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Transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw has a transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech + Q&A up. Good Stuff. During the Q&A he made a good point to think about: 'We stand for free speech. We're the free speech movement of the moment. And that we have to insist upon, all the time, uncompromisingly. My dear friend, Mr. Stallman, has caused a certain amount of resistance in life by going around saying, "It's free software, it's not open source". He has a reason. This is the reason. We need to keep reminding people that what's at stake here is free speech. We need to keep reminding people that what we're doing is trying to keep the freedom of ideas in the 21st century, in a world where there are guys with little paste-it labels with price tags on it who would stick it on every idea on earth if it would make value for the shareholders. And what we have to do is to continue to reinforce the recognition that free speech in a technological society means technological free speech. I think we can do that. I think that's a deliverable message.'"
Well, Slashdot articles usually carry these links to stories about the subject you can read...
The way you put it, we should tell who is speaking so people can assess if it's worth listening.
But I'd expect this is the purpose of the quote.
-- Pedro
And I know that money talks and bullshit walks. Unless we get some thick-walleted lobbyists on our side, the souless corporations will continue to turn innovation and invention into commodities - and Open Source and Free Software will remain terms that no one but the choir ever hears.
"Free Software" exists to sell the idea of freedom. "Open Source" exists to sell the reality of freedom.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It is in danger if you are not allowed to not talk about how bad the BigMac sucks or are sued when you talk about the ingredients. Or, if McDonalds sue Burger King because the whopper is similar. Or the 6 year old is sued for taking apart a whopper.
Fight Spammers!
Does this mean that any piece of closed-source software is a threat fo (sic) Free Speech?
Is it, now, right this moment? I really don't know for certain.
Could it be in the future? You bet.
Keeping the source open pretty well ensures that the software I use only serves my purposes, not anyone elses.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Or your dear sweet old grandma is sued because her age-old family recipe violates some sort of McDonald's trade secret or patent.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
An "Errata" moderation mode would be usefull to these cases
sign(c14n(envelop(this)), x509)
My right to speak in no way infringes their right to remain silent. Those against open source itself, like the MPAA and SCO, are doing so because they don't like what is being said, as well as how it is being said. The MPAA doesn't want fair use rights, and SCO doesn't want a superior product for the X86.
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The code at the bottom of this post is illegal under the DMCA. Its very illegality violates my right to free speech, because it's only legal so long as it's closed source. That's why this is about free speech, and that's why we must protect it.
It's not closed software that's the threat to free speech, it's the attacks that are being made upon open software. You have the right to remain silent, but please leave me my right to speak.
efdtt.c Author: Charles M. Hannum <root@ihack.net>
Thanks to Phil Carmody <fatphil@asdf.org> for additional tweaks.
Length: 434 bytes (excluding unnecessary newlines)
Usage is: cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob
#define m(i)(x[i]^s[i+84])<<
unsigned char x[5],y,s[2048];main(n){for(read(0,x,5);read(0,s,n
*2-k
[j],k="7Wo~'G_\216
*6^c+~y;}}
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This Free Speech/Open Source movement is not just a philosophy. It's a religion
Any philosophy would appear like a religion if you don't agree with it. That's just like saying "all you people are wrong, and why don't you just shut up with your new philosophy".
Is Free Speech in danger when McDonald's doesn't publish the recipes of their menu or when KFC keeps the 13 spices and herbs secret?
How about my favorite Italian restaurants meatballs?
Almost all chefs that I've met keep their receipes secret. This is a tradition amongst chefs, and helps them distinguish themselves, much like an artist has a certain style.
As for those 13 herbs and spices... consider the following transcript from this article...
So let me tell you what I think the owners of culture were doing in the 20th century. It took them two generations from Edison to figure out what their business was, and it wasn't music and it wasn't movies. It was celebrity. They created very large artificial people, you know, with navels eight feet high. And then we had these fantasy personal relationships with the artificial big people. And those personal relationships were manipulated to sell us lots and lots of stuff -- music and movies and T-shirts and toys and, you know, sexual gratification, and heavens knows what else. All of that on the basis of the underlying real economy of culture, which is that we pay for that which we have relations with. We are human beings, social animals.
