From a ‘Copyright and Globalisation’ talk at MIT by Richard Stallman:
QUESTION: How would you really expect to implement this compromise copyright system under the chokehold of corporate interests on American politicians due to their campaign-finance system?
STALLMAN: It beats me. I wish I knew. It’s a terribly hard problem. If I knew how to solve that problem, I would solve it and nothing in the world could make me prouder.
QUESTION:. How do you fight the corporate control? Because when you look at these sums of money going into corporate lobbying in the court case, it is tremendous. I think the DECS case that you’re talking about is costing something like a million-and-a-half dollars on the defense side. Lord knows what it’s costing on the corporate side. Do you have any idea how to deal with these huge sums of money?
STALLMAN: I have a suggestion. If I were to suggest totally boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion. They might consider it too radical. So I would like to make a slightly different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end, and that is, don’t go to a movie unless you have some substantial reason to think it’s good. Now this will lead in practice to almost the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies. In extension, it’s almost the same but, in intention, it’s very different. Now I’ve noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they think the movies are good. So if you change that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason to think it’s good, you’ll take away a lot of their money.