Among other things he speaks of the think-tank-driven concerted effort to influence political support by using language invoking specific metaphors to frame important issues.
Like "Tax Relief" for dramatically reducing taxes for the rich etc.
Changed how I process political speech and pretty much any media-supported narrative.
I thought it is a good story how rethoric and framing is used nowadays in politics.
And then everyone forgot it, or maybe were encouraged to forget it.
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992...
I don't want to be harsh here, but it might be worth for you to consider that you were also a poor student.
That being said, if your claim is that the acronyms as they existed do not accurately describe what's going on, I fundamentally disagree. What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. What's DRM? It's technology that helps rights holders manage the rights they have to their intellectual property. What's intellectual property? It's like physical property, but it's ideas instead of objects. Intellectual property is never safe from the fair use exception, which is what protects what one might call the "free flow of ideas" and such. It's simply there to protect exploitation for financial gain.
The common theme here is that someone invented an abstract concept and applied a word to it that got its good connotations from the more concrete things it was usually applied to. Usually you can point to ways in which it betrays the original concept. In "copy-protection" and other kinds of business "protection", the thing being protected is not a business, or people, or property, but rather the ability of a particular group of businesses to make a profit doing what they're doing; the implementation of this "protection" may well involve sending police to forcibly shut down other businesses, arrest people, and confiscate property. For "intellectual property", the "right to the property" that the law enforces is not the right to the material integrity or full usage of anything physical; in fact, it's the privilege to prevent other people who have full ownership of physical objects from using them in certain particular ways. The digital "rights" are roughly the same: the right is not to own and have the full use of some digital object (which presumably means a group of bytes in memory or persistent storage somewhere), but in fact to prevent other people from possessing isomorphic digital objects.
The government can invent any kind of "exclusive right to do X", and make the privilege transferable. Then people can buy and sell it. Like taxi medallions. And then people can call it "property", which they "own", and the government "protects" their "right" to it. I think it's a debasement of the terms, which functions (deliberately or otherwise) to mislead the unwary into granting the practice legitimacy.
Digital Restrictions Management is about the only one that's really stuck: it's not contrived, it's more accurate and it fits the initialism.
The PATRIOT Act was not called the Increase Spying on Citizens Act, but perhaps it should have been.
The unfortunate fact is that if your political adversaries have already chosen a favorable-sounding, possibly-dishonest name for something, it's very hard to persuade people of your position while using the other side's terms.
But we're using it too. So maybe, "exchange" would be a better word? Although, with most of nowadays' apps (youtube, google, gmail, facebook, whatsapp, ...), the way they use "us" is really limited compared to the practicality they provide.
Then you have claiming Win32 is a subliminal message about winning rather than an abbreviation for Windows...
When my bank charges me a fee, they call it a fee, not a bonus, though it's the latter from their point of view.
In practice, instead of getting "Declined" and using a credit card instead, you end up paying $35 in order to borrow $1.
Furthermore, it seems neither do many of the artists - most of them make their music available for free through e.g. YouTube.
And even if such a social contract existed, I suspect I would feel more harmed by the inability to format-shift the music I bought, than by someone else listening to the music without paying.
It is rare for two passengers on an airplane to pay the same rate even for the same seat and service class. Does this violate any social contract in your opinion? Obviously, the money was not wall spent by one of them.
For 99.999% of the users, it restricts the user from copying the CD. And actually, the CD itself doesn't really care if it's copied, so the cd itself is not "protected" in any way. It provides some minimal protection to the rights owner from unauthorized copies (which are usually, but not necessarily illegal - c.f fair use).
Now, which terminology is more appropriate - that which describes the situation for essentially everyone involved (e.g. a billion people) or the rights holder (essentially less than 10 "people" if you count corporations as people)?
> Digital rights management manages the rights of the IP owner. These are just as valid.
Again, they are valid from the narrow point of view of 0.001% of the population, but INVALID and IRRELEVANT from the point of view of the rest.
"Copy Restriction" and "Digital Restriction Management" are factual and actually neutral. It is what these systems do. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view.
Similarly, it wasn't mentioned here, but stallman likes to refer to "Intellectual Property" as "Imaginary Property", which is also factual. I have yet to adopt this one, but I will only really accept "Intellectual Property" as property when it is taxed like property.
> Copy protection protects CDs from being copied.
The contention is of course with the word "protection." It implies that copying is a bad thing and that preventing copying is protection. It's a loaded word, even if in general use. Replacing with "restriction" challenges this this notion with a word loaded in the opposite direction.
> Digital rights management manages the rights of the IP owner.
The assumption here is that the restrictions on use are in fact "rights of the IP owner." There is no a priori reason that there should be. In fact IP rights are a part of law and public policy. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be; obviously Stallman and beagle3 disagree.
If someone in 1984 had started coining alternative terms the way stallman does, the amount of thoughtcrimes would skyrocket.
Sorry, could not resist.
All HN useds already realize this. If this by it self is a reason not to use a service, very few sites can be used.
And please don't propagate the false notion that Facebook sell personal information.
However, I did adopt Stallman's "Copy Restriction" (instead of "Copy Protection") and "Digital Restriction Management" (instead of "Digital Right Management") - because they are a much better description of what the concept actually is for 99% of the people.
I started doing this after I told someone that I will not buy a Depeche Mode CD I wanted and was holding in my hand in the store, because it has copy protection; they looked at me completely puzzled, asking "Why wouldn't you want your copy to be protected?", and a little more inquiry revealed that they believed it was a somehow more robust (by virtue of being "protected") than non-copy protected CDs.
Language is a very potent medium of control. You are, indeed, used by facebook when you interact with it, and introducing it into the language is a way to bring it to the surface. He's not using "useds" to be clever. He's bringing it to the surface. It might look stupid to you, but I assure you that you are not immune to this kind of bias (and neither am I). I know that's why he does that, because I've heard him personally explain that when attending one of his talks.
In fact, if you look at the works of Kahenman & Tversky, you see that equivalent questions worded differently get opposite responses from people who we expect to know better (e.g. doctors, pilots, ...).
Stallman is basically trying to counter the (essentially unlimited) bias that the media has against what he believes, and I don't know of any tool that does that better than the rhetorical device(s) he is using.