"In China, the concept has been much
slower to catch on. Comparing free software to free
speech is harder to do when you don't have any free
speech. Still, the level of interest in free software
during my last visit was profound."
The conversation shifts to Napster, the San Mateo,
California software company, which has become something
of a media cause c?l?bre in recent months. The company
markets a controversial software tool that lets music
fans browse and copy the music files of other music
fans. Thanks to the magnifying powers of the Internet,
this so-called "peer-to-peer" program has evolved into
a de facto online juke box, giving ordinary music fans
a way to listen to MP3 music files over the computer
without paying a royalty or fee, much to record
companies' chagrin.
Although based on proprietary software, the Napster
system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman
contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in
other words, once making a copy is less a matter of
duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a
matter of duplicating information-the natural human
impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict.
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