Back in the early days of the internet, before the internet was the internet, in fact,

before apps and smartphones, before the worldwide web, internet in fact before apps and smartphones before the worldwide

web before modern email there was arpinet and usnet one of the denizens of these progenitor

e-spaces which were relegated at the time to mostly academics and scientists because of both

the knowledge and the infrastructural requirements

to access them, was a man commonly referred to as RMS, which were his initials and his online

username. His actual name was Richard Stallman, and he began his computer-related career as a day job.

He got his bachelor's degree in physics,

graduating magna cum laude from Harvard in 1974, and then he became a graduate student at MIT to get his doctorate in physics. But he quit his doctorate program after a year to focus on the

work that he had been doing at the MIT Artificial Intelligence

Laboratory since he was an undergrad. That work at the AI Lab resulted in his co-publishing a

1977 paper on an artificial intelligence, truth, maintenance system, basically a system that

helps AIs figure out which data can be

safely overwritten when new information becomes available, and which data is more or less

locked in as irrefutable fact. Some of the work that he did, way back then in the 70s, is still

used today in the world of AI programming. Now arguably even more

important than his work in the world of AI are the projects that he started in his free time as part

of the 1970s and 80s computer hacker counterculture. The United States Copyright Act of 1976 made some fundamental changes to the

concept of copyright in the country during this time. It was at this moment that copyright

durations were adjusted so that they started when the creator of something died, rather than

there being a fixed period of time after

initial copyright implementation. And the concept of fair use was introduced in its early

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