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.'"

Comments

Re:If you want to give away your stuff .. fine...

[Quill_28]

You are failing to understand why GNU was created.

You selling software is morally wrong, according to RMS.

Let me repeat. Morally wrong.
http://lwn.net/2002/features/rms.php3

Why this doesn't apply to books, music, or any other IP i have no idea, go ask him.

The failure of the judicial system is correctable

[Baldrson]

The judicial system has failed due to the fact that we live in a technological civilization and the judiciary views technologists as an after-thought to the constitution of civilization. They've simply forgotten where law came from to begin with.

Now this isn't to say we should go around offing the lawyers but to be realistic we have to recognize we don't have lawyers worthy of technological civilization at all.

The best thing to do is correct the corrections system by providing alternatives to it. If programmers need a little competition to keep them honest why not the judiciary and the law enforcement system upon which its founded?

The best way to do this is simply render judgements and opinions and then leave it up to the enforcers to do the enforcing. Either the enforcers of the world will start paying attention to the right courts and the right rulings or they won't. If they don't we're screwed anyway but the least we can do is provide them with good judgements.

If I were a military or police man now I'd hate my job with a passion and desperately wish to find some courts with some compassion for humanity and justice rather than the leviathan that orders me throw people in prison to be "corrected" via gang-rape by the worst elements of society. That's the motivation for the enforcers. People want to be good -- particularly guys who want to be our protectors the most. Rendering judgements that actually upheld the nobility of creativity rather than forking the honors over to those with a brother-in-law sleaze-bag lawyer would be a natural consequence of correcting the corrections system so they could actually look at themselves in the mirror without averting their eyes.