- Censoring my Software
- Richard Stallman
- [From Datamation, 1 March 1996]
-
-
-Last summer, a few clever legislators proposed a bill to "prohibit
-pornography" on the Internet. Last fall, right-wing Christians made
-this cause their own. Last week, President Clinton signed the bill,
-and we lost the freedom of the press for the public library of the
-future. This week, I'm censoring GNU Emacs.
-
-No, GNU Emacs does not contain pornography. It is a software package,
-an award-winning extensible and programmable text editor. But the law
-that was passed applies to far more than pornography. It prohibits
-"indecent" speech, which can include anything from famous poems, to
-masterpieces hanging in the Louvre, to advice about safe sex...to
-software.
-
-Naturally, there was a lot of opposition to this bill. Not only from
-people who use the Internet, and people who appreciate erotica, but
-from everyone who cares about freedom of the press.
-
-But every time we tried to tell the public what was at stake, the
-forces of censorship responded with a lie: they told the public that
-the issue was simply pornography. By embedding this lie as a
-presupposition in their statements about the issue, they succeeded in
-misinforming the public. So here I am, censoring my software.
-
-You see, Emacs contains a version of the famous "doctor program",
-a.k.a. Eliza, originally developed by Professor Weizenbaum at MIT.
-This is the program that imitates a Rogerian psychotherapist. The
-user talks to the program, and the program responds--by playing back
-the user's own statements, and by recognizing a long list of
-particular words.
-
-The Emacs doctor program was set up to recognize many common curse
-words, and respond with an appropriately cute message such as, "Would
-you please watch your tongue?" or "Let's not be vulgar." In order to
-do this, it had to have a list of curse words. That means the source
-code for the program was indecent.
-
-Because of the censorship law, I had to remove this feature. (I
-replaced it with a message announcing that the program has been
-censored for your protection.) The new version of the doctor doesn't
-recognize the indecent words. If you curse at it, it curses right
-back to you--for lack of knowing better.
-
-Now that people are facing the threat of two years in prison for
-indecent network postings, it would be helpful if they could access
-precise rules via the Internet for how to avoid imprisonment.
-However, this is impossible. The rules would have to mention the
-forbidden words, so posting them on the Internet would be against the
-rules.
-
-Of course, I'm making an assumption about just what "indecent" means.
-I have to do this, because nobody knows for sure. The most obvious
-possible meaning is the meaning it has for television, so I'm using
-that as a tentative assumption. However, there is a good chance that
-our courts will reject that interpretation of the law as
-unconstitutional.
-
-We can hope that the courts will recognize the Internet as a medium of
-publication like books and magazines. If they do, they will entirely
-reject any law prohibiting "indecent" publications on the Internet.
-
-What really worries me is that the courts might take a muddled
-in-between escape route--by choosing another interpretation of
-"indecent", one that permits the doctor program or a statement of the
-decency rules, but prohibits some of the books that children can
-browse through in the public library and the bookstore. Over the
-years, as the Internet replaces the public library and the bookstore,
-some of our freedom of the press will be lost.
-
-Just a few weeks ago, another country imposed censorship on the
-Internet. That was China. We don't think well of China in this
-country--its government doesn't respect basic freedoms. But how well
-does our government respect them? And do you care enough to preserve
-them here?
-
-If you care, stay in touch with the Voters Telecommunications Watch.
-Look in their Web site http://www.vtw.org/ for background information
-and political action recommendations. Censorship won in February, but
-we can beat it in November.
-
-
-Copyright 1996 Richard Stallman
-Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium
-provided this notice is preserved.
+Censoring my Software
+
+Note added March 2014:
+
+This file is obsolete and will be removed in future.
+Please update any references to use
+
+<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/censoring-emacs.html>
HCoop / bpt / emacs.git / blobdiff