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Dark forces in the world have today coalesced at Annapolis, where, like the angel of Esav, they are attempting yet again, to squeeze the life out of Israel, by blotting out the light of its holy source in this world, and dimming its sense of purpose. Were these sons of Esav to know that Ehud Olmert and associates do not, never have, and never will represent the holy nation of Israel, they might have saved themselves the effort of their evil designs. The real nation of Israel, scion of our righteous forefather, is here in the land of Israel, as ever, "striving with G-d and man." And as promised, we will prevail.

Join Rabbi Chaim Richman and Yitzchak Reuven this week on Temple Talk, as they discuss Ya'akov's wrestle with the angel, his confrontation with Esav, the rape of Dinah, and the return to Beit El, and the message each of these matters impart to us in the age of Annapolis.

While Ehud Olmert is in Annapolis more determined than ever to divide and destroy the holy city of Jerusalem and divest himself of the "troublesome" "problem" of the Temple Mount, by handing it over to terrorists, the sworn enemies of the Jewish people and the G-d of Israel, and uproot tens of thousands of G-d fearing Jewish citizens from their homes and communities in the biblical heartland of Israel, an alternative and true Jewish leadership conference, "The New Jewish Congress," took place today in Jerusalem. Among the speakers were the Temple Institute's Rabbis Yisrael Ariel and Chaim Richman. Needless to say, Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and rebuilding the Holy Temple were central themes of the conference. Video excerpts of Rabbi Richman's presentation will be available online later this week.

Now is the time to make your voices heard, and flood both American and Israel officials with letter and emails, expressing your determination that Jerusalem will not be divided and the Temple Mount not forsaken.

What IP rights have in common is fairly obvious: they all protect non-tangible forms of properly. IP represents a set of rights, and defining such a set doesn't imply anything about the relationships that may or may not exist among the members of a set.

Stallman argues that creating the set known as IP gives the rights false credibility. Yet, people use IP as a term to collectively criticize the legitimacy of such rights as well. For example, many socialists oppose all forms of IP.

Moreover, Stallman founded the FSF, an organization that actively involves itself in copyright, patent, and trademark reform, both socially and legally. It's curious that he would fight defining those rights as a set when the FSF itself consolidates the analysis of those rights in one organization.

The difference between pasting the text of the article and inserting it within an IFrame is that in the latter case the site that produced the content gets calls to its server, and therefore pageviews, exposure for its advertizers, etc. Copy/paste may be theft, but is IFraming?

David, I'm e-mailing your comment to Stallman. Straightforward as your point sounds, I've actually never heard/seen it posed to Stallman re: intellectual property and the FSF (Incidentally, your point that the internal diversity of any category doesn't necessarily render the category useless--if it did, we'd all be very short of categories with which to describe the world--is also a missing and very relevant point in the debate taking place re: our lead article)

I had assumed it was just my limited mental capacity that prevented me from groking how the concept of 'transclusion' Nelson introduces in his Literary Machines is really defined or relevant today. But if you feel it isn't clear, I feel a lot more comfortable with my confusion.

I remember when I attended my first Bar Mitzvah at 13, and heard the Rabbi say that god brought Jews into this world to help make it better. Having already decided god was a myth, (as had the boy who had magically become a man that day ) I accepted this statement as just another dimension of the ethno-shtick.

Many years later, reading compulsively and encountering giants such as Einstein, Chomsky, Dawkins, and Stallman, I began wondering about the line between the message and variants of the DNA; the old nature/nurture dilemma. I see both in play, but over many generations, not one. rms would have been a force if raised by fools.

I accept his opinion that those who have any opinion about Jews are foolish, as I acknowledged my role as one of life's fools long ago. The irony is that he not only represents one of the many which helped construct my opinion, but was part of the cadre that initiated my epiphany one evening about how out of proportion the number of Jews were among the towering leaders of almost every topic I had ever pursued. His was one of the names I ticked off once the realization struck.

I was late getting it with computers. When I obtained my first used Osborne 01 in 1984, rms had already begun the GNU project. This was back when 'open source' first became a retronym, and I was so naive concerning markets I believed CPM would prevail over DOS even after IBM starting using it. It wasn't until much later I began to appreciate what GNU really represented.

I certainly hope rms hasn't wasted his precious time reading these words. I'd much prefer he kept improving vrms. My only purpose is writing this is to share one example of how many lives this man has inspired with his tireless effort and genius. If we survive the next few decades, I'm certain history will enshrine him as one of the most influential thinkers of our times.

Transducer: Interesting the way you thread-jacked here transducing the Torah. And of course it IS a classic example; the ideas/text of the past affecting the future.

