Minor Tidbits

I watched https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2015-7046-freie_software_gegen_unsere_freiheit/ (it's a link to media.ccc.de) and it pissed me off somewhat. The whole premise is that the guy, who gives the talk, claims to be in favor of free as in freedom software, but then excludes people or rather specific purposes from this freedom. His whole shtick is that he thinks the military and intelligence agencies shouldn't be able to use free software, and this by extend somehow limits our freedom or something, but he doesn't realize how this is against the whole idea of free software. Theo de Raadt said once in a mailing list post that OpenBSD must be free for all "for any purpose they wish to use it, including modifications, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia", which I think is very much the ideal for free software. However those types like this Thorsten Schroeder guy think software freedom is cool and all, but not for everyone. (Considering he does this talk with an Antifa sticker on his laptop, I would not be surprised if he thought freedom of expression should have limitations built-in to prevent wrongspeak as well.)

He talks about he wants to add a clause to free software licenses to prevent the military and intelligence agencies to use his software, which not only shows that he doesn't care about software freedom, but also that he is in favor of intellectual property laws. In the end "You may not use this software for military purposes" is the same as "You may not use this software commercially", because it's the same train of thought where people think they ought to have rights on what people do with their work after it has been released. I sincerly hope that the free software movement realizes that out of principle everyone should have the freedom to use, modify, distribute, and study software as they wish, because the military certainly won't be last and there will be many more clauses that forbid people to use software for any given purpose or for any group of people.

It absolutely beyond me how many artists, creators and programmers create things, which seem to be themed around being "against the system", "mainstream society" or anything of that kind really, but then still obsess over copyright and intellectual property, as if it wasn't a symptom of the very thing they dislike so much. In this article I don't want to reiterate what is wrong with copyright law, since I just assume if you are reading this, you are already enlightened, rather than focusing on this particular phenomenon.

Why is it that way? One explanation would be that they are part of some kind of organization or music label, that manages the distribution of their creation for them, but this is not really the case for most of them, as most of those are independent and merely post their stuff online without any other people involved. And even if this were the case, the question still stands. For example a music label, which publishes anarchist music of any kind, why would those people insist on using the copyright system for them? You would think those people are knowledgeable enough about publishing music AND about copyright, that they would not do so, but it seems to be the case for the vast majority of them. In the case of the independent creator, this does not apply really. My other guess would that since the vast majority of so-called "platforms" default to making your works copyrighted, so most artist just publish their work without caring about this issue and then don't bother with it anymore. This is probably where you can observe a divide between the artists, who actually don't bother further, and such who exploit the current state of the law, to censor redistribution and remixing of their work. I think in the end it just boils down to actually not being as non-conformist as they like to think of themselves, or they just do not bother with copyright in first place, but then also don't care for reuploads, remixing and pirating.

While this article was fairly insipid in itself, and more of a rant than anything else, I hope it's still readable. More so, I want to suggest to everyone reading this to make their creative works public domain (with a public domain waiver such as CC0).