Eben Moglen

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have chosen to pass laws which establish the maximum wage for a day’s work for working people at what it stood a generation ago, not even what it stood for at the onset of the black death. They have, in other words, attempted to legislate the role of the people in society backward at a time when advantageous conditions – regrettable to all, and painful mostly to ordinary people – have opened an opportunity for people to have a way towards freedom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those tens of billions of dollars in capital equipment that we made – that is, durable software capable of operating business entities – that durable capital equipment is now producing more than a hundred billion dollars in annual economic activity in the world economy, and it will produce more even though the world economy is about to shrink. That’s because the portion of the world economy which has zero marginal cost grows at the expense of that which has non-zero marginal cost, in economic hard times. ”

“ Networks are by nature commons of a particular kind, or rather of several particular kinds, and which kinds the networks are is a crucial subject. It is possible to counterfeit the phenomena of commons in a wholly-owned network completely controlled by a benevolent autocrat smart enough to pretend to be invisible, which is of course the smartest kind of autocracy, and I would suggest to you that both Facebook and the 3G cell phone networks are examples of autocratic networks under construction, in which the owners are trying to be, to one degree or another, invisible. ”

“ But whatever is the fate of free software in that regard, whatever is the outcome with respect to the technical situation, for which the free software system was built, that is merely a necessary, not a sufficient condition to the larger goals of the free software movement, and of the collection of movements and ideas that we all here are part of.
We must have a network that makes it possible for us to share. We must prevent the activity of the network in supporting sharing from being biased by those people whose primary concern is preventing sharing as competition to ownership. ”

“ Because we now live in a world where we can make enough for everybody with our own hands. Because we are capable of achieving the relationship we needed to achieve: From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need. ”

“ All the way along, there were opportunities, and we tried to take them, and often they led us to violence because we didn’t know how to avoid it, because we had to redistribute stuff with non-zero marginal cost, because we had to take a thing away from a rich man to give it to a poor man, and the rich man resented it and he fought back, and you can’t win that fight, because even when you triumph the very thing you are trying to make gets killed in the struggle. ”

“ We don’t have to be concerned about whether what we are doing in increasing the commons is harming the quality or fate of human culture, and we don’t have to waste any tears on the publishers. This is a royal funeral being thrown for itself by an aristocracy which wishes us to attend that funeral with a sense of despondency that the Sulzbergers and the Chandlers are passing from the scene. We needn’t worry about that. If it takes a loan sharking thug like Carlos Slim to keep The New York Times in business, then something is wrong at The New York Times; it’s not our problem. ”

“ That is, the network will be a place of science, not a place of power – that is, a place where somebody determines and other people must make their peace with the way it is. If you think for a moment about how often you in your daily lives have to make your peace with the way it is, with respect to something you can’t change the behavior of because the software inside it is unfree, you will understand the basic principle which was being invoked. ”

“ Something is happening which has never happened before, and it changes the outcome of the game. We are exactly where we have always been, with respect to what we want, but the methods of gaining it have changed, and they are now possible in ways that they were never possible before. And the great riddle of romantic socialist politics, the great worry of the French revolution, the great difficulty that has presented itself to every struggle for human equality since the beginning of the struggle, has been lifted in substantial part. ”

“ The real reason for all the patent threatening is in order to be able to use our features, in BSD licenced and other permissively licensed works, to gaudily decorate their own failing software for the next two product cycles, while at the same time getting paid for software they don’t make, through patent revenue requests, okay? The real goal is to get paid for software they don’t make, because software they do make is not selling at a very great advantage over the immensity of their costs. ”

“ We wanted freedom of thought, we wanted freedom of personal development, we wanted not to be held in serfdom, we wanted not to be tied to the land, we wanted not to be told that we must pursue the trade of our fathers, we wanted not to be told that we had to labor in somebody else’s demesne six days a month. ”

“ We can explain why the public consent is not available to deteriorate the network. We can explain to our friends when they decide that what they want to do is go to 4G cell phones, living inside little captive networks made by people who don’t let you bring your own software in there, and who demand that your phone work exactly the way they want it to, which means if the GPS chip inside the phone is reporting where you are to KFC every minute so it can send you food advertisements when it thinks you’ll be hungry, that you don’t have to have a phone that does that. ”

“ The arguments that were being offered against the public domain, this morning, are real arguments – it is why the free software movement doesn’t suggest just putting software in the public domain. The public domain is the most open of all open commonses, and it can be appropriated from in freedom-disrespecting ways. Margaret said that, and she’s quite right. But that’s the whole purpose of the copyleft commons.
The Wikipedia is not subject to appropriative destruction, because the Wikipedia is a copyleft entity. ”

“ If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? ”

“ And one of the best ways of being invisible is to be something that everybody knows, but you can’t do anything about it, so you might as well forget. And so we forget – as we tend to forget every day when the newspaper isn’t headlined with the 50.000 children who starved to death yesterday – we forget that one of the fundamental characteristics of human societies heretofore has been their wastage of human brains. And I go around, and I say to people “How many of the Einsteins who ever existed were permitted to learn physics?”. ”

“ This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs. ”

“ The free software movement succeeds in doing that, not because we are smarter than the people who built the welfare state, but because the welfare state is made out of non-zero marginal cost parts, and it’s extremely difficult to make a hundred million good social workers by pressing a button. ”

“ That you don’t have to have a phone which spies on you. That you don’t have to report to Google every call you dial. That you don’t have to see every advertisement. That it is possible, in the ecology of commons, to achieve the goal of acting locally and thinking globally about the commons. That your relationship to the commons is itself, now, a political act with public consequences that should be publicly shared and publicly known about. ”

“ It is, of course, something so natural to us that it strikes us as an odd aperçu when we meet it, but of course we know that it is true. We know that it is true, and that there wasn’t any way to prevent it from being true, even as we know that it’s an injustice. ”

“ The problem that besets them is that you must be at one and the same time invisible and also possessed of a brand that everybody on Earth recognizes, and that’s a little tricky. You do it by associating the brand with the idea of yourself, the user, rather than the power at the other end. But we’ll talk about that a little more shortly. All I wanted to do at the outset was to stress that the network is irreversibly changing human life. One of the important questions, then, is how it changes some of the hitherto unchangeable elements of human life. ”