I missed Stallman's keynote last night at SXSW, but my pal Heath took great running notes through the talk.
The theory of this is that the public pays a price. The public trades away its natural right to copy things and in exchange gets the benefit of getting more things written. The thing we traded away wasn't a right we could use easily. Then printing press technology got more efficient. Printing presses around 1900 got cheaper. Even poor people stopped copying things by hand. People started forgetting that copies could be made by hand. Things went along more or less OK. But the age of the printing press is going away for the age of the computer. Not everybody wants this to be easy for you.
Digital information technology brings us back to a situation more like the ancient world. It's true that mass producing CD's is less expensive than making a one-off CD, but the difference isn't that great. Any computer user can make copies. There's no inherent reason for copies of things to be made centrally. Copyright law now affects every citizen. It no longer affects companies. It takes away freedoms from you and me. Copyright law is no longer painless, easy to enforce, or arguably beneficial. To stop you from sharing something with a friend, the police state needs to intrude into your house. We're no longer trading away something we don't have anyway. We need to renegotiate the deal.
