Eben Moglen

“ 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. ”

“ 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.’? ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Free software, in other words, is to the cultural system of creation and distribution the rules that refuse to be made in a user‐disabling fashion. They are the rules of agility in the market or in society, and they are the rules of non‐exclusivity in control of cultural distribution.
A system of non‐exclusivity in the making and implementing of the rules for cultural distribution also touches on a second great phenomenon in 21st century culture. The replacement of the analog by the digital is also the replacement of the consumer by the “prosumer”. ”

“ Creative Commons is an experiment in what to do with a teachable moment, on the global scale. Larry was entirely right in believing that a window was opening within which the creative populations around the world could be asked to rethink the ownership of culture and ideas. And Creative Commons is a non‐hierarchical, or weakly hierarchical, way of trying to build education on that question for the world’s creators. ”

“ So, what I want, then, to say about the software layer is that it begins to have the power over the political economy of culture that it needs to have in order to make real changes. When Mr. Murdoch has to rush out and buy MySpace, in order to sustain the profitability of his media empire, you know that something very important has happened. MySpace is to media consumption the prosumer revolution made big, right? What we are watching is the world’s greatest believer in the producer/consumer distinction buying prosumer properties ’cause that’s where the profits is in the next 10 years. ”

“ Government uses its coercive power to lock down the whole network from the center to the edge. And the other is that capitalism negotiates its way to a disempowerment of users, right? All the way from the center to the edge, all businesses get together and they make a deal that sells you out. The problem with that is that there’s always some business that’s got more stake in your being happy with them than Disney’s being happy with them. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The wire line telephone companies who tend to be bankrupt in the places where the copper is are busy going around the world selling other people low quality digital cell phone service in which a third of their calls get dropped and one half can’t be heard on the ones that don’t drop, because that’s the way they’re trying to copper, excuse me, their bets in a world where their core businesses are failing. If Deutsche Telekom were able to make money selling wire line telephone service to Germans, they wouldn’t be quite so determined to go around the world imitating T‐Mobile all the time, right? ”

“ So, with that in mind then, what we have is a system in which a series of private parties who have used immense amounts of power over culture, over bandwidth, over communications, in the course of the 20th century are beginning to find themselves all simultaneously under threat from the free layer of the net. ”

“ Those of you who actually do go to movie theaters will notice that one of the routines of movie going is now MPAA propaganda in the form of two and three minute shorts with guys who work in non‐talent roles in the movie industry, so a set painter earnestly adjures you not to share movies, because his livelihood will be destroyed if the movie business fails. One wonders whether the set painter’s concern for the continuity of his livelihood has more to do with his fear that if he doesn’t appear in the propaganda he’ll be fired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To a greater extent, then, the 20th century experiment with photographic prosumption, which I suppose we would call the Brownie camera, the whole Kodak experiment in populist photography. The digital photography revolution which makes the camera disappear, the darkroom disappear, the photo album disappear. It’s all virtual, right? it all exists solely in the sense that pretty much anywhere a solvent human being in one of the developed societies is, is a place where photographs can be taken, and everywhere anybody is, is a place where photographs can be viewed. ”

“ I would point out that what the recording companies and the movie companies now want to do on university campuses is essentially what the spooks and the cops want to do in the civil society network as a whole. Universities have gone from being the place where a free speech movement might be conducted, for the dramatization benefits that it would have on society at large, to the actual front lines of the struggle over how much snooping is acceptable and who should be allowed to conduct it. ”

“ I, as a man with an opinion, have constantly taken the view that Creative Commons should be very careful not to open up a space to its left that would be occupied by more extreme or more uncompromising positions. ”

“ Images, then, become truly part of the ordinary give and take of social life, they enable vast business models that never existed in the age of consumption photography. The digital camera itself has sparked hundreds of business models or community of heirs models, or structures of organization that nobody had ever thought of, and that weren’t reachable in social space before the digital camera, but which are now, well, not to be too cliché about it, MySpace. ”

“ Software comes to be like public roadways or drinking water, a factor of production which is socialized. Which nobody has to pay for completely because everybody shares the cost of its production, and it enables various forms of economic activity that depend on the lowering of friction. ”

“ We are, in other words, watching as the self‐assembled wireless net begins to cooperate thickly enough that even infrastructure builders may not have much work left to do. Combine that with ubiquitous SIP soft phones inside your PDAs, Internet tablets, laptops. Combine that with the reluctance of most people in the young generation to buy wire line telephone service anymore, and there’s a perfect storm being set up for the bandwidth merchants. ”

