Title:	Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks
Date:	September 5, 2005 (Monday)
Time:	5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Venue:	ERB LT, William M.W. Mong Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Prof. Richard Stallman

ABSTRACT:

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.

BIOGRAPHY:

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system, GNU. He is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. Stallman currently serves as president of the Free Software Foundation.

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2003 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he was named an honorary professor of the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Peru, and received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels. In 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar