Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...)

This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...

I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice.

Stallman said "I don't hesitate to share copies of anything," but added that "I don't have copies of non-free software, because I'm disgusted by it." After a pause, he added this. "Just because there is a law to to give some people unjust power, that doesn't mean breaking that law becomes wrong....

Dividing people by forbidding them to help each other is nasty.

And later Stallman was asked how he watches movies, if he's opposed to DRM-heavy sites like Netflix, and the DRM in Blu-ray discs? "The only way I can see a movie is if I get a file — you know, like an MP4 file or MKV file. And I would get that, I suppose, by copying from somebody else."

Sharing is good. Stopping people from sharing is evil.

Abstract credit: https://slashdot.org/story/451774

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[–] super_user_do@feddit.it 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Nice ad hominem fallacy bro

Edit: sorry it's straw man

[–] 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip -4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

let me take you to school, kid.

see, you can't just randomly drop few latin words without understanding what they mean, the chance you would drop them into sentence correctly by pure chance is quite small.

so ad hominem is when you attack the speaker instead of their argument. as if i started shouting "you commie", or "you libtard", at you instead of explaining why what you said is nonsense.

let me do exactly that.

now, by a funny coincidence, this whole post is actually example of sort of reverse ad hominem. we call it argument by authority (or argumentum ad verecundiam, so we can appear smart!).

it is when you present your argument in a form of "famous person thinks x, therefor x must be true". which is of course not how it works, famous person's opinion is largely irrelevant, unless the discussion is in their field of expertise.

and in such case, it is perfectly logical to point out that said famous person has some really shitty takes and they are by no means an arbiter of moral; and that is the point of the discussion, because it s you (the one who made the argument, not literal you) who tried to make them the arbiter.

hope this helps in your future keyboard wars, bro 😂

[–] super_user_do@feddit.it 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Oh, that's right, what you did is a straw man argument not an ad hominem one. I also never stated that he's right just because he's famous, don't put in the mouth of others things they've never said