Merci. Félicitations aux étudiants [de l'association Libertés Numériques -- NdR]
d’avoir organisé cette réunion.
Ils ont eu raison, non seulement à cause de la célébrité de Richard
mais aussi parce que les sujets nous intéressent beaucoup.
Ils nous intéressent particulièrement ici à Sciences Po
puisque nous essayons d’abord d’étudier les controverses;
certains d’entre vous ici étudient les controverses
et Richard est lui-même un personnage controversé.
Je n’ai rien trouvé sur le Web qui permette de donner un accord
ni sur ce qu’il fait, ni sur ce qu’il dit, ni sur les mots qu’il utilise, donc il est un cas d’école
pour nous qui étudions les cartographies de controverse dans cette maison.
On a en quelque sorte la présentation d’un personnage controversé
sur des sujets qui nous importent.
Le deuxième point évidemment, c’est que le sujet lui-même
et la question des degrés de liberté et de contrôle
qui sont au cœur de toutes ces innovations autour du numérique
nous intéressent directement, pour des raisons de sciences politiques
pour des raisons de sociologie, pour des raisons également de droit
toutes questions qui nous intéressent dans cette maison.
C’est d’ailleurs assez intéressant que Richard vienne chez nous
quelques jours après la mort de Steve Jobs, mort qu’il a célébrée à sa façon si j’ose dire
en expliquant que la disparition de Steve Jobs n’était pas un énorme malheur
pour l’ensemble des questions de liberté numérique
à cause du fait que — même si on pouvait estimer Steve Jobs
le contrôle qu’il exerçait sur les logiciels
et la domination qui nous rend en quelque sorte libres
mais sous la forme, comme il le dit dans plusieurs de ses propos
d’une espèce de prison dorée — prison dorée que j’adore
puisque je suis moi-même un adepte du Macintosh
mais ce n’est pas évidemment le genre de personnage
le genre de liberté auxquels pense Richard.
La troisième raison, c’est évidemment que
pour des tas de questions qui nous intéressent directement
dans cette maison autour des humanités scientifiques
la liaison entre les innovations techniques
et les dipositifs politiques nous intéresse directement.
Donc nous avons au moins, en tout cas moi à la direction scientifique
trois raisons de nous réjouir de l’initiative du groupe d’élèves
qui a organisé cette réunion
et je suis heureux de laisser la parole à Richard Stallman
et je vous prie de l’applaudir avant qu’il ne parle.
Projects with the goal of digital inclusion are making a big assumption.
They are assuming that participating in a digital society is good;
but that’s not necessarily true.
Being in a digital society can be good or bad
depending on whether that digital society is just or unjust.
There are many ways in which our freedom is being attacked by digital technology.
Digital technology can make things worse, and it will, unless we fight to prevent it.
Therefore, if we have an unjust digital society
we should cancel these projects for digital inclusion
and launch projects for digital extraction.
We have to extract people from digital society if it doesn’t respect their freedom;
or we have to make it respect their freedom.
So, what are the threats? First, surveillance.
Computers are Stalin’s dream.
They are ideal tools for surveillance
because anything we do with computers, the computers can record.
They can record the information
in a perfectly indexed searchable form in a central database
ideal for any tyrant who wants to crush opposition.
Surveillance is sometimes done with our own computers.
For instance, if you have a computer that’s running Microsoft Windows
that system is doing surveillance.
There are features in Windows that send data to some server.
Data about the use of the computer.
A surveillance feature was discovered in the iPhone a few months ago
and people started calling it the “spy-phone”.
Flash player has a surveillance feature too
and so does the Amazon “Swindle”.
They call it the Kindle, but I call it the Swindle, l’escroc
because it’s meant to swindle users out of their freedom.
It makes people identify themselves whenever they buy a book
and that means Amazon has a giant list of all the books each user has read.
And such a list must not exist anywhere.
Most portable phones will transmit their location
computed using GPS, on remote command.
And the phone company is accumulating a giant list of places that the user has been.
A German from the Green Party asked the phone company
to give him the data it had about where he was.
He had to sue, he had to go to court to get this information.
And when he got it, he received forty-four thousand location points
for a period of six months.
That’s more than two hundred per day.
So what that means is someone could form a very good picture of his activities
just by looking at that data.
We can stop our own computers from doing surveillance on us
if we have control of the software that they run.
But the software these people are running, they don’t have control over.
It’s non-free software and that’s why it has malicious features, such as surveillance.
However, the surveillance is not always done with our own computers
it’s also done at one remove.
For instance ISPs in Europe are required
to keep data about the user’s internet communications for a long time
in case the State decides to investigate that person later
for whatever imaginable reason.
And with a portable phone, even if you can stop the phone
from transmitting your GPS location
the system can determine the phone’s location approximately
by comparing the time when the signals arrive at different towers.
So the phone system can do surveillance
even without special cooperation from the phone itself.
Likewise, the bicycles that people rent in Paris.
Of course the system knows where you get the bicycle
and it knows where you return the bicycle
and I’ve heard reports that it tracks the bicycles
as they are moving around as well.
So they are not something we can really trust.
But there are also systems that have nothing to do with us that exist only for tracking.
For instance, in the UK all car travel is monitored.
Every car’s movements are being recorded in real time
and can be tracked by the State in real time.
This is done with cameras on the side of the road.
Now, the only way we can prevent surveillance
that’s done at one remove or by unrelated systems
is through political action against increased government power
to track and monitor everyone.
Which means of course we have to reject whatever excuse they come up with.
For doing such systems, no excuse is valid to monitor everyone.
In a free society, when you go out in public you are not guaranteed anonymity.
It’s possible for someone to recognize you and remember.
And later that person could say that he saw you at a certain place.
But that information is diffuse.
It’s not conveniently assembled to track everybody and investigate what they did.
To collect that information is a lot of work
so it’s only done in special cases when it’s necessary.