I hope to make my voice heard regarding your message in the appropriate forum, but I doubt you will find it supportive. The ancient tales might be instructive on some level, but they will not be helpful in our future evolution. "Go forth and multiply" may have been an advantageous strategy 2 thousand years ago, but its disastrous today.

David: Isn't what you're implying regarding the FSF sort of like the parable that lies at the root of set theory? You want to create a complete index of all the online indexes that don't list themselves. Do you include your own index? If yes it doesn't qualify, and if not your list isn't complete? Forget what its called, but you likely know. It is an interesting question. Diversity won't render it useless, but certainly incomplete.

Its only protetecting the exploitative class and I have no interest in that.

Aside from the word "protect", which only injects bias, that is just going around in circles. These laws make different requirements and have different effects, but if you ignore all that important stuff and focus on the small abstract commonality some of these laws have, you might think they are similar. The term "intellectual property"
encourages such thinking, and that's a reason to reject it.

In an abstract mathematical sense, you can define a set of whatever elements you please. You can define the set of "groobles" as including all forks, cars and toilet seats, if you like. Then you can forget about it, because they have so little in common that you'll never have a use for talking about groobles -- there's nothing useful to say about them.

The problem with the "intellectual property" as an arbitrary generalization is that most people don't realize that copyrights, patents and trademarks have as little in common as forks, cars and toilet seats. So they set out to discuss "the issue of intellectual
property", and they're confused already at the outset. Here's a handy example:

Your description of our work is more false than true, and it's misleading as well. The Free Software Foundation goal is to give users the freedom to share and change software. This relates to various laws, but our main way of doing this is by recruiting people to write free replacements for non-free software, not by reforming
laws. We criticize the effects of copyright law, but we are not particularly trying to reform it.

We do oppose any law that prohibits the release of free software for a useful job. For instance, we participate in a campaign for reform of patent law to protect software developers, distributors and users from being sued for patent infringement. But this campaign is broader than the free software movement. Software patents endanger all software developers, and all software developers want to be safe from this.

There are also many laws that the FSF obeys but does not seek to change, including including tax law, trademark law, labor law, and export law. Thus, the belief that our activities mainly relate to "intellectual property" laws is mistaken.

Perhaps you were led, by the habit of using the term "intellectual property", to misperceive our views and activities along the lines suggested by that term. That happens often, and it is another reason to avoid that term.

Here's a simple set of freedoms I consider essential to free software:
* The ability to use it any way I could use software I've written for myself from scratch
* The ability to modify it
* The ability to redistribute it, including in modified form

Any law that can control my use of those free software freedoms is an intellectual property law. Even though I would be willing to accept IP laws as an arbitrary set, I don't think they are.

Really, I don't think my criteria are any more arbitrary than the ones we would use to group Jim Crow laws or blue laws. Is it superficial to group Jim Crow laws despite their wildly varying legal specifics and language? Do poll taxes and segregation laws have any more in common than patent and copyright laws?

"These laws make different requirements and have different effects, but
if you ignore all that important stuff and focus on the small abstract
commonality some of these laws have, you might think they are similar."

This "small abstract commonality" is the difference between physical property that can be in one place only at the exclusion of another and (intellectual) property that can be replicated without any effect on the original. Free culture and software advocates rightfully object to the metaphor of "stealing" MP3s because the original remains intact, but it's quite tedious to refer to "things that are owned but not physical." These are the things that can live on hard disks and the Internet alone. The idea of intellectual property is, again, not that they share common legal protections but that they require unique consideration from physical property because of the ability to copy without affecting the original in any direct way.

The Western notion of property has long been based on exclusion: my ownership of an apple tree does not only give me access to the tree to pick apples or the guarantee of a certain amount of fruit from the tree (should it exist) but also the ability to tell other people that they cannot pick fruit from the tree. This notion of exclusion had relevance for physical property: excluding others from use is often necessary to prevent abuse. Yet, this reasoning does not map well to intellectual property, where ownership isn't an effort to prevent others from damaging or removing your ability to use your property.

"Your description of our work is more false than true, and it's
misleading as well. The Free Software Foundation goal is to give users
the freedom to share and change software. This relates to various laws,
but our main way of doing this is by recruiting people to write free
replacements for non-free software, not by reforming laws. We criticize the effects of copyright law, but we are not particularly trying to reform it."

This response misses a critical part of my statement: "socially." Reforms do not always entail lobbying and legislation; widespread adoption of licenses like the GNU GPL are a different, social force of reform. GNU is quite famous for the "viral" nature of its licenses, which seek to spread copyleft further and further through people's work. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but portraying GNU's mission as mostly replacing existing proprietary code is misleading. After all, GNU discourages use of its own LGPL because it's less "viral," even though it's basically identical in other ways to the GPL.

