June 29, 2003
By Eben Moglen
Software, by which I here mean executable bitstreams that instruct computers in what to do (there are lots of other types of software and we will be discussing them in the course of this hour: they include music, and movies, and train schedules, and all other useful forms of information in the twenty-first century) is becoming in the twenty-first century a public utility, not a product. We are doing that for a reason. The reason, which was sketched out by my colleague, friend, and client Richard Stallman in the early nineteen eighties, is to protect the ethical right to share information. This is properly understood as the intellectual context of Western science and literature-not as an invention of the nineteen eighties, not as a consequence of our particular personal, intellectual or moral idiosyncrasies. It is the received understanding of our common culture with regard to the production of knowledge by collaborative effort. The free sharing of scientific information is the essence of Western science. And without the concept of the free sharing of information--Western scientists have been pointing out since Galileo pointed it out to the church in the mid 16th century--the advance of knowledge would be either impossible or impossibly burdened.
Information distribution, from the adoption of movable type printing in the west at the end of the fifteenth century until the end of the twentieth, was an industrial process. Information was turned into physical artifacts that it cost money to make, move and sell. Accordingly, an economy of information distribution arose, which required payment streams to recoup the cost of making, moving and selling physical artifacts containing information. That process came to center around the creation of property rights--through a logic of the raising of streams of payment to recoup the costs of production familiar to everybody--in every branch of Western economic thought. The morality of that process, however, depended on the fact that there was no alternative. Because this form of distribution inevitably resulted in the exclusion of some people from information. Societies, as their wealth increased, tended to attempt to offset that exclusionary effect--the undesired, exclusionary effect--of property rights in information production by socialized measures to ensure access: the public library, the public university, and so on. Thus, by the middle of the twentieth century it had become the dogma of the West that information costs money to make move and sell, that information costs must be recouped by exclusionary property rights ("you may not have this information unless you pay for it'') and that the harshness of coercive distribution of information goods could be ameliorated in the familiar way--by semi-socialized institutions that offset the distributive unfairness of coercive models of information production and distribution. That, in a nutshell, is how to we got to the point at which things threatened to become terrible, because the advance of technology removed the barrier to universal access. But our minds did not change with respect to the paradigms of information production and distribution.
