Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

Bestsellers can still do well without forbidding sharing. Stephen King got hundreds of thousands of dollars selling an unencrypted e-book serial with no obstacle to copying and sharing. (He was dissatisfied with that amount and called the experiment a failure, but it looks like a success to me.) Radiohead made millions in 2007 by inviting fans to copy an album and pay what they wished, while it was also shared through peer-to-peer. In 2008, Nine Inch Nails released an album with permission to share copies and made $750,000 in a few days.[1]

The possibility of success without oppression is not limited to bestsellers. Many artists of various levels of fame now make an adequate living through voluntary support:[2] donations and merchandise purchases of their fans. Kevin Kelly[3] estimates the artist need only find around 1,000 true fans.[4]

When computer networks provide an easy anonymous method for sending someone a small amount of money, without a credit card, it will be easy to set up a much better system to support the arts. When you view a work, there will be a button you can press saying, “Click here to send the artist one dollar.” Wouldn’t you press it, at least once a week?

Another good way to support music and the arts is with tax funds—perhaps a tax on blank media or on Internet connectivity. The state should distribute the tax money entirely to the artists, not waste it on corporate executives. But the state should not distribute it in linear proportion to popularity, because that would give most of it to a few superstars, leaving little to support all the other artists. I therefore recommend using a cube-root function or something similar. With linear proportion, superstar A with 1,000 times the popularity of a successful artist B will get 1,000 times as much money as B. With the cube root, A will get 10 times as much as B. Thus, each superstar gets a larger share than a less popular artist, but most of the funds go to the artists who really need this support. This system will use our tax money efficiently to support the arts.

The Global Patronage[5] proposal combines aspects of those two systems, incorporating mandatory payments with voluntary allocation among artists.

In Spain, this tax system should replace the SGAE[6] and its canon, which could be eliminated.

To make copyright fit the network age, we should legalize the noncommercial copying and sharing of all published works, and prohibit DRM. But until we win this battle, you must protect yourself: don’t buy any products with DRM unless you personally have the means to break the DRM. Never use a product designed to attack your freedom unless you can nullify the attack.

Copyright © 2008, 2010 Richard Stallman

This essay was first published on http://gnu.org, in 2008. This version is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2010).

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Chapter 21. What Is Copyleft?

Copyleft is a general method for making a program (or other work) free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.

In the GNU Project, our aim is to give all users the freedom to redistribute and change GNU software. If middlemen could strip off the freedom, we might have many users, but those users would not have freedom. So instead of putting GNU software in the public domain, we “copyleft” it. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has freedom.

Copyleft also provides an incentive for other programmers to add to free software. Important free programs such as the GNU C++ compiler exist only because of this.