But computerized surveillance makes it possible
to centralize and index all this information
so that an unjust regime can find it all and find out all about everyone.
If a dictator takes power, which could happen anywhere
people realize this and they recognize
that they should not communicate with other dissidents
in a way that the State could find out about.
But if the dictator has several years of stored records
of who talks with whom, it’s too late to take any precautions then.
Because he already has everything he needs to realize
“OK this guy is a dissident and he spoke with him. Maybe he is a dissident too.”
“Maybe we should grab him and torture him.”
So we need to campaign to put an end to digital surveillance now.
You can’t wait until there is a dictator and it would really matter.
And besides, it doesn’t take an outright dictatorship to start attacking human rights.
I wouldn’t quite call the government of the UK a dictatorship.
It’s not very democratic and one way it crushes democracy is using surveillance.
A few years ago, people believed to be on their way to a protest
they were going to protest.
They were arrested before they could get there
because their car was tracked through this universal car tracking system.
The second threat is censorship.
Censorship is not new, it existed long before computers.
But 15 years ago, we thought that the Internet would protect us from censorship
that it would defeat censorship.
Then, China and some other obvious tyrannies
went to great lengths to impose censorship on the Internet, and we said:
“well that’s not surprising, what else would governments like that do?”
But today we see censorship imposed in countries
that are not normally thought of as dictatorships
such as for instance the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark…
They all have systems of blocking access to some websites.
Denmark established a system
that blocks access to a long list of webpages, which was secret.
The citizens were not supposed to know how the government was censoring them
but the list was leaked, and posted on WikiLeaks.
At that point, Denmark added the WikiLeaks page to its censorship list.
So, the whole rest of the world can find out
how Danes are being censored, but Danes are not supposed to know.
A few months ago, Turkey, which claims to respect some human rights
announced that every Internet user
would have to choose between censorship and more censorship.
Four different levels of censorship they get to choose!
But freedom is not one of the options.
Australia wanted to impose filtering on the Internet but that was blocked.
However Australia has a different kind of censorship.
It has censorship of links.
That is, if a website in Australia has a link
to some censored site outside Australia
the one in Australia can be punished.
Electronic Frontier Australia
which is an organization that defends human rights
in the digital domain in Australia
posted a link to a foreign political website.
It was ordered to delete the link or face a penalty of $11,000 a day.
So they deleted it, what else could they do?
This is a very harsh system of censorship.
In Spain, the censorship that was adopted earlier this year
allows officials to arbitrarily shut down an Internet site in Spain
or impose filtering to block access to a site outside of Spain.
And they can do this without any kind of trial.
This was one of the motivations for the Indignados
who have been protesting in the street.
There were protests in the street in Turkey as well after that announcement
but the government refused to change its policy.
We must recognize that a country
that imposes censorship on the Internet is not a free country.
And is not a legitimate government either.
The next threat to our freedom comes from data formats that restrict the users.
Sometimes it’s because the format is secret.
There are many application programs
that save the user’s data in a secret format
which is meant to prevent the user
from taking that data and using it with some other program.
The goal is to prevent interoperability.
Now evidently, if the program implements a secret format
that’s because the program is not free software.
So this is another kind of malicious feature.
Surveillance is one kind of malicious feature
that you find in some non-free programs;
using secret formats to restrict the users
is another kind of malicious feature
that you also find in some non-free programs.
But if you have a free program that handles a certain format
ipso facto that format is not secret.
This kind of malicious feature can only exist in a non-free program.
Surveillance features could theoretically exist in a free program
but you don’t find them happening.
Because the users would fix it.
The users wouldn’t like this, so they would fix it.
In any case, we also find secret data formats in use for publication of works.
You find secret data formats in use for audio
such as music, for video, for books…
And these secret formats are known as Digital Restrictions Management, or DRM
or digital handcuffs (les menottes numériques).
So, the works are published in secret formats
so that only proprietary programs can play them
so that these proprietary programs can have the malicious feature of restricting the users
stopping them from doing something that would be natural to do.
And this is used even by public entities to communicate with the people.
For instance Italian public television makes its programs available on the net
in a format called VC-1
which is a standard supposedly, but it’s a secret standard.
Now I can’t imagine how any publicly supported entity
could justify using a secret format to communicate with the public.
This should be illegal.
In fact I think all use of Digital Restrictions Management should be illegal.
No company should be allowed to do this.
There are also formats that are not secret
but almost might as well be secret, for instance Flash.
Flash is not actually secret but Adobe keeps making new versions, which are different
faster than anyone can keep up and make free software to play those files.
So it has almost the same effect as being secret.
Then there are the patented formats, such as MP3 for audio.
It’s bad to distribute audio in MP3 format!
There is free software to handle MP3 format, to play it and to generate it
but because it’s patented in many countries
many distributors of free software don’t dare include those programs.
So if they distribute the GNU+Linux system
their system doesn’t include a player for MP3.
As a result if anyone distributes some music in MP3
that’s putting pressure on people not to use GNU/Linux.
Sure, if you’re an expert you can find a free software and install it
but there are lots of non experts
and they might see that they installed a version of GNU/Linux
which doesn’t have that software and it won’t play MP3 files
and they think it’s the system’s fault.
They don’t realize it’s MP3′s fault. But this is the fact.
Therefore, if you want to support freedom, don’t distribute MP3 files.
That’s why I say if you’re recording my speech and you want to distribute copies
don’t do it in a patented format such as MPEG-2, or MPEG-4, or MP3.
Use a format friendly to free software, such as the Ogg format or WebM.
And by the way, if you are going to distribute copies of the recording
please put on it the Creative Commons-No derivatives license.
This is a statement of my personal views.
If it were a lecture for a course, if it were didactic
then it ought to be free, but statements of opinion are different.
Now this leads me to the next threat
which comes from software that the users don’t have control over.
In other words: software that isn’t free, that is not “libre”.
In this particular point French is clearer than English.
