INTERVIEW: Richard Stallman on 20 years of GNU

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 13 Jan 2004 at 11:28

The grantees of these monopolies would like society to forget those goals and criteria, and treat both copyrights and patents as burdens that we must bear no matter how great the cost.

One of their methods for encouraging forgetfulness is to describe government-issue incentives as 'property' and describe themselves as 'owners'. We should firmly reject this usage even if others do not. The notion of physical property is not a problem for software development. There is no problem with the idea that you own a computer, or that you own a disk that holds a copy of a program. However, treating ideas as 'property' can turn software development into a quagmire.

Software patents monopolize software ideas, so they make software development legally dangerous. A nontrivial program combines many ideas, perhaps hundreds of them. If each of these ideas could perhaps be patented by someone else already, making a new and useful combination could get you sued.

The European Union is now considering a directive that can either allow or reject software patents. The free software community took the lead in lobbying against them and, amazingly, we convinced the European Parliament to reject them. Now the battle has moved to the individual states of the EU. See www.ffii.org for more explanation of the danger of software patents, and how you can fight back.

Since copyright law and patent law have essentially nothing in common, it should be no surprise that the situation for copyright is completely different. Copyright as traditionally understood does not impede the development of new software.

However, the recent EU Copyright Directive creates new restrictions on developing any means to bypass limitations intentionally imposed by a program in accessing data. That prohibits important free programs such as DeCSS. The proposed 'Intellectual property enforcement directive' would make things even worse. For more information about this threat, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/draftdir.html,
and contact your members of the European Parliament immediately.

www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html explains why the term 'intellectual property' is biased and confusing, and should never be used.

Do you think the issues we've seen with patenting 'one-click shopping' and the Eolas '906' patent dispute, for example, will be an eternal presence in the industry, or can you forsee a time when laws will have to be changed to be more appropriate?

This is the wrong question to ask. If we believe in democracy, the right question is, how can we put an end to software patents? To treat this as a question to be forecast rather than a battle to be won
is to abandon democracy even in principle, and become loyal subjects of a corporate sovereign.

More information on GNU and the Free Software Foundation is at www.gnu.org. Richard Stallman's home page is at www.stallman.org.