In there small way KFC is threatening freedom of speech. They've created a secret formula, and made it a celebrity. They own a piece of our culture, like George Lucus owns Star Wars, and that's how they make all that money.
As for freedom of speech, people will publish receipes, (and make movies), and others will take those receipes and improve upon them (there is no requirement to republish), and over the centuries we developed wonderful and complex delicacies and great diversity. KFC gives us a few types of food and they sustain their IP with marketing. Why is this restricted model somehow better for society just because it creates shareholder value in the pockets of a few?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
That's a load of astonishingly ill-informed nonsense. The basis of intellectual property is the promotion of the creation of works that benefit society. To accomplish this, the government grants creators certain limited rights to control certain aspects of how their creations are used. You can read all about this (and nothing about your "absolute" "moral" claptrap) in the foundation of my civilized society, the U.S. Consitution.
It is patronizing if you are one of the guys who wants to put a paste-it label with a price tag on every idea on earth, but I doubt he means you.
The Flatlander
And you wonder why you're having trouble finding GPL programmers for it? :)
You might have better luck trying to sell the same idea to the Palm community. Not only do you already have a bunch of "anything-but-Microsoft" folks, but even the new development tools are based on the Eclipse open-source IDE. There are FAR more apps and developers out for Palm, many of them free.
The bottom line of intellectual property is this: The creator of that IP has an absolute moral right to determine how his property may be used.
And it's an idea that is 100% moose hockey.
Unlike the natural properties (things which are capable of being owned), ideas are not capable of being owned. "Intellectual property" is a creature of law, designed solely to encourage the fixture of ideas (not, crucially, the creation of ideas... the purpose of copyright and patent is solely to have people WRITE STUFF DOWN so that others can access it and use it). It's since gone badly off the rails, but that's the animating purpose behind all such laws.
You can't own an idea, any more than you can own the word "dental". You can keep an idea private, but that's different from owning it.
The fact is, that "moral rights" never even appeared on the radar screen of intellectual property until well after the current model of permanent ownership of the products of all human ideas came into being.
There is no theft in the "theft" of an idea, for the simple fact that my appropriation of "your" idea does not alter or harm your own idea one iota. My taking the "idea" under my control does not, in any way, affect the control you have over the idea. As a result, ideas are simply not capable of being owned, since the only purpose of ownership is the taking under human control of those things that can be controlled.
Sorry for the heavy Hegelian slant of this (I'm hauling my concept of ownership, incidentally, out of Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_). But in a nutshell, ideas are not things, and treating them as things is stupid.
Just so you know, however, the large numbers of programmers available to open source projects, and the many, many eyes taht can review open source projects will probably render your proprietary code worthless in short order. That's not a problem for you, is it?
You intentionally misinterpret the Professors argument. It ain't free as in beer. It's free as in speech. When the code is available, when the algorithm can be examined, fixed, improved upon, everyone benefits.
Red Hat, HP, and IBM seem to be doing okay with software that's "free." How do they do that? Because the *service* ain't free - it's only the code that you can get free.
The Flatlander
I have had conversations with many folks from various countries about Stallman. My feeling is that he is held in VERY high regard by both the technical and political classes in every country except his own. The unfortunate fact is that in the USA, (which, BTW, is my home country) most people are anti-intellectual, and do not have the capacity to comprehend the magnitude of his accomplishments. Even most technical folks in the USA are so decidedly one-dimensional that their frame of reference in worldly matters is like a postage stamp.
In almost any other country, a man who has sacrificed his earning potential to pursue a larger cause is revered. In the USA, that is considered the sign of a loser or a crank. This is the root cause of the differences in perceptions.
Magnus
I do too, and I bet it will come to pass. But (from someone who attended the speech) there's something we should realize: Moglen and RMS are championing almost exactly the same principles and agenda. The differences are in how they serve the agenda: Stallman by writing code (in the beginning) and playing the visionary, Moglen by plotting legal strategy and fighting the legal ground war; and in their particular communication styles.
So while I agree that RMS's personality may be getting worn and he is somewhat tainted by politics, it is important that we see Moglen not as a less orthodox RMS, but as a new, and perhaps more effective, conveyor of the same fundamental message. It may help to note Moglen's pointed expressions of respect and admiration for RMS during the speech.