The English word free means ‘libre’ and ‘gratuit’
but what I mean when I say free software is ‘logiciel libre‘. I don’t mean ‘gratuit’.
I’m not talking about price.
Price is a side issue, just a detail, because it doesn't matter ethically.
You know if I have a copy of a program
and I sell it to you for one euro or a hundred euros, who cares?
Why should anyone think that that’s good or bad?
Or suppose I gave it to you ‘gratuitement’… still, who cares?
But whether this program respects your freedom, that’s important!
So free software is software that respects users’ freedom.
What does this mean?
Ultimately there are just two possibilities with software:
either the users control the program or the program controls the users.
If the users have certain essential freedoms
then they control the program
and those freedoms are the criterion for free software.
But if the users don’t fully have the essential freedoms
then the program controls the users.
But somebody controls that program and, through it, has power over the users.
So, a non-free program is an instrument
to give somebody power over a lot of other people
and this is unjust power that nobody should ever have.
This is why non-free software, les logiciels privateurs, qui privent de la liberté
why proprietary software is an injustice and should not exist?
Because it leaves the users without freedom.
Now, the developer who has control of the program
often feels tempted to introduce malicious features
to further exploit or abuse those users.
He feels a temptation because he knows he can get away with it:
because his program controls the users
and the users do not have control of the program.
If he puts in a malicious feature, the users can’t fix it;
they can’t remove the malicious feature.
I’ve already told you about two kinds of malicious features:
surveillance features, such as are found in Windows
and the iPhone and Flash player and the “Swindle”.
And there are also features to restrict users
which work with secret data formats
and those are found in Windows, Macintosh, the iPhone, Flash player
the Amazon “Swindle”, the Playstation 3 and lots and lots of other programs.
The other kind of malicious feature is the backdoor.
That means something in that program
is listening for remote commands and obeying them
and those commands can mistreat the user.
We know of backdoors in Windows, in the iPhone, in the Amazon “Swindle”.
The Amazon “Swindle” has a backdoor that can remotely delete books.
We know this by observation, because Amazon did it:
in 2009 Amazon remotely deleted thousands of copies of a particular book.
Those were authorized copies, people had obtain them directly from Amazon
and thus Amazon knew exactly where they were.
Which is how Amazon knew where to send the commands to delete those books.
You know which book Amazon deleted?
It’s a book everyone should read because it discusses a totalitarian state
that did things like delete books it didn’t like.
Everybody should read it, but not on the Amazon “Swindle”.
Anyway, malicious features are present in the most widely used non-free programs
but they are rare in free software, because with free software the users have control:
they can read the source code and they can change it.
So, if there were a malicious feature
somebody would sooner or later spot it and fix it.
This means that somebody who is considering
introducing a malicious feature does not find it so tempting
because he knows he might get away with it for a while
but somebody will spot it, will fix it
and everybody will loose trust in the perpetrator.
It’s not so tempting when you know you’re going to fail.
And that’s why we find that malicious features are rare in free software
and common in proprietary software.
Now the essential freedoms are four.
Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish.
Freedom 1 is the freedom to study the source code and change it
so the program does your computing the way you wish.
Freedom 2 is the freedom to help others.
That’s the freedom to make exact copies and redistribute them when you wish.
Freedom 3 is the freedom to contribute to your community.
That’s the freedom to make copies of your modified versions
if you have made any, and then distribute them to others when you wish.
These freedoms, in order to be adequate, must apply to all activities of life.
For instance if it says: “This is free for academic use”, it’s not free.
Because that’s too limited. It doesn’t apply to all areas of life.
In particular, if a program is free
that means it can be modified and distributed commercially
because commerce is an area of life, an activity in life.
And this freedom has to apply to all activities.
Now however, it’s not obligatory to do any of these things.
The point is you’re free to do them if you wish, when you wish.
But you never have to do them. You don’t have to do any of them.
You don’t have to run the program.
You don’t have to study or change the source code.
You don’t have to make any copies.
You don’t have to distribute your modified versions.
The point is you should be free to do those things if you wish.
Now, freedom number 1, the freedom to study and change the source code
to make the program do your computing as you wish
includes something that might not be obvious at first.
If the program comes in a product
and a developer can provide an upgrade that will run
then you have to be able to make your version run in that product.
If the product would only run the developer’s versions
and refuses to run yours, the executable in that product is not free software.
Even if it was compiled from free source code
it’s not free because you don’t have the freedom
to make the program do your computing the way you wish.
So, freedom 1 has to be real, not just theoretical.
It has to include the freedom to use your version
not just the freedom to make some source code that won’t run.
I launched the free software movement in 1983
when I announced the plan to develop
a free software operating system whose name is GNU.
Now GNU, the name GNU, is a joke.
Because part of the hacker’s spirit
is to have fun even when you’re doing something very serious.
Now I can’t think of anything more seriously important than defending freedom.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t give my system a name that’s a joke.
So GNU is a joke because it’s a recursive acronym
it stands for “GNU is Not Unix”, so G.N.U.: GNU’s Not Unix.
So the G in GNU stands for GNU.
Now in fact this was a tradition at the time.
The tradition was: if there was an existing program
and you wrote something similar to it, inspired by it
you could give credit by giving your program a name
that’s a recursive acronym saying it’s not the other one.
So I gave credit to Unix for the technical ideas of Unix
but with the name GNU, because I decided to make GNU a Unix-like system
with the same commands, the same system calls so that it would be compatible
so that people who used Unix can switch over easily.
But the reason for developing GNU, that was unique.
GNU is the only operating system, as far as I know
ever developed for the purpose of freedom.
Not for technical motivations, not for commercial motivations.
GNU was written for your freedom.
Because without a free operating system
it’s impossible to have freedom and use a computer.
And there were none, and I wanted people to have freedom
so it was up to me to write one.
Nowadays there are millions of users of the GNU operating system
and most of them don’t know they are using the GNU operating system
because there is a widespread practice which is not nice.
