Is Non-Commercial Culture Doomed?
This is the best explanation of Richard Stallman’s views on copyright I’ve found. Its short and standalone, yet still comprehensive, compared to his normal ‘Copyright Versus Community’ speeches. I’m posting here as I’m interested in discussing ‘non commercial’ terms. The way computers always shrink the total manpower needed to author work of whatever kind to one, I think its increasingly impossible to distinguish commercial and non-commercial activity. Copyright used to be an ‘Industrial regulation’ that effected only publishers who copied and distributed works, and the Internet has already made everyone a ‘non commercial publisher’ who can copy and distribute worldwide. But if we continue to find a way to monetise individuals activity – eg, Witness the rise of Adsense on personal blogs – will this ‘non commercial’ distinction go away? The design of the MojoNation p2p system (the direct predecessor to BitTorrent) included a digital cash system so that you earned tokens for uploading fi
