Eben Moglen

“ The law of Intellectual Property was the law of rights of distributors, who oppressed producers by the alienation of the production from those who made and used it. We reverse that process and eliminate the law of Intellectual Property by eliminating distributors.
We eliminate distributors, because the technology of human society at the beginning of the twenty first century makes distribution child's play. ”

“ Unfreedom is nasty. That’s what we think, OK? We think unfreedom is nasty. We think that technology can be used to help freedom and to inhibit unfreedom, but we don’t think it’s magic wand.
I will grant you the problem, OK? There’s no question about it. Dictatorship in the 21st century needs Mr. Gates, just like Disney needs Mr. Gates. A monopoly of technology is a very strong assistance, but don’t think of it as a big country/little country problem. ”

“ The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay? ”

“ But I mention it here, because for all of us, awareness has long since come to full heat, that without collaboration there is no success – that the purpose of the technology is to make us peers, to give us ways of communicating with one another on terms of quality, and helpfulness, and mutuality, and sharing. That’s what we use the technology for, at the first level of generality, because that’s all we need. People share time, people share money, people share skill, people share passion, and out of that we make a better world. ”

“ We have battles about culture, we have battles about software, we have battles about bandwidth. But we have come far enough that the tools of those confrontations now favor us. Time’s on our side. And the building of the infrastructure for 21st century freedom that we need is an infrastructure we can build. ”

“ My work, and the lawyers who work with me at the Software Freedom Law Center, is about making those commons effective for everybody.
The businesses may well see us as people who take care of the geese that laid golden eggs. The hackers don’t think of themselves as geese, and they don’t care whether the eggs are gold, they just care whether they work great. They want to be taken care of, because they don’t trust businesses for the very same reasons that businesses don’t trust one another; the odd thing is, you can all trust the hackers. ”

“ Those who control computer programs control who gets everything.
We say, computer programs, then, must be made by everybody, for everybody, in the interests of everybody.
That's governments for the people, of the people, by the people.
That's the free software movement. "Here, we made this, would you like some? Take it. It's free."
What that does it to turn the network into a distribution system that behaves according to populist principles.
At the moment that we do this work, the network, as a system for the control of everybody, collapses. ”

“ To do that, then, we begin, at the end of the 20th century, to imagine reversing the long and complicated relationship between the human race and the idea that knowledge is something that you own. We reverse that course by beginning, once again, to treat – unsparingly and without any degree of forgiveness for the alternative – we begin to treat knowledge as a thing that must be shared in order to be valuable. ”

“ What we do have at the moment is the opportunity for a political insistence upon the importance of the commons. We have a great opportunity which lies in the inevitable populist rising of annoyance, then irritation, then anger, at what has happened to the society in which we were all living in relative safety and prosperity only a few years ago. We have an opportunity to explain to people that too much ownership, and too much leverage, and too much exclusivity was the prevailing justification for and also the prevailing reason that what happened, happened. ”

“ Murdoch and whichever one of his children wants to inherit the business, because there’s less or no business to inherit, precisely because MySpace is the way of the future.
Nothing will save the recording industry now, and even the recording industry knows it. What won’t save them won’t save them because musicians have begun to desert, which was always the problem, it was never that the audience would steal, it was that the musicians would escape slavery, and the deenslavement of the musicians is now becoming a reality. ”

“ And – as many of you, in the work you do, are acutely conscious – we have as many children with us now as there were human beings in the generations that preceded our own. All of them, put together. That means we are either about to throw away as many human brains as have ever been thrown away in the whole history of the human race, or we’re about to reverse the flow at the moment where it will do the most good.
This is the context within which we have begun to use technology ourselves in our own lives in a slightly different way. ”

“ I thought, in other words, in the mid‐’90s when it was possible to imagine Stallman’s victory and software being everywhere free to share, that the next round would be a long and complicated war against the owners of culture, terminating some time in the 2020s, only to precipitate the next and most problematic of all confrontations over the allocation of bandwidth in society in which the broadcasters on one hand and the telecoms operators on the other would be the overwhelmingly powerful adversaries, against whom we had to run our campaigns. ”

“ Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.
So we live in a political economy in which the commitment to the freedom of the software is the beginning of a commitment to freedom of autonomy at the end points – that would mean you, you’re an end point. You’re a productive end point, as well as a consuming end point, but you’re an end point, unless you’re a network operator, in which case, please leave now. ”

“ We repurpose material, we repurpose profit, we repurpose people’s willingness to work, we repurpose the instinct to assist. We are the sector of the economy that really understands what recycling is about. And if you take our ability to repurpose, and you add to it knowledge which is made by sharing, you create assets that would otherwise be wasted, and you drive those assets towards making it possible for everyone to learn. ”

“ We will have bumped off a lot of powerful and nasty businesses. We will have changed very substantially the structure of three of the 20th century’s dominant industries. We will have restored competition to places where oligopoly if not monopoly was the rule, we will have created a lot of openness, and we will have built a lot of power, and I hope that we will be confident and calm and reasonable as we go about the job of reconstructing the net ten years from now so that it supports freedom against the state as firmly as it supports freedom against Murdoch. ”

“ I’m one of the hackers – of the technical nature, not the law nature – of the system administrator breed, and we don’t make code, we just make sure that the machines that run the free code keep running so that the coders can, you know, keep writing it. But, it’s funny to me; in the technical world, people really like to demonize Microsoft, but it’s a lot of you know, “Who cares, their software has nothing to do with what I do, so they’re not really a part...”, but I always wondered, what would Microsoft call their Linux distribution? ”