“ So, we find ourselves now watching the question of property problematized by the very same bozos who want to use that conception of property to interfere with the technologies of freedom, who want to see our attempt to build a network that self‐assembles in a prosumer basis where software is thing we make and share, rather than something we consume, who want to interfere with that structure for reasons of support of an ideology which is already perishing on all the fronts more or less simultaneously. ”

“ When PBX and voice switching and all the pieces of intellect necessary to run a telephone system can be run on commodity white box hardware at no cost, and bandwidth can be bought in bulk by buyers with deep enough pockets to buy as much backbone time as they want, the telecommunications operators of the world are in a terrible jam. ”

“ We make free software that runs on every device in the world, runs better, cheaper, faster, for everybody on everything, and which is the only thing that can be relied upon by engineers to do that job with no muss, no fuss, at a unit price of zero. ”

“ The freeing of the video culture is a much more complex economically difficult process, and the movie industry remains a better player. But they are doing some of our work for us, they have pissed off every movie viewer in North America with constant propagandizing in the theater, a mistake that they will pay large for when the time comes, and which they are still so proud of that they can’t stop themselves from doing it. ”

“ The digital cameras created a hundred business models, none of which could have been defined very well in the Kodak age of film photography. Services, yes, support, yes, training, yes, But also things whose name it wouldn’t be quite so easy to express, like combined artistic affiliation, or improved—or at any rate, altered—dating, or... Right?
So, the business model is in some sense recently become part of the infrastructure and life goes on.
We make software into a thing which is just knowledge, like arithmetic. Nobody pays for arithmetic by the unit. ”

“ I built a law firm last spring for the first time in my life, I’ve always been a solo, having a law firm was an unusual thing for me, and when we started the Software Freedom Law Center Bradley Kuhn and I decided that we would do voice over IP as the primary telephone system of this law firm and that we would build it on bare metal using free software only, just to see how easy it would be, and it was shockingly easy, and profoundly good. ”

“ If you walk away for 10 years, leaving rules on the table, that allow movie companies to determine what products you make and how we use them, when 15 years have gone by you’re not going to want to live in that world, let’s do something now. ”

“ But in any of those ways, the relationship between media and state presupposed that common property was going to remain anything but sharable, that the bulk of it would be controlled by government agencies, some of them captured, some of them not, and that those who benefited from that form of crony capitalism or state socialism or whatever you care to call it, would be long term in possession of the power to control human communications. ”

“ What is currently happening is that commodity telecom switching is forcing the operators out of business, and they know it. The largest enterprises leave first. Which is a problem, because the largest enterprises have always paid, per unit of telecoms, the highest price in the system.
Within a very short period of time all the world’s major operators, Verizon, SBC, the Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, BT, all of them will be watching as business gets out of the business of buying telecoms from them. ”

“ We will protect our way of making software against those ways of making unfreedom. We will say only that the right to tinker has to be protected against hardware that resists it. I think that is both legitimately the scope of a free software license in everybody’s view, and also sufficient for the purpose. ”

“ Where there is a great deal of sharing, remix, mashup, a great deal of do‐it‐yourself recombination, very little respect for “the integrity of the work”—a concept which is now revealed largely to be the publisher’s right to fend off everybody else—and where, after all, we have recognized, production for the market got so ruthless and so cynical that in fact we can no longer tell whether it is a 19 year old who has plagiarized the novel, or just the hidden ghost writers working for her book packager. ”

“ Suppose we say about the 21st century political economy again in a more general way, that there’s a phenomenon by which products in 20th century economic life become services in 21st century economic life. This happens not just with respect to the stuff we do, it happens in all variety of ways. Jeremy Rifkin wrote as usual an insightful if somewhat tendentious book on the subject and then went off to do something else.
The problem of the service as opposed to the product, it’s the product company. Like, say, Microsoft, or Verizon. ”

“ When we have gotten to the point where the cloud is growing faster than Verizon can pretend it isn’t there, it’s gonna be the case that the bandwidth part of our problem will be hit from above by businesses deserting pay‐per‐service telecoms, and the community building mesh clouds, both at the same time.
We can do parts of both jobs. In our day lives we do know enterprises that need to get out of the telephone system. ”