I want to use still images, even from films, they are much harder to get permission to use, and the prices charged to use those still images are much higher – even when I make arguments about intellectual inquiry and the the legal category of “fair use.”  So I think, in this moment of extended transformation, the longer-term prospects may, in fact, not be as disturbing as what’s happening in the shorter term.  But in any case, we need to understand the whole of our contemporary experience as a renewed version of a struggle over the control of technological resources that is a recurring principle of Western society.

It’s also essential to understand that the history of older technologies is itself a complicated matter.  The impact of the printing press in Spain, for example, is radically different from its impact in England or in France. 

QUESTION:  Have you given thought to extending the concept of “fair use,” and are there any nuances there that you might care to lay out for us?

STALLMAN:  Well, the idea of giving everyone permission for non-commercial verbatim copying of two kinds of works, certainly, may be thought of as extending what fair use is.  It’s bigger than what’s fair use currently. If your idea is that the public trades away certain freedoms to get more progress, then you can draw the line at various, different places.  Which freedoms does the public trade away and which freedoms does the public keep?

QUESTION:  One analogy that was recently suggested to me for the whole Napster question was the analogy of the public library.  I suppose some of you who have heard the Napster arguments have heard this analogy.  I’m wondering if you would comment on it.  The defenders of people who say Napster should continue and there shouldn’t be restrictions on it sometimes say something like this: “When folks go into the public library and borrow a book, they’re not paying for it, and it can be borrowed dozens of times, hundreds of time, without any additional payment.  Why is Napster any different?”

STALLMAN:  Well, it’s not exactly the same.  But it should be pointed out that the publishers want to transform public libraries into pay-per-use, retail outlets.  So they’re against public libraries.

QUESTION:  There’s more to making a model successful than just the licensing.  Can you speak to that?

STALLMAN:  Absolutely.  Well, you know, I don’t know the answers.  But part of what I believe is crucial for developing free, functional information is idealism.  People have to recognize that it’s important for this information to be free, that when the information is free, you can make full use of it.  When it’s restricted, you can’t.  You have to recognize that the non-free information is an attempt to divide them and keep them helpless and keep them down.  Then they can get the idea, “Let’s work together to produce the information we want to use, so that it’s not under the control of some powerful person who can dictate to us what we can do.”

This tremendously boosts it.  But I don’t know how much it will work in various different areas, but I think that in the area of education, when you’re looking for textbooks, I think I see a way it can be done.  There are a lot of teachers in the world, teachers who are not at prestigious universities – maybe they’re in high-school; maybe they’re in college – where they don’t write and publish a lot of things and there’s not a tremendous demand for them.  But a lot of them are smart.  A lot of them know their subjects well and they could write textbooks about lots of subjects and share them with the world and receive a tremendous amount of appreciation from the people who will have learned from them.

QUESTION:  Actually what I was looking for is something even more than that.  What’s important in your kind of structure is somebody that creates an infrastructure to which everybody else can contribute.  There isn’t a K through 12 infrastructure out there in any place for a contribution for materials.

I can get information from lots of places but it’s not released under free licenses, so I can’t use it to make a free textbook.

STALLMAN:  Actually, copyright doesn’t cover the facts.  It only covers the way it’s written.  So you can learn a field from anywhere and then write a textbook, and you can make that textbook free, if you want.