Eben Moglen

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If those assumptions are wrong for you, the technology is wrong for you – maybe subtly, maybe seriously, but unquestionably wrong for you. Because you need to collaborate, and the technologist needs the platform to be sticky. To be sure, we benefit now, very largely, from cooperation with businesses who have realized that a sticky platform isn’t necessarily their greatest help. The more elite the business, and the further it is from contact with ordinary human beings, the more likely it is to have begun to experience the benefits of sharing and collaborating in our mode. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What I think is really interesting is not that we just talk to each other all the time, which we do, which is fantastic, but that this community has such broad representation, and that we all get to play pretty nicely together regardless of where we come from or what we’re trying to do. That spirit of sharing has been something that really drives the community, whether you are... So, you know, in this community we have Blackbaud and Convio, we have Microsoft and open source, we have all these players here in this space, and that’s something that I think contributes to our success. ”

“ The university considers it to be a waste of time and trouble to bother having a program to sell used hardware to the workers who use it – the only efficient thing to do is throw it away. And so it goes off into the e-waste stream somewhere, and undoubtedly, though we don’t mean to do it, some of it ends up somewhere in the world being disassembled by a child who does not know that some of it is poisonous.
In the system of owned knowledge more children will harm themselves by disassembling e-waste than will be given the opportunity to change the operating system. ”

“ And then I found myself – for some other project entirely, in another side of my life – reading Rosa Luxemburg and there in the collected papers of Rosa Luxemburg, in volume 5, was a little essay on capitalism and technology, and it said “profit motive makes lousy technology, because when you have to choose between making a profit and making good technology, you make the profit, and in a world of socialism the technology would advance at a rate that would make capitalism seem like child’s play.” And I thought: “Sharing is better than owning.” ”

“ In the four and a half years that my colleagues and I have been practicing together we have formed more than sixteen non-profits, and we have a client list of about 30 or so non-profit organizations, that we have assisted in one way or another. So we are servants of the community, and it’s a pleasure to be here this morning in the community in which I belong.
The most serious problems that confront humanity are about human beings and their intelligence, which oft goes agley, as Robert Burns told us, no matter how good the plans may be. ”

“ I mean, I can’t; in my judgement, I’m not preserving privilege at all if I am letting other people’s computers read the data generated in the course of my talking to my clients.
We are going to have to address some issues of social responsibility not being addressed by industrial operations. And I don’t mean by this to say that Google is careless – Google is not careless. Google thinks very carefully, and wants to do the right thing. But it’s not okay to just say “Well, Google wants to do the right thing”, we have to do the right thing ourselves, as a community. ”

“ Our principles, our objectives, our dreams, and our daily needs all coincide. They point us in the same direction: Could we make the very technology we use generate the energy which educates the world? ”

“ To live embedded in a community in the rest of your life and explain to people what’s going on there, and have them care for you and look after you and pay you? Or would you like to work for Rupert Murdoch?
“Well, we’d like to work for Rupert Murdoch ’cause the pay is steady.”, you know? “Could we really rely on a community to pay us adequately?” I don’t know, there are a lot of guys who had great white-collar careers wondering if they were going to get a General Motors pension after all. ”

“ Out there in the industry – where our colleagues who must make profits, as well as improvements, live – collaboration is not necessarily actually the goal. The architecture of technology in the past 20 years has largely been about the making of platforms rather than communities. You know what platforms are; platforms are sticky things – it’s difficult to fall off. Once you’re in, your can’t get out. Once you buy the music player, you have to buy the headphones from the same guy, ’cause the guy has put the controls for the music player in the headphones, just to keep you on the platform. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The primary question I have about the knowledge that might be shared is: “Might Einstein use it to learn physics, if he were a child in Trivandrum?” That is to say, the knowledge that can best be shared is the knowledge that helps minds to grow. Knowledge that ought not be shared is knowledge which would give someone power or leverage over a mind that it might be unfair to exercise.
I appreciate Google products very much. They are very clever. ”

“ Law school, where I spend a lot of my time, is an awkward sort of place, because people compete there, harshly, to learn how to do jobs which are done by collaborating. I’ve been a solo practitioner much of my life, but one of the things I love about the Software Freedom Law Center, and one of the reasons that I made it, is that I don’t have to practice alone. ”

