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Copyright or copywrong

One of ACTA's key aims is to make copyright and patent law even more Draconian, with criminal as well as civil penalties for infraction. It also seeks to mandate the introduction of “three strikes and you're out” for alleged copyright infringement in all countries that sign up to the treaty. Of course, this won't achieve its stated goals of reducing unauthorised sharing of copyright materials, but politicians don't understand this, and will never grasp the serious negative consequences that will flow from ACTA – notably for free software - unless enough concerned citizens make representations to them. That's less like to happen if the former are happy, passive consumers of iPad-mediated content, because they are almost completely insulated from the underlying issues, and have in any case been trained by the benevolent dictator, Apple, to accept top-down, “we know best” systems of control.

So in this sense, the FSF is correct when it writes:

"Attention needs to be paid to the computing infrastructure our society is becoming dependent upon. This past year, we have seen how human rights and democracy protesters can have the technology they use turned against them by the corporations who supply the products and services they rely on. Your computer should be yours to control. By imposing such restrictions on users, Steve Jobs is building a legacy that endangers our freedom for his profits," said FSF executive director Peter Brown.

But the issue turns out to be much wider than just DRM or even being in control of your computer: it's about having a digitally-literate electorate that is able to make informed decisions about key political questions. In this respect, the iPad threatens to become the iOpium of the People.

Of course, one of the reasons why Steve Jobs' digital drug is so appealing is that computing has, indeed, done a poor job of providing tools that ordinary people can use. Much of the blame can be laid at the door of Microsoft, whose poorly-written software, with its illogical interface (going to the “Start” menu to close the system down, etc.), its unending, crippling vulnerabilities, and its recurrent Blue Screens of Death, have all exposed users to the very worst coding practice, and made them hungry for anything even vaguely better.

But free software must take some of the blame too. After all, the GNU project is 25 years old, and yet we still don't have a free desktop system that is even as good as Windows, let alone Apple's indubitably more polished approach. Call it arrogance, call it incompetence, it is, in any case, an undeniable failure.

And so, as iPad sales begin to take off, and the general population begins to warm to this seductively simple way of doing “real work”, the free software community must take the opportunity to re-evaluate its work and priorities. For example, there is still a fixation on bringing about the “Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop”: but if the aim is to conquer the mass market, perhaps we should instead be striving for the “Year of the GNU/Linux Tablet”, and forget about the desktop.

Fortunately, work is already going on in this area, notably around Android. And we know that there will be a number of Android tablets coming out in the next few months that could be free (or at least potentially more free) alternatives to the iPad. But the big problem with Android is that, despite its free software underpinnings, there's precious little in the way of open source at the upper levels. A priority, then, would be for developers to start working on free software apps for Android, since these can be easily adapted for tablet systems as they appear. Similarly, both GNOME and KDE might usefully start redirecting more of their effort to designing interfaces for the tablet, rather than for the desktop.

In fact, we might usefully see the iPad as not just a threat, but also something of a boon for open source. Just as Internet Explorer grew flabby in the absence of any viable competition, and has improved enormously under the impact of the upstart Firefox, so a free software world that is overly inward-looking, and that has become even a little complacent in the light of its growing successes, might receive a similarly salutary jolt from the dangerous, controlled perfection of the Apple iPad.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca. For other feature articles by Glyn Moody, please see the archive.

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