Recipes give a good example. Recipes, like programs, are functional objects: you use them to get a job done. So it's not a coincidence that the way we want to treat software is like the way we treat recipes--we use them in similar ways. And there are other kinds of functional works--dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, textbooks--all of which we use to get some job done, find out what a word means, find out the basic facts on some country or place or person or thing, learn a subject. For all these various functional works, the same issues apply. The same freedoms should be available. You should be free to copy and redistribute and to modify dictionaries, textbooks, encyclopedias, and I'm happy to say that a lot of work is going on now to extend the idea of free software to those areas. A few years ago I proposed a way of developing a free encyclopedia. People have been proposing free encyclopedias for years. Generally those projects got bogged down in planning the design of things, so I said: Forget designing it--just ask people to write some articles. And it got started. There is even a business working on developing articles of a free encyclopedia. In addition, there is an entirely public-contributed free encyclopedia called "Wikipedia", and together it looks like the job of a free encyclopedia is going to be done much sooner than I ever believed it would. I was thinking in 10 or 20years it might get done. Now it's going so fast I think we pretty soon will have it. Then it will just be a matter of finding the volunteers to translate it into all the languages of the world. There are some free dictionary projects, too. I believe there is a free Spanish dictionary project. There is a free dictionary project for translation between various languages of India, and there is a free dictionary of the Walloon language, which is the partly forgotten native language of half of Belgium, to a large extent replaced by French, which is similar to it. But now there is a free dictionary of Walloon and I think there wasn't really an available dictionary of Walloon before that. Walloon is actually used on computers now, thanks to free software, or so they tell me. These pilot projects show that it's feasible to develop dictionaries through a free-software-type approach. I hope to see some day a free English dictionary. I hope you will some day have a free Japanese dictionary, because every computer should have access to free dictionaries for whatever languages the user wants to use. Free textbooks are beginning as well. I recently found out about a book entitled How To Think Like A Computer Scientist--at least I think that's the title, my memory is not what it was once-which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License, the license that we use for manuals for the GNU system, and he is now looking for a publisher for this. Interestingly enough, commercial publishers are already publishing books under free documentation licenses and selling copies in all the usual ways, and the authors are getting paid by the publishers in the usual ways. Beyond that, can these ideas go any further? When we go outside the domain of functional works, we get to works that serve totally different purposes. For instance, there are scientific papers and memoirs and essays whose purpose is to say what certain people saw or think or believe. That's very different from a functional work. I don't think it's proper to modify these works whose purpose is to show what certain people thought. And then there are the aesthetic works which raise a very difficult question about modification because, on the one hand, in some cases they are works of great artistry and you can argue that they would be degraded if they are changed. But often they are just made to make money, anyway, and there is no particular high art in them, and sometimes other people can then improve them. I heard recently about a film called Star Wars, the Phantom Edit. Yes, that's the Phantom Edit. Somebody obtained a copy of Star Wars, the Phantom Menace, and edited it himself, rearranging parts and deleting parts, and people who have seen this say that it's better than the original. This is circulating underground, of course, because it's illegal. But this joins some other examples of the folk process to show that modifying works that are artistic or entertaining can be a useful thing for society, contribute to the cultural richness of society, and that's a very powerful argument that it should be allowed. So what does this imply for systems such as copyright that are designed to prohibit people from sharing and modifying these works? Well, at the very least, we must eliminate that part of copyright that prohibits the non-commercial redistribution. We must never tell people in society that they are forbidden to share with their neighbors. If we do that we poison the spirit of goodwill that society depends on. We can't afford that. But what about other kinds of use, modification or commercial redistribution? In the field of software and for other functional works, we see that permitting everyone to distribute modified versions, even to commercially redistribute them and sell them, is vital because those are important ways these works are used. If people are unable to use a work in those ways, it can't really be used in our community--it's crippled. That's why in a criterion for free software we insist that everyone must have the freedom to sell copies of the program, with or without modification. For other kinds of works, perhaps it's okay to have copyright limiting commercial use of the work. It's a subject I haven't fully finished thinking about myself, but it's one that I hope you will think about. Thank you.