You may disagree with Stallman's philosophy (many do, me too). But his predicitions WERE spot on, and they were made more than 30 years ago.
He predicted DRM for consumer media, and that DRM violations will carry a harsh punishment. As the laws are written (and occasionally practiced), he was more than spot-on.
He predicted being unable to run unapproved software on commodity hardware you own. This has started happening with iPhone/iPad and somewhat with Win7 and (boot locked) Android devices. This post is about it coming to a PC near you in the near future via Win8 UEFI Secure Boot requirements.
In the beginning, you'll have to pay more to get hardware that can run anything you fancy, and it some point you might not be able to.
I'd say his predictions were right. Philosophy and ethics is never a well defined right or wrong, so I'm not sure what you are arguing with.
Those were not predictions. Those things were already happening -- to paraphrase, the rest of the world got caught up in the future of 30 years ago.
The "F* u nvidia" seems also to catch on slowly in Finland ->
"there was a disturbance that they needed to take care of. The officer then asked what the disturbance was and the faculty member relented - they were worried that there would be an incident, but that it hadn't yet happened." -- http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html
DRM is as old as the floppy. Frequently, bad sectors were created on the original media and the software checked for those bad sectors. If you copied the software, you couldn't copy the bad sectors, so the software wouldn't load.
That's a very distant cousin to DRM: if you had two machines, you could just move the floppy or dongle between them (or lend them to a friend, or resell them). You cannot do this with your DRMd music or ebooks. Furthermore, your software and data were usable even if the authorization server went down. (google play4sure if you are not familiar with a modern counter example ).
Furthermore, quaid software's "Copywrite" and central point's option board were able to copy just about everything, and we're legally sold and marketed.
French and US 3-strike accusation-based penalty is very much in line with what stallman was describing. copy protection of the 80's isn't.
The guy deserves credit for quite accurately predicting a non-trivial future.
According to Wikipedia, Stallman wrote "the right to read" in 1997, not 1985:
"The Right to Read" is a short story by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, which was first published in 1997 in Communications of the ACM.
That said, I remember several copy protection measures where en vogue for games, on Amiga and Atari, and even business software. It wasn't called DRM at the time, but DRM is just an acronym describing any similar practice, not a specific technology.
From Wikipedia we also learn: "A very early implementation of DRM was the Software Service System (SSS) devised by the Japanese engineer Ryoichi Mori in 1983 [135] and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and also enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder."
For some reason, I remembered reading it already in 1992, that should show about trusting my memory...
Still, he was discussing these things before "The right to read" (in which the ideas were well enough crystalized to put into literature), and modern DRM is inline with "right-to-read" (e.g. Japanese penalties passed this week) and dissimilar to anything that was there (in theory) before 2000 and (in practice) before 2005.
> That said, I remember several copy protection measures where en vogue for games, on Amiga and Atari, and even business software. It wasn't called DRM at the time, but DRM is just an acronym describing any similar practice, not a specific technology.
I see a huge difference between software copy restriction (a.k.a "protection") and DRM. With copy restriction, you owned your copy and could do anything you wanted with it, including lending and reselling it. Many of these schemes would still let you make a backup, so long as the dongle/original was available for a 1 second check. That is, the restriction was on distribution.
Modern DRM restricts use.
> From Wikipedia we also learn: "A very early implementation of DRM was the Software Service System (SSS) devised by the Japanese engineer Ryoichi Mori in 1983 [135] and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and also enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder."
That's more in line with modern DRM. But Japan had always been in the future :)
He predicted DRM for consumer media, and that DRM violations will carry a harsh punishment. As the laws are written (and occasionally practiced), he was more than spot-on.
He predicted being unable to run unapproved software on commodity hardware you own. This has started happening with iPhone/iPad and somewhat with Win7 and (boot locked) Android devices. This post is about it coming to a PC near you in the near future via Win8 UEFI Secure Boot requirements.
In the beginning, you'll have to pay more to get hardware that can run anything you fancy, and it some point you might not be able to.
I'd say his predictions were right. Philosophy and ethics is never a well defined right or wrong, so I'm not sure what you are arguing with.