Subject: RMS Interview
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 15:56:37 -0400
Dear Mr. Williams,
I read your interview with Richard Stallman on BeOpen with great
interest. I’ve been intrigued by RMS and his work for some time now
and was delighted to find your piece which I really think you did a
great job of capturing some of the spirit of what Stallman is trying
to do with GNU-Linux and the Free Software Foundation.
What I’d love to do, however, is read more - and I don’t think I’m
alone. Do you think there is more information and/or sources out there
to expand and update your interview and adapt it into more of a
profile of Stallman? Perhaps including some more anecdotal information
about his personality and background that might really interest and
enlighten readers outside the more hardcore programming scene?
The email asked that I give Tracy a call to discuss the idea further. I did just that. Tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. The e-book format was 30,000 words, about 100 pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. Her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile, she had come across my BeOpen interview with Stallman. Hence her email to me.
That’s when Tracy asked me: would I be willing to expand the interview into a full-length feature profile?
My answer was instant: yes. Before accepting it, Tracy suggested I put together a story proposal she could show her superiors. Two days later, I sent her a polished proposal. A week later, Tracy sent me a follow up email. Her bosses had given it the green light.
I have to admit, getting Stallman to participate in an e-book project was an afterthought on my part. As a reporter who covered the open source beat, I knew Stallman was a stickler. I’d already received a half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”.
Then again, I also knew Stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to the general public. Perhaps if I presented the project to him that way, he would be more receptive. If not, I could always rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations Stallman had left lying around the Internet and do an unauthorized biography.
During my research, I came across an essay titled “Freedom-Or Copyright?” Written by Stallman and published in the June, 2000, edition of the MIT Technology Review, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software sins. Not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read them, Stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. Instead of downloading a transferable HTML or PDF file, readers downloaded an encrypted file. In essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. Any attempt to open a book’s content without an authorized key constituted a criminal violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the Internet. Similar penalties held for readers who converted a book’s content into an open file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their home. Unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. They only had the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned Stallman:
We still have the same old freedoms in using paper books. But if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. With “electronic ink”, which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. Imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library-no more “leaks” that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (And judging from the ads for Microsoft Reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.) This is the world publishers have in mind for us.[1]
Needless to say, the essay caused some concern. Neither Tracy nor I had discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of copyright that would govern the e-book’s usage. I mentioned the Technology Review article and asked if she could give me information on her company’s e-book policies. Tracy promised to get back to me.
Eager to get started, I decided to call Stallman anyway and mention the book idea to him. When I did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. “Did you read my essay on e-books?” he asked.
When I told him, yes, I had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from the publisher, Stallman laid out two conditions: he didn’t want to lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn’t want to come off as lending support. “I don’t want to participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite”, he said.
For Stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. He said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book’s content. Stallman pointed to Stephen King’s
“I’d be willing to accept something like that”, Stallman said. “As long as it also permitted verbatim copying”.
I forwarded the information to Tracy. Feeling confident that she and I might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, I called up Stallman and set up the first interview for the book. Stallman agreed to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue. Shortly after the first interview, I raced to set up a second interview (this one in Kihei), squeezing it in before Stallman headed off on a 14-day vacation to Tahiti.
It was during Stallman’s vacation that the bad news came from Tracy. Her company’s legal department