People call the system “Linux”.
Many do, but some people don’t and I hope you’ll be one of them.
Please, since we started this
since we wrote the biggest piece of the code
please give us equal mention
please call the system GNU+Linux or GNU/Linux. It’s not much to ask!
But there is another reason to do this.
It turns out that the person who wrote Linux
which is one component of the system as we use it today
he doesn’t agree with the free software movement.
And so if you call the whole system Linux
in effect you’re steering people towards his ideas and away from our ideas.
Because he’s not gonna say to them that they deserve freedom.
He’s going to say to them that he likes convenient, reliable, powerful software.
He’s going to tell people that those are the important values.
But if you tell them the system is GNU+Linux, the GNU operating system plus Linux the kernel
then they’ll know about us and then they might listen to what we say.
You deserve freedom, and since freedom will be lost if we don’t defend it —
there’s always going to be a Sarkozy to take it away —
we need above all to teach people to demand freedom
to be ready to stand up for their freedom
the next time someone threatens to take it away.
Nowadays, you can tell who doesn't want to discuss these ideas of freedom
because they don’t say “logiciel libre”.
They don’t say “libre”, they say “open source”.
That term was coined by the people like Mr Torvalds
who would prefer that these ethical issues don’t get raised.
And so the way you can help us raise them is by saying libre.
You know, it’s up to you where you stand you’re free to say what you think.
If you agree with them, you can say open source.
If you agree with us, show it: say libre!
Now the most important point about free software
is that schools must teach exclusively free software.
All levels of schools from kindergarten to university
it’s their moral responsibility to teach only free software in their education
and all other educational activities as well
including those that say that they’re spreading digital literacy.
A lot of those activities teach Windows, which means they’re teaching dependence.
To teach people the use of proprietary software is to teach dependence
and educational activities must never do that because it’s the opposite of their mission.
Educational activities have a social mission to educate good citizens
of a strong, capable, cooperating, independent and free society.
And in the area of computing, that means: teach free software.
Never teach a proprietary program because that’s inculcating dependence.
Why do you think some proprietary developers offer gratis copies to schools?
They want the schools to make the children dependent.
And then, when they graduate, they’re still dependent
and you know the company is not going to offer them gratis copies.
And some of them get jobs and go to work for companies.
Not many of them anymore, but some of them.
And those companies are not going to be offered gratis copies.
Oh no! The idea is if the school directs the students
down the path of permanent dependence
they can drag the rest of society with them into dependence.
That’s the plan! It’s just like giving the school gratis needles
full of addicting drugs, saying
“inject this into your students, the first dose is gratis.”
Once you’re dependent, then you have to pay.
Well, the school would reject the drugs
because it isn’t right to teach the students to use addictive drugs
and it’s got to reject the proprietary software also.
Some people say “let’s have the school teach both proprietary software and free software”
“so the students become familiar with both.”
That’s like saying “for lunch lets give the kids spinach and tobacco”
“so that they become accustomed to both.”
No! The schools are only supposed to teach good habits, not bad ones!
So there should be no Windows in a school
no Macintosh, nothing proprietary in the education.
But also, for the sake of educating good programmers.
You see, some people have a talent for programming.
At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they’re fascinated
and if they use a program, they want to know “how does it do this?”
But when they ask the teacher, if it’s proprietary, the teacher has to say
“I’m sorry, it’s a secret, we can’t find out.”
Which means education is forbidden.
A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education.
It’s knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school
even though there may be plenty of people in the school
who don’t care about programming, don’t want to learn this.
Still, because it’s the enemy of the spirit of education
it shouldn’t be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows
and then give out copies of the source code, saying:
“read it and you’ll understand everything.”
And those who are really fascinated, they will read it!
And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you’ll need to recognize
that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct
they’re not good because other people will have trouble understanding them.
Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on
when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code?
You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code.
And only free software offers the chance
to read the code of large programs that we really use.
And then you have to write lots of code
which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for large programs?
You have to start small, which does not mean small programs, oh no!
The challenges of the code for large programs don’t even begin to appear in small programs.
So the way you start small at writing code for large programs
is by writing small changes in large programs.
And only free software gives you the chance to do that!
So, if a school wants to offer the possibility of learning to be a good programmer
it needs to be a free software school.
But there is an even deeper reason
and that is for the sake of moral education
education in citizenship.
It’s not enough for a school to teach facts and skills
it has to teach the spirit of goodwill, the habit of helping others.
Therefore, every class should have this rule:
“Students, if you bring software to class, you may not keep it for yourself”
”you must share copies with the rest of the class”
”including the source code in case anyone here wants to learn!”
”Because this class is a place where we share our knowledge.”
”Therefore, bringing a proprietary program to class is not permitted.”
The school must follow its own rule to set a good example.
Therefore, the school must bring only free software to class
and share copies, including the source code with anyone in the class that wants copies.
Those of you who have a connection with a school
it’s your duty to campaign and pressure that school to move to free software.
And you have to be firm.
It may take years, but you can succeed as long as you never give up.
Keep seeking more allies among the students, the faculty, the staff, the parents, anyone!
And always bring it up as an ethical issue.
If someone else wants to sidetrack the discussion
into this practical advantage and this practical disadvantage
which means they’re ignoring the most important question, then you have to say:
“this is not about how to do the best job of educating“
“this is about how to do a good education instead of an evil one.“
“It’s how to do education right instead of wrong“
“not just how to make it a little more effective or less.”
So don’t get distracted with those secondary issues and ignore what really matters!
So, moving on to the next menace.
There are two issues that arise from the use of internet services.
One of them is that the server could abuse your data
and another is that it could take control of your computing.
The first issue, people already know about.
They are aware that, if you upload data to an internet service
there is a question of what it will do with that data.
It might do things that mistreat you.
What could it do? It could lose the data, it could change the data
it could refuse to let you get the data back.