Furthermore, free software licenses regularly deal with all three aspects of intellectual property: copyright, patents, and trademarks. You readily accept that issues of patents and copyrights pervade free software, but throw in topics like the Mozilla Public License -- which does explicitly deal with trademarks -- and you're suddenly dealing with all three again. Some very GNU-friendly projects like Debian have even created untrademarked Firefox derivatives to stay clean of trademark issues.

To create truly free software and culture, your work must be free of all forms of intellectual property restriction that would prevent or limit use, modification, or redistribution. No matter how varied the legal protections behind the various forms of IP, they all can be used to prevent the kinds of software freedoms GNU seeks to protect. No labor or tax law comes close.

"To create truly free software and culture, your work must be free of
all forms of intellectual property restriction that would prevent or
limit use, modification, or redistribution. No matter how varied the
legal protections behind the various forms of IP, they all can be used
to prevent the kinds of software freedoms GNU seeks to protect. No
labor or tax law comes close."

David: as you know I wanted to withhold my questions until rms replied. I'm going ahead now to keep this in view, and plan to PM him. Having been in awe of Stallman for most of my adult life the prospect of addressing him directly is daunting beyond what a young IT turk such as yourself could likely comprehend. Anyway, while I wouldn't begin to speculate how rms will reply, I will risk a question or two for you concerning your thoughtful analysis.

First, I'm not sure what you're suggesting. Should those like rms promoting free source be focusing on eliminating or neutralizing the IP legal protections within the labor/tax law systems? Wouldn't companies like MS likely prevail in that setting?

I'll risk an analogy. Homeless squatters in countries such as Netherlands have had little success making their case in the courts. Yet by persistence in re-occupying empty buildings, they often win the battle in the trenches through their relentless presence. Over time, they become an inevitability the land barons slowly grow to accept. Wouldn't chipping away slowly be a better strategy? How exactly would you suggest GNU proceed?

You state: "GNU is quite famous for the "viral" nature of its licenses, which seek
to spread copyleft further and further through people's work. There is
nothing wrong with this approach, but portraying GNU's mission as
mostly replacing existing proprietary code is misleading." Perhaps. But isn't it already starting to happen? Examples, rms?

Also, rms wrote: "The Free Software Foundation goal is to give users
the freedom to share and change software. This relates to various laws,
but our main way of doing this is by recruiting people to write free
replacements for non-free software, not by reforming laws. We criticize
the effects of copyright law, but we are not particularly trying to
reform it." So you're saying this is impossible, David?

If I've missed some obvious point-happens often-no need to answer these questions. It seems the central point of contention is the best strategy, and that you lean toward reforming the laws. What approach to that tactic do you see that could overcome the vested interest and money stacked against it? Doesn't any kind of 'free sharing' dredge up visions of socialist conspiracy within our right of center government?

"Should those like rms promoting free source be focusing on eliminating
or neutralizing the IP legal protections within the labor/tax law
systems? Wouldn't companies like MS likely prevail in that setting?"

I mentioned tax and labor laws because RMS listed them as other laws the FSF follows besides trademark. My response is that the FSF relationship with trademark law is considerably more complicated than it is with labor and tax law. And, no, eliminating IP protections would not always help open source projects. Copyright law can be used to require that people share  modified source code under the same rights given to them, as the GPL requires. Patent law is being used to establish a free software patent arsenal, though this is more to counter abuses of patents than it is a positive use in and of itself. Trademark law allows projects to protect one of the most important resources in the free software world: reputation.

"So you're saying this is impossible, David?"

No, I'm just saying that there's more to the FSF mission than replacing proprietary code. If all they wanted was to replace proprietary code, they could use one of the BSD licenses, which do not have the viral copyleft effect on modified versions.

"and that you lean toward reforming the laws."

While I do support reforming the laws, I don't see such work as an either-or proposition with free software. I support the work of the FSF; I do not support the attempts by RMS to fight the term "intellectual property." 

I imagine rms has been busy with the Iowa Caucus coming up, but I would dearly love to read his reply to your points, David. Seems that cyberspace will be the battleground for intellectual property, and the writer's strike is just the latest skirmish.

Personally I don't know how to sort it out; I'm torn in several different directions. To present just one example, I could not have begun to have afforded to buy all the books I have read. Yet I realize if everyone did as I do and got them from libraries, there would be little incentive for the writers to make the effort. Kant comes to mind. That's why I find this discussion so interesting. It's a dilemma I've wrestled with for years.

I waited until this thread was ready to disappear until replying, to try and keep it visible for when rms has a chance to come back. He has given so much of his time to make the world a better place, it is quite understandable he can't make answering my questions a priority. I only hope he will respond to yours, as you have stated the challenge facing the FSF so adroitly. Thanks David.