“ Apple and Google, you can distinguish one from another, but you can say that it isn’t profit that’s the problem, or money that’s the problem, it’s the love of money, right? Radix malorum est cupiditas. The problem of Apple is selfishness, and the selfishness is Steve’s. The problem of Google is not that. The problem of Google is that in order to do the work it’s going to do to make the money it’s going to do, it wants to know what’s inside the head of everybody on Earth. ”

“ Among the reasons that 20th century civilization made such little progress – we do, you know, we still throw away almost all the brains – the reason we made such little progress is largely that we treated knowledge as a thing that could be owned, and therefore need be purchased. ”

“ Are more children able to learn now? Is knowledge less owned, more accessible to those who cannot pay, now?” And we will derive benefit beyond calculation from all those human beings whom we will enable to cooperate with us.
I’m not breaking you any news when I mention that capitalism is having a little trouble lately. [Laughter] I’m not breaking any news to you when I say that the trouble it is having is the trouble that it has to have because it has to tell people that they must pursue the benefit of ownership at the expense of the sustainability of others. ”

“ You have only a few last lines to cut with the world of owned knowledge, and you will have attained not merely intellectual self-sufficiency, but the actual capacity to make knowledge easier for people all over the world to acquire, and you will have begun educating everyone and you will have eased the human tendency to throw away all the brains. ”

“ We are either helping to make knowledge something which can only be shared, or we are helping to continue knowledge as a thing that can be owned. Those who must turn a profit must experience a difficult choice, but we shouldn’t have any conflict at all. ”

“ But it’s a bias – we fall, always, in the direction of technology of sharing, collaboration, and community. We fall, always, in the direction away from technology of platforms and profits. This is no surprise, and it’s not a provocative recommendation, in my judgement – it’s simply being who we are. We will experience great advantages, but we will not even live to see the greatest advantages we are creating by doing so. Because the real question that we are agitating at the bottom when we do that is: “Are more Einsteins learning physics now? ”

“ And working for Rupert Murdoch doesn’t really look all that good, you know, ’cause he’s Rupert Murdoch, [Laughter] and he’s in charge.
So, I think that the answers are evolving out of the technologies of sharing; I do believe that. I think the way that journalism is going to change is by getting closer to the community, not further away; It’s another disintermediation going on, and the folks being disintermediated are just as ugly as the intermediaries usually are, the only thing is: they own the media and they make themselves look pretty. And they want us to be very sad because they’re dying. ”

“ My income, too, depends upon the idea that knowledge is owned to some extent. But I like to think I’m paid to teach, not to hide the ball. I like to think it’s okay for me to say everything I know to anyone who needs it. ”

“ We are almost never to be found on the side of exclusion, but we do business with exclusion constantly. And often on terms with which we would not be so comfortable, if the harm were more immediate. We deal with the owners of knowledge businesses with far more ease in our hearts than we deal with the owners of tobacco businesses or petroleum businesses. ”

“ We want to create change, in how we think about how our data is protected, who gets to see our data, you know, all that kind of stuff. One way of making sure your data’s protected is just opting out of the system. But does opting out help put the pressure on Google to change the way that they behave? ”

“ If we could feed everybody by cooking one breakfast and pressing a button, what would the case be, what would the argument be, for charging people more for food than everyone could pay? Of course, we can’t just cook one breakfast and press a button, but we can make one operating system and press a button. ”

“ Because we are, still, not like everybody in the world, and when everybody in the world is surrounded by those machines, it will make a whole lot of difference how we used them; whether we used them to make knowledge freer, or whether we used them to increase privilege at the expense of equality. ”

“ How do you feel if the National Security Agency is using computers to read all the e-mail just for the purpose of preventing terrorism? For me, that’s not an acceptable arrangement anymore than it was 18 years ago when I went to work for Phil Zimmermann on PGP.
We need to ask ourselves whether we don’t at the moment have tools in our hands, in our offices, on our desks, for improving the world that we shouldn’t give up until we finish the job, and we don’t have much left to do. All we have to do is use the stuff that we can share. ”