And it could also show the data to someone else you don’t want to show it to.
Four different possible things.
Now, here, I’m talking about the data that you knowingly gave to that site.
Of course, many of those services do surveillance as well.
For instance, consider Facebook.
Users send lots of data to Facebook, and one of the bad things about Facebook
is that it shows a lot of that data to lots of other people
and even if it offers them a setting to say “no!”, that may not really work.
After all, if you say “some other people can see this piece of information,”
one of them might publish it.
Now, that’s not Facebook’s fault
there is nothing they could do to prevent that but it ought to warn people.
Instead of saying “mark this as only to your so-called friends”
“it should say “keep in mind that your so-called friends are not really your friends”
“and if they want to make trouble for you, they could publish this.”
Every time, it should say that, if they want to deal with people ethically.
As well as all the data users of Facebook voluntarily give to Facebook
Facebook is collecting through data about people’s activities on the net
through various methods of surveillance. But that was the first menace.
For now I am talking about the data that people know they are giving to these sites.
Losing data is something that could always happen by accident.
That possibility is always there, no matter how careful someone is.
Therefore, you need to keep multiple copies of data that matters.
If you do that, then, even if someone decided to delete your data intentionally
it wouldn’t hurt you that much, because you’d have other copies of it.
So, as long as you are maintaining multiple copies
you don’t have to worry too much about someone’s losing your data.
What about whether you can get it back.
Well, some services make it possible to get back all the data that you sent, and some don’t.
Google services will let the user get back the data the user has put into them.
Facebook, famously, does not.
Of course in the case of Google, this only applies to the data the user knows Google has.
Google does lots of surveillance, too and that data is not included.
But in any case, if you can get the data back
then you could track whether they have altered it.
And they are not very likely to start altering people’s data if the people can tell.
So maybe we can keep a track on that particular kind of abuse.
But the abuse of showing the data to someone you don’t want it to be shown to
is very common and almost impossible for you to prevent
especially if it’s a US company.
You see, the most hypocritically named law in US history
the so-called USA Patriot Act, says that Big Brother’s police
can collect just about all the data that companies maintain about individuals.
Not just companies, but other organizations too, like public libraries.
The police can get this massively, without even going to court.
Now, in a country that was founded on an idea of freedom
there is nothing more unpatriotic than this. But this is what they did.
So you mustn’t ever trust any of your data to a US company.
And they say that foreign subsidiaries of US companies are subject to this as well
so the company you are directly dealing with may be in Europe
but if it’s owned by a US company, you got the same problem to deal with.
However, this is mainly a concern
when the data you are sending to the service is not for publication.
There are some services where you publish things.
Of course, if you publish something, you know everybody is gonna be able to see it.
So, there is no way they can hurt you
by showing it to somebody who wasn’t supposed to see it.
There is nobody who wasn’t supposed to see it if you published it.
So in that case the problem doesn’t exist.
So these are four sub-issues of this one threat of abusing our data.
The idea of the Freedom Box project is you have your own server in your own home
and when you want to do something remotely you do it with your own server
and the police have to get a court order in order to search your server.
So you have the same rights this way that you would have traditionally in the physical world.
The point here and in so many other issues is:
as we start doing things digitally instead of physically
we shouldn’t lose any of our rights, because the general tendency is that we do lose rights.
Basically, Stallman’s law says
that in an epoch when governments work for the mega-corporations
instead of reporting to their citizens
every technological change can be taken advantage of to reduce our freedom.
Because reducing our freedom is what these governments want to do.
So the question is: when do they get an opportunity?
Well, any change that happens for some other reason is a possible opportunity
and they will take advantage of it if that’s their general desire.
But the other issue with internet services
is that they can take control of your computing
and that’s not so commonly known. But It’s becoming more common.
There are services that offer to do computing for you on data supplied by you
things that you should do in your own computer
but they invite you to let somebody else’s computer do that computing work for you.
And the result is you lose control over it. It’s just as if you used a non-free program.
Two different scenarios but they lead to the same problem.
If you do your computing with a non-free program
well, the users don’t control the non-free program
it controls the users, which would include you.
So you’ve lost control of the computing that’s being done.
But if you do your computing in his server
well, the programs that are doing it are the ones he chose.
You can’t touch them or see them, so you have no control over them.
He has control over them, maybe.
If they are free software and he installs them then he has control over them.
But even he might not have control.
He might be running a proprietary program in his server
in which case it’s somebody else who has control of the computing being done in his server.
He doesn’t control it and you don’t.
But suppose he installs a free program
then he has control over the computing being done in his computer, but you don’t.
So, either way, you don’t!
So the only way to have control over your computing
is to do it with your copy of a free program.
This practice is called “Software as a Service”.
It means doing your computing with your data in somebody else’s server.
And I don’t know of anything that can make this acceptable.
It’s always something that takes away your freedom
and the only solution I know of is to refuse.
For instance, there are servers that will do translation or voice recognition
and you are letting them have control over this computing activity
which we shouldn’t ever do.
Of course, we are also giving them data about ourselves
which they shouldn’t have.
Imagine if you had a conversation with somebody
through a voice-recognition translation system that was Software as as Service
and it’s really running on a server belonging to some company.
That company also gets to know what was said in the conversation
and if it’s a US company that means Big Brother also gets to know. This is no good.
The next threat to our freedom in a digital society is using computers for voting.
You can’t trust computers for voting.
Whoever controls the software in those computers
has the power to commit undetectable fraud.
Elections are special. Because there’s nobody involved that we dare trust fully.
Everybody has to be checked, crosschecked by others
so that nobody is in the position to falsify the results by himself.
Because if anybody is in a position to do that he might do it!
So our traditional systems for voting were designed
so that nobody was fully trusted, everybody was being checked by others.
So that nobody could easily commit fraud.
But once you introduce a program, this is impossible!
How can you tell if a voting machine would honestly count the votes?
