I would point out that the existence of copyright for books means that some courses of action which do not harm anybody in the senses listed are nonetheless illegal, but Stallman doesn’t argue against copyright for books with anything like the vehemence he does for software.

The “freedom” thing, as the FSF argues it, is not honest, IMO. They resolutely fail to admit that the individual user of the BSD- or MIT-licensed software has more freedom than the user of the GPL. That the user can turn that freedom to ends that are not what the FSF would like, well, something similar has always been the consequence of actual freedom. If you’re a country and you open your borders, you run the risk of your best and brightest leaving to earn more money elsewhere; if you end prohibition of alcohol and gambling, you run more risk of having inveterate gamblers and alcoholics in your population.

Now, yes, the freedom of which the GPL deprives the user should be balanced against the freedom it grants; but they don’t even start. Whence, IMO, the dishonesty.

I’m going to shut up on this now, because I’ve thought it through already to my satisfaction, and I really dislike trying to get into Stallman’s frame of mind, both in reading his opinions on society and his Lisp and emacs documentation. I find him inarticulate, unclear and so often just wrong (“Of course C-h should be the primary documented way to invoke help! What, you say that every terminal in the world sends C-h for backspace? Then every terminal in the world should change! C-h for help makes perfect sense!”) that the effort versus the benefit rarely works out.

But, yeah, I accept that my example was badly chosen. I suppose it’s a symptom of my having talked about it with a limited number of people, so my appreciation of how other people understand it is not that complete.