Copyright and globalization in the age of computer networks
[The following is an edited transcript of the conclusion of Richard Stallman's talk. A transcript of the complete talk including the question-and-answer session is also available.]
RMS is a God, but so is Huitzilopochtli, demander of human sacrifice. One wants to tie you to a slab and cut your heart out and the other was worshipped by Aztecs.
Anyway.
RMS is a good guy in the copyfight, but I'm going to have to tug his beard for this:
We have to recognize that the existing copyright system does a lousy job of supporting musicians, just as lousy as world trade does of raising living standards in the Philippines and China. You have these enterprise zones where everyone works in a sweatshop and all of the products are made in sweatshops. I knew that globalization was a very inefficient way of raising living standards of people overseas.
Wait, what? World trade has done a lousy job of raising living standards in China? I'm not sure which version of emacs he's been smoking, but every available indicator over the last 30 or 40 years reveals China to be in the midst of the greatest industrial revolution in history. You might legitimately complain about the environmental results of this, but you absolutely cannot question that the Chinese people are better off for it. Real statistics are hard to come by, but with population up by 30% and GDP up by 300% from 1978-2000 it's mindbogglingly counterfactual to suggest Deng Xiaoping's market reforms haven't raised living standards.
As for "sweatshops", there's a dirty little secret that $20/hr first-world workers don't want you to know: sweatshops are good for the poor and the people that work in them like working in them. Speaking of which...
Say, an American is getting paid $20 an hour to make something and you give that job to a Mexican who is getting paid maybe six dollars a day, what has happened here is that you've taken a large amount of money away from an American worker, given a tiny fraction, like a few percents, to a Mexican worker and given back the rest to the company. So if your goal is to raise the living standards of Mexican workers, this is a lousy way to do it.
Is it really a lousy way to raise the living standard of the Mexican worker when he's getting $6/day and was previously getting nothing? It sounds like he's $6/day better off.
Aside from $20/hour being a gross overestimate for unskilled labour (US minimum wage is $5.15/hour), and $6/day being a gross underestimate for outsourced labour ("sweatshop" wages in Honduras are more than twice that, not even taking into account differences in purchasing power), the suggestion seems to be that wealth has been destroyed because the $160/day job has turned into a $6/day job.
In fact, wealth has been created. If you only have to spend $6 on labour, you can spend the other $154 on other things. RMS seems to believe that "giving back the rest to the company" somehow causes it to disappear, but I imagine this is just his unfamiliarity with what companies actually do with their money. That extra $154 can now be productively invested in further enterprises which, on the whole, will generate further wealth, and very likely further jobs.
One might ask whether this makes the $20/hour American feel any better about losing his job, and the answer is obviously no. He might not care to hear Bastiat explain the situation either. But the fact is, for all his loss, everybody else is better off. The Mexican is better off because he has a job. The company is better off because it can invest in new projects (or return the money to its shareholders, who will invest it themselves, or maybe just blow it all on strippers). The rest of the world is better off because it can buy widgets for $6 plus parts rather than $160 plus parts.
This last benefit is important. Would you have a computer if it cost £10,000? Would you have a car if it cost £100,000? How long would you spend talking on the phone to your friends if it cost £10/minute? Every penny shaved off the price of consumer goods is an improvement in your - and everyone else's - quality of life.
RMS goes on to say:
So I think I've said most of what I want to say. I'd like to mention that tomorrow is Phone-In Sick Day in Canada.
And he wonders why $20/hour workers are being out-competed by Mexicans.
Comments
<blockquote cite="http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript.en.html#q8"> the ideas of free software, I believe, extend to other kinds of works of authorship that serve functional practical purposes such as, for instance, recipes - which are, for the most part, free. And, educational works such as text books and manuals, they should also be free. And reference works, like dictionaries and encyclopedias, so Wikipedia is an example of a free reference work, and there are several others, showing that we are making good progress in extending the idea of freedom to these other useful works. More broadly, farmers in many countries are opposed to patents on crops, which deny them the freedom to copy their plants. This restriction is unjust in the same way that proprietary software is unjust. However, we should be careful not to try to simplify life down to just one issue. There are many ethical issues in life which are different, they are not isomorphic, they are not analogous. I don't believe that all the important ethical issues in life can be modelled on the free software movement. At a very broad level, the biggest political battle today is democracy vs. the corporate masters of the World. Thus, free trade treaties are designed to transfer power from governments that can be democratic to businesses that never try to be democratic and therefore, free trade treaties are dangerous. I believe they should be abolished. This does not mean I'm against international trade. International trade is beneficial for all the reasons that neo-liberal economists tell us, but they don't mention the price which we pay in loss of democracy. So I say that international trade is a useful thing to encourage to the extent we can do so and still preserving the strength of democracy. That means that today's free trade treaties have gone too far because they turn democracy into an empty shell. Today, companies find it so easy to move their operations from one country to another that they make these countries compete to bow down to business which means that no country can really exercise democracy anymore. If the people in a country say "We want you to regulate business", perhaps to protect the environment, perhaps to protect public health, perhaps to protect the general standard of living, the politicians of the country respond "We don't dare do this because all the businesses will move some place else". Whatever methods of encouraging international trade we use, have to be designed so that they do not produce this result. This is a very broad kind of struggle, and since the 90s, free software can be seen as being a part of the struggle, even though when we began the movement, that was before the age of these free trade treaties and the larger context into which our movement fits today didn't exist then. Because fundamentally, this isn't about democracy vs. business. Fundamentally this is about making sure everyone's freedom and social solidarity is respected. It just happens that this fits into today's movement against business-dominated globalisation. Interestingly, free software itself it globalisation. Many free programs have developers in several continents and are used in all the countries of the World, or pretty close. Free software represents the globalisation of human knowledge and human cooperation. When people say they are against globalisation, they are simplifying things a bit. The issue there is not globalisation in an abstract sense, it's one specific kind of globalisation, namely the globalisation of business power. Businesses should never have power, that conflicts with democracy, so business power is an injustice and if you globalise something that is bad, it becomes a bigger evil. But cooperation and developing and disseminating human knowledge is good, and if you globalise something good, it becomes a bigger good, and that's what the free software movement does. </blockquote>
That's from Richard's recent GPLv3 speech in Tokyo, at http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/tokyo-rms-transcript.en.html#q8 of course.
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