You’d have to study the program that’s running in it during the election
which of course nobody can do, and most people wouldn’t even know how to do.
But even the experts who might theoretically be capable of studying the program
they can’t do it while people are voting.
They’d have to do it in advance
and then how do they know that the program they studied
is the one that’s running while people vote? Maybe it’s been changed.
Now, if this program is proprietary, that means some company controls it.
The election authority can’t even tell what that program is doing.
Well, this company then could rig the election.
There are accusations that this was done in the US within the past ten years
that election results were falsified this way.
But what if the program is free software?
That means the election authority
who owns this voting machine has control over the software in it
so the election authority could rig the election.
You can’t trust them either.
You don’t dare trust anybody in voting
and the reason is, there’s no way that the voters can verify for themselves
that their votes were correctly counted, nor that false votes were not added.
In other activities of life, you can usually tell if somebody is trying to cheat you.
Consider for instance buying something from a store.
You order something, maybe you give a credit card number.
If the product doesn’t come, you can complain
and you can, of course if you got a good enough memory,
you will notice if that product doesn’t come.
You’re not just giving total blind trust to the store, because you can check.
But in elections you can’t check.
I saw once a paper where someone described
a theoretical system for voting
which uses some sophisticated mathematics
so that people could check that their votes had been counted
even though everybody’s vote was secret
and they could also verify that false votes hadn’t been added.
It was very exciting, powerful mathematics;
but even if that mathematics is correct
that doesn’t mean the system would be acceptable to use in practice
because the vulnerabilities of a real system might be outside of that mathematics.
For instance, suppose you’re voting over the Internet
and suppose you’re using a machine that’s a zombie.
It might tell you that the vote was sent for A
while actually sending a vote for B. Who knows whether you’d ever find out?
In practice, the only way to see if these systems work and are honest
is through years, in fact decades, of trying them and checking in other ways what happened.
I wouldn’t want my country to be the pioneer in this.
So, use paper for voting. Make sure there are ballots that can be recounted.
The next threat to our freedom in a digital society comes from the war on sharing.
One of the tremendous benefits of digital technology
is that it is easy to copy published works and share these copies with others.
Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.
So, millions of people share.
Those who profit by having power
over the distribution of these works don’t want us to share.
And since they are businesses, governments which have betrayed their people
and work for the empire of mega-corporations try to serve those businesses
they are against their own people, they are for the businesses, for the publishers.
Well, that’s not good. And with the help of these governments
the companies have been waging war on sharing
and they’ve proposed a series of cruel draconian measures.
Why do they propose cruel draconian measures?
Because nothing less has a chance of success:
when something is good and easy, people do it.
And the only way to stop them is by being very nasty.
So of course, what they propose is nasty, nasty, and the next one is nastier.
So they tried suing teenagers for hundreds of thousands of dollars — that was pretty nasty.
And they tried turning our technology against us
Digital Restrictions Management that means, digital handcuffs.
But among the people there were clever programmers too
and they found ways to break the handcuffs.
For instance, DVDs were designed to have encrypted movies in a secret encryption format
and the idea was that all the programs to decrypt the video
would be proprietary with digital handcuffs.
They would all be designed to restrict the users.
And their scheme worked okay for a while.
But some people in Europe figured out the encryption
and they released a free program that could actually play the video on a DVD.
Well, the movie companies didn’t leave it there.
They went to the US congress and bought a law making that software illegal.
The United States invented censorship of software in 1998
with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [DMCA].
So the distribution of that free program was forbidden in the United States.
Unfortunately it didn’t stop with the United States.
The European Union adopted a directive in 2003 I believe, requiring such laws.
The directive only says that commercial distribution has to be banned
but just about every country in the European Union has adopted a nastier law.
In France, the mere possession of a copy of that program
is an offense punished by imprisonment, thanks to Sarkozy.
I believe that was done by the law DADVSI.
I guess he hoped that with an unpronounceable name
people wouldn’t be able to criticize it.
So, elections are coming. Ask the candidates in the parties:
will you repeal the DADVSI? And if not, don’t support them.
You mustn’t give up lost moral territory forever.
You’ve got to fight to win it back.
So, we still are fighting against digital handcuffs.
The Amazon “Swindle” has digital handcuffs
to take away the traditional freedoms of readers to do things such as:
give a book to someone else, or lend a book to someone else.
That’s a vitally important social act.
That is what builds society among people who read: lending books.
Amazon doesn’t want to let people lend books freely.
And then there is also selling a book, perhaps to a used bookstore. You can’t do that either.
It looked for a while as if DRM had disappeared on music
but now they’re bringing it back with streaming services such as Spotify.
These services all require proprietary client software
and the reason is so they can put digital handcuffs on the users.
So, reject them! They already showed quite openly
that you can’t trust them, because first they said:
“you can listen as much as you like”, and then they said:
“Oh, no! You can only listen a certain number of hours a month.”
The issue is not whether that particular change was good or bad, just or unjust;
the point is, they have the power to impose any change in policies.
So don’t let them have that power.
You should have your own copy of any music you want to listen to.
And then came the next assault on our freedom: HADOPI, basically punishment on accusation.
It was started in France but it’s been exported to many other countries.
The United States now demand such unjust policies in its free exploitation treaties.
A few months ago, Columbia adopted such a law under orders from its masters in Washington.
Of course, the ones in Washington are not the real masters
they’re just the ones who control the United States on behalf of the Empire.
But they’re the ones who also dictate to Columbia on behalf of the Empire.
In France, since the Constitutional Council
objected to explicitly giving people punishment without trial
they invented a kind of trial which is not a real trial
which is just a form of a trial
so they can pretend that people have a trial before they’re punished.
But in other countries they don’t bother with that
it’s explicit punishment on accusation only.
Which means that for the sake of their war on sharing
they’re prepared to abolish the basic principles of justice.
It shows how thoroughly anti-freedom, anti-justice they are.
These are not legitimate governments.