That said, Moglen did put the free software movement in a wider legal and intellectual context better than RMS usually does. Moglen can play the visionary very well if he wishes! Perhaps if we are inspired by Moglen, we can reconsider RMS with renewed appreciation.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
On one hand there's the idea of property as a human right or a natural right. You usually see this made explicit in libertarian writings. Viewed as a human right, the idea is that if you can't own anything you are going to be owned by others, the essence of slavery being that you don't *get* anything for your labor. Viewed as a natural right, the idea is that property law simply acknowledges and protects something that existed before the first dog barked at a trespasser.
On the other hand there's the idea that "property is theft". You see this most often in anarchist writings. Here the argument is that for one person to own something, that person has to take it away from everyone else. Then a whole coercive apparatus has to be built up to keep everyone else from taking it away from the owner.
Scarcity, according to Aristotle, is the fundamental principle of economics. If there's a limited supply of something and unlimited demand, then there needs to be some kind of rationing. Property laws provide that function.
A matter duplicator would force us to rethink our ideas about physical property because it would remove the scarcity issue. The Internet is forcing us to rethink our ideas about intellectual property for the same reason.
>whether the *creator* (or creators) of a piece of IP have the moral right to designate its usage
Well put. From a human-rights point of view, "designate the usage" means giving orders to the other six billion people on the planet about what they can do with a piece of "IP". From a utilitarian point of view ("greatest good of the greatest number") useful intellectual work should get spread as widely as possible. The compromise of copyright law was an attempt to ensure the greatest good given 18th-century distribution methods.
If I understand the rms position, it's not so much that it's bad to make money from software, but rather that it's bad to imprison the software and make money by charging for access to it.
Honest and thoughtful people can come to different ethical conclusions on these questions. I just wish more bright people would give those questions the depth of thought they deserve.
What I find most interesting in these great speeches about freedom of information, like what I read in http://www.creativecommons.org/, is that the more strict legislation over what you can do is passed, the more people react to it.
When we were feeling sad about the state of copyright law, feeling that nothing would never enter public domain and become humanity's propery, there comes all these people sharing because they want to. Everything is automagically copyrighted? Fine. I'll explicitly license it to everybody. What are you evil people going to do, tell me I can't license what is mine?
Give them (or us, as I write a little free software here and there) twenty years more; the body of freely licensed knowledge will be so huge there won't be any benefit in anything proprietary. There will be so many musicians and artists licensing their cool stuff that we won't need to infringe on anyone's copyright to listen to good music. Those that try to say "Hey, come here and buy the right to hear this song" will face the question "Why? There's so many free stuff to hear I actually haven't got the time".
The last time I bought a CD was more than two years ago, because they're expensive. But I gladly buy very expensive beer and pay the artist's fee at this jazz cafe I go almost every week. The music is just too good.
-- Pedro
It's amazing how many people thought the original poster, gkelman, was asking about Eben Moglen. The post asks a different question, one asked by Eric Raymond in "The Luxury of Ignorance," which was discussed on slashdot yesterday. The real question is why do slashdot postings, as do many configuration utilities, assume the reader already knows the answers?
All the poster was suggesting was that the original post would have been much more informative if it had included a second sentence that read something like "Eben Moglen is the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation and spoke at the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology lecture on the 23rd on the topic of 'SCO and After SCO: The Legal Future of Free Software'."
Wouldn't that have made the topic of the article much clearer?
There are two problems with your argument.
1) You make reference to a Dr. Dobbs article, but we have no way to independently verify your reference; because it is too vague. We can't go and look at the article to determine if your paraphrase of Mr. Stallman is acurate. Certainly his recent behavior does not back up your claim (as has been pointed out by others in this thread), so your citation is merely manipulative and can't be taken as serious.
2) I have studied Kant, and I am not familiar with any so-called philosophy of anti-self. Kant's well-known contribution to philosophy was his a-priori metaphysics, which was a brilliant and thoughtful counterpoint to the empiricists. Perhaps you could recommend one of Kant's writings in which the theory of anti-self is presented and discussed?
I find your argument manipulative because of its weak backing. The references to Dr. Dobbs and Immanuel Kant do not make me comfortable as to your authority in making such assertions regarding Mr. Stallman.
Perhaps you could enlighten us with some more tangible evidence?