“ It is what we tell everybody else a matter of acting locally, and thinking globally – within our own space, just where we live – in enabling the people who do good to use technology more effectively for all the things that must be done, from raising the money to auditing the books, delivering the services, making the plans, everywhere we operate, we can be pushing the great rock uphill. ”

“ The free software revolution is a revolution in which a bunch of technically sophisticated people, you know, I needn’t, I’m not being deprecatory when I say that you’re different from most other people, it was an acquired taste, a minority skill; it remains something which most of the people out there can’t possibly grasp when you try and tell it to them your way. And the sharing of culture without permission, though it seems like child’s play to children, as you know it doesn’t seem like anything except child’s play to adults. ”

“ Free software is embedded irremovably in the belly of all of the developed societies in all of everything they do. It’s not exclusively embedded there, but even the monopolists, which is the deepest funded and most powerful technological entity in the history of human beings, can no longer remove the free commons from the network. ”

“ So, we’re not just the non-profit sector. We’re the real breeding house of the greatest of technologies. We’re the place where the research can really be done. We’re the place where we can actually attend to what we would do if we didn’t have to make money doing it, right? That’s what we do all the time, that’s every day. We don’t want to think of ourselves as where the great technology comes from ”

“ But the most important part of the story is the bandwidth wars. And the reason that that is so important is it was politically the toughest nut to crack in the beginning, and is now in some ways the easiest nut to crack at the end. Business will take care of itself. Enterprise is leaving the telecom system because there’s money in it for them to do so. What we have on our side is all those wireless routers. What we have on our side is the low cost of mesh. What we have on our side is the extraordinary economic change that makes infrastructure recomposition an easy game for us to play. ”

“ But one of the things to keep in mind is that if what the network does is it centralizes services, and those services are things you haven’t got a right to copy, modify, understand, and share, then what has happened is that the effort at unfreedom has moved from the person who monopolized software, to the person who was merely the dominant provider of services. That’s not exactly the correct outcome, either. Whether it is a moral outcome depends upon whether the data miner can figure out any reason why it does not want every Einstein to learn physics. ”

“ And one of the paths that we can go – one of the paths that we can take in our lives – is to use our intelligence to vaporize all the machines around us, and leave ourselves with the thinnest possible client and the thickest possible cloud. There can’t be anybody here who isn’t at least partly attracted by that – it would be so nice to get away from all the stuff one has to do, and let somebody else do it. ”

“ Yeah, you can do that, but you would want to ask whether, if an artist has experienced this fully, that will be her next thought.
Look, the 20th century’s structure was for artists to believe that nobody cared enough about art to pay for it voluntarily. 20th century political economy said: “If you don’t force them, you will starve.” From a Marxist point of view, this is just another way of making workers afraid of one another more than they are of the boss, right? Why did we take the view in the 20th century that people who love culture won’t pay for it unless you put a gun to their head? ”

“ If everybody has the right to understand how software works, copy it, modify it, and change it, then everybody will be able to affect the performance of the network as it affects them. Sure, not everybody will be a hacker who takes it apart and rewrites it and puts it back the way she would like it to be, but everybody will be able to benefit from everybody else’s experiments and improvements – the network will be a place of science. ”

“ Artists have never lived by coercion. It was somebody else who imposed the idea of coercion on you. Now you don’t need it anymore, isn’t it nice to get out of the morally compromised position in which art temporarily survived in mass society, not on the goodwill of individual patrons, or on the goodwill of a mass of lovers, but rather in this rather uneasy position of ‘I will give you the music or I will shoot you.’? ”

“ What we need to do, then, is to ask ourselves: “How much more sharing can we do?” without too much concern about whether it will hurt us, which it won’t. In our work, from day to day, as we begin to design technology we need – if we all put our hearts and minds to it, you know we could be done replacing Raiser’s Edge in six months – [Applause] if we did put our hearts and minds to it, we could be showing everybody we interact with who has a dead computer somewhere – which they all do, everybody we interact with does – we could be showing them that it isn’t waste, it’s useful material. ”

“ As you begin to go through those questions, as you begin to attach yourself to what the commons can do for you, remember to keep your congressman informed about what you need. Remember that everybody has to understand the extent to which the commons economy is now what you are resting the good things in your lives on. Because, people need to know what it is that really causes prosperity. ”

“ I go to the businesses and I say: “When are you planning to allow on the network, in your business, machines that have software in it you can’t read, can’t control, can’t modify and which phones home to people on the network in ways you can’t read?” ”

“ If you think about the technologies you use, and recommend, and need, and evaluate, and consider, and you begin in your mind to categorize them as about sharing and community and collaboration, or about platforms and profit, you very readily see how easily the lumps can be differentiated, one from the other, and you can begin to think about which heaps you’re built on. ”

“ The other thing of which the network is constituted is switches. Switches are what determine who gets what, where, when, how and how much they pay for it. Switches are the things which determine which signals in the net go where, and why. Switches are computers, and they run by code, and, as my dear friend and colleague Larry Lessig pointed out in his first brilliant book “Code”, they are capable of imitating law, because they create reality. They determine who gets what, and in determining who gets what and at what price they determine access to knowledge and therefore power. ”