And I’m sure they’ll come up with more nasty ideas
because they’re paid to defeat the people no matter what it takes.
Now, when they do this, they always say that it’s for the sake of the artists
that they have “protect” the “creators”.
Now those are both propaganda terms.
I‘m convinced that the reason they love the word “creators“
is because it is a comparison with a deity.
They want us to think of artists as super-human
and thus deserving special privileges and power over us
which is something I disagree with.
In fact though, the only artists that benefit very much from this system are the big stars.
The other artists are getting crushed into the ground
by the heels of these same companies.
But they treat the stars very well, because the stars have a lot of clout.
If a star threatens to move to another company, the company says:
“oh, we’ll give you what you want.”
But for any other artist they say: “you don’t matter, we can treat you any way we like.”
So the superstars have been corrupted by the millions of dollars or euros that they get
to the point where they’ll do almost anything for more money.
For instance, J. K. Rowling is a good example.
J. K. Rowling, a few years ago, went to court in Canada
and obtained an order that people who had bought her books must not read them.
She got an order telling people not to read her books.
Here’s what happened. A bookstore put the books on display for sale too early
before the day they were supposed to go on sale.
And people came into the store and said:
“oh, I want that!” and they bought it and took away their copies.
Then, they discovered the mistake so they took the copies off of display.
But Rowling wanted to crush any circulation of any information from those books
so she went to court, and the court ordered
those people not to read the books that they now owned.
In response, I call for a total boycott of Harry Potter.
But I don’t say you shouldn’t read those books or watch the movies
I only say you shouldn’t buy the books or pay for the movies.
I leave it to Rowling to tell people not to read the books.
As far as I’m concerned, if you borrow the book and read it, that’s okay.
Just don’t give her any money! But this happened with paper books.
The court could make this order but it couldn’t get the books back
from the people who had bought them.
Imagine if they were ebooks. Imagine if they were ebooks on the “Swindle”.
Amazon could send commands to erase them.
So, I don’t have much respect for stars who will go to such lengths for more money.
But most artists aren’t like that, they never got enough money to be corrupted.
Because the current system of copyright supports most artists very badly.
And so, when these companies demand to expand the war on sharing
supposedly for the sake of the artists
I’m against what they want but I would like to support the artists better.
I appreciate their work and I realize if we want them to do more work we should support them.
I have two proposals for how to support artists
methods that are compatible with sharing.
That would allow us to end the war on sharing and still support artists.
One method uses tax money.
We get a certain amount of public funds to distribute among artists.
But, how much should each artist get? We have to measure popularity.
The current system supposedly supports artists based on their popularity.
So I’m saying let’s keep that, let’s continue on this system based on popularity.
We can measure the popularity of all the artists
with some kind of polling or sampling, so that we don’t have to do surveillance.
We can respect people’s anonymity.
We get a raw popularity figure for each artist.
How do we convert that into an amount of money?
The obvious way is: distribute the money in proportion to popularity.
So if A is a thousand times as popular as B A will get a thousand times as much money as B.
That’s not efficient distribution of the money.
It’s not putting the money to good use.
It’s easy for a star A to be a thousand times as popular as a fairly successful artist B.
If we use linear proportion, we’ll give A a thousand times as much money as we give B.
And that means that, either we have to make A tremendously rich
or we are not supporting B enough.
The money we use to make A tremendously rich
is failing to do an effective job of supporting the arts; so, it’s inefficient.
Therefore I say: let’s use the cube root. Cube root looks sort of like this.
The point is: if A is a thousand times as popular as B
with the cube root A will get ten times as much as B
not a thousand times as much, just ten times as much.
The use of the cube root shifts a lot of the money
from the stars to the artists of moderate popularity.
And that means, with less money we can adequately support a much larger number of artists.
There are two reasons why this system would use less money than we pay now.
First of all because it would be supporting artists but not companies.
Second because it would shift the money from the stars to the artists of moderate popularity.
Now, it would remain the case that the more popular you are, the more money you get.
So the star A would still get more than B, but not astronomically more.
That’s one method, and because it won’t be so much money
it doesn’t matter so much how we get the money.
It could be from a special tax on Internet connectivity
it could just be some of the general budget that gets allocated to this purpose.
We won’t care because it won’t be so much money;
much less than we’re paying now.
The other method I’ve proposed is voluntary payments.
Suppose each player had a button you could use to send one euro.
A lot of people would send it, after all it’s not that much money.
I think a lot of you might push that button every day
to give one euro to some artist who had made a work that you liked.
But nothing would demand this
you wouldn’t be required or ordered or pressured to send the money;
you would do it because you felt like it.
But there are some people who wouldn’t do it
because they’re poor and they can’t afford to give one euro.
And it’s good that they won’t give it.
We don’t have to squeeze money out of poor people to support the artists.
There are enough non poor people who’ll be happy to do it.
Why wouldn’t you give one euro to some artists today, if you appreciated their work?
It’s too inconvenient to give it to them. So my proposal is to remove the inconvenience.
If the only reason not to give that euro is you would have one euro less
you would do it fairly often.
So these are my two proposals for how to support artists
while encouraging sharing because sharing is good.
Let’s put an end to the war on sharing, laws like DADVSI and HADOPI.
It’s not just the methods that they propose that are evil
their purpose is evil.
That’s why they propose cruel and draconian measures.
They’re trying to do something that’s nasty by nature.
So let’s support artists in other ways.
The last threat to our freedom in digital society is the fact
that we don’t have a firm right to do the things we do, in cyberspace.
In the physical world, if you have certain views
and you want to give people copies of a text that defends those views
you’re free to do so. You could even buy a printer to print them
and you’re free to hand them out on the street
or you’re free to rent a store and hand them out there.
If you want to collect money to support your cause
you can just have a can and people could put money into the can.
You don’t need to get somebody else’s approval or cooperation to do these things.
But, in the Internet, you do need that.
For instance if you want to distribute a text on the Internet
you need companies to help you do it. You can’t do it by yourself.
So if you want to have a website, you need the support of an ISP or a hosting company
and you need a domain name registrar.
You need them to continue to let you do what you’re doing.
So you’re doing it effectively on sufferance, not by right.
And if you want to receive money, you can’t just hold out a can.
You need the cooperation of a payment company.
And we saw that this makes all of our digital activities vulnerable to suppression.
We learned this when the United States government
launched a distributed denial of service attack [DDoS] against WikiLeaks.
Now I’m making a bit of a joke because the words “distributed denial of service attack”
usually refer to a different kind of attack.
But they fit perfectly with what the United States did.
The United States went to the various kinds of network services that WikiLeaks depended on
and told them to cut off service to WikiLeaks. And they did.
For instance, WikiLeaks had rented a virtual Amazon server
and the US government told Amazon: “cut off service for WikiLeaks.” And it did, arbitrarily.
And then, Amazon had certain domain names such as wikileaks.org
the US government tried to get all those domains shut off.
But it didn’t succeed, some of them were outside its control and were not shut off.
Then, there were the payment companies. The US went to PayPal and said:
“Stop transferring money to WikiLeaks or we’ll make life difficult for you.”
And PayPal shut off payments to WikiLeaks.
And then it went to Visa and Mastercard and got them to shut off payments to WikiLeaks.
Others started collecting money on WikiLeaks behalf and their accounts were shut off too.
But in this case, maybe something can be done.
There’s a company in Iceland which began collecting money on behalf of WikiLeaks
and so Visa and Mastercard shut off its account;
it couldn’t receive money from its customers either.
Now, that business is suing Visa and Mastercard apparently under European Union law
because Visa and Mastercard together have a near-monopoly.
They’re not allowed to arbitrarily deny service to anyone.
Well, this is an example of how things need to be
for all kinds of services that we use in the Internet.
If you rented a store to hand out statements of what you think
or any other kind of information that you can lawfully distribute
the landlord couldn’t kick you out just because he didn’t like what you were saying.
As long as you keep paying the rent, you have the right to continue in that store
for a certain agreed-on period of time that you signed.
So you have some rights that you can enforce.
And they couldn’t shut off your telephone line
because the phone company doesn’t like what you said
or because some powerful entity didn’t like what you said and threatened the phone company.
No! As long as you pay the bills and obey certain basic rules
they can’t shut off your phone line. This is what it’s like to have some rights!
Well, if we move our activities from the physical world to the virtual world
then either we have the same rights in the virtual world, or we have been harmed.
So, the precarity of all our Internet activities is the last of the menaces I wanted to mention.
Now I’d like to say that for more information about free software, look at GNU.org.
Also look at fsf.org, which is the website of the Free Software Foundation.
You can go there and find many ways you can help us, for instance.
You can also become a member of the Free Software Foundation through that site
if you're going to do e-commerce. If you'd like to join and pay cash
right here you can do that too. I've got cards you can fill out.
There is also the Free Software Foundation of Europe fsfe.org. You can join FSFE also.
Can you accept membership in cash?
Is there someone who wants to join right now?
Ok, so you can join FSFE also paying with cash.
Now it's time and, by the way
I know the case of the FSF we get most of our funds from members
so joining is really important and probably for FSFE as well.
Now it's time for me to raise funds in another way.
This is an adorable gnu that needs a home.
And I'm going to auction it on behalf of the Free Software Foundation.
If you buy the gnu, I'll sign a card for you, if you like
and if you have a penguin you need to get a gnu
because as we all know a penguin can hardly function without a gnu.
When you bid, please wave your arm and shout the quantity you are bidding
so that I notice you.
If you are bidding, I think you want me to notice that you're bidding.
The FSF can accept payments either in cash or with a credit card.
If the credit card works for ordering by telephone then it won't work with us.
So, I'm going to start with 20 euros. Do I get 20 euros?
I've got 20 euros, do I have 25?
How much?
Trente? Ok, I've got 30 euros, do I have 35?
How much? I've got 35, do I get 40?
I have 42
I have 42 euros, do I have 50?
How much? I've got 50, do I get 60?
I've got 60, do I get 70?
How much? I've got 70, do I get 80?
I've got 80, do I get 90?
I've got 80 euros, do I get 90 for this adorable gnu?
How much? I've got 100 euros, do I get 110?
I've got 110, do I get 120?
I've got 120, do I get 130?
I've got 130, do I get 140?
How much? I've got 140, do I get 150?
I've got 150, do I get 160?
I've got 160, do I get 170?
How much? I've got 170, do I get 180?
Do you bid? I've got 200
I've got 200, do I get 210?
I've got 210, do I get 220?
I've got 220, do I get 230?
Do I get 230 for this adorable gnu that needs a home?
Do I get 230 to the Free Software Foundation to defend freedom?
Last chance to bid. How much?
I've got 230, do I get 240?
I've got 240, do I get 250?
For this adorable gnu to defend freedom?
How much? I've got 300
I've got 300, do I get 320 for this adorable gnu to defend freedom?
I've got 320, do I get 340?
How much? 340? I've got 340, do I get 360?
What? I've got 340.
No, no I don't want to go up by such small increments, we'll be here all night
I've got 340, do I get 360?
I've got 360, do I get 380?
I've got 380, do I get 400?
to defend freedom? for this adorable gnu, do I get 400?
I've got 380, do I get 400? Last chance to bid, 400 or more.
Last chance, going...
I've got 400, do I get 420?
How much? I've got 420, do I get 440?
Last chance to bid 440 or more for this adorable gnu.
Do I get 440? Last chance, going, going
sold for 420.
Please note that there are stickers which are gratuit to take.
Please take as many as you can and make good use of.
There are also various small things to sell, like badges and elegant pins
and the money supports the Free Software Foundation.
Anyway now it's time for me to answer questions.