Moglen, Eben (Eben Moglen)

Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful – build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another – your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough mathematics to complete the task which lies before you. You can only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any extra on hand. You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the form of mathematics payments.
-- Eben Moglen

We are moving to a world in which in the twenty-first century the most important activities that produce occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held together by software. It is the infra-structural importance of software which is first important in the move to the post-industrial economy. It isn’t that software is itself a thing of value – that’s true. It isn’t that applications produce useful end-point activities, or benefit real people in their real lives. Though that’s true. It is that software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation. That’s crucial in economic history terms, because the driving force in economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to place, economic growth results; welfare improvements occur. They occur most rapidly among those who have previously been unable to transport value into the market. In other words, infrastructure improvement has a tendency to improve matters for the poor more rapidly than most other forms of investment in economic development.

-- Eben Moglen

Software is creating roadways that bring people who have been far from the center of human social life to the center of human social life. Software is making people adjacent to one another who have not been adjacent to one another. And with a little bit of work, software can be used to keep software from being owned. In other words, software itself can lift the software tax.
-- Eben Moglen

Books are the first mass-produced article in Western society. They are the cheapest method of making large amounts of information available by broad public access available in analog technology. And they are still grossly expensive, difficult to move, cumbersome to keep and catalog and maintain, and very difficult for people to have access to who are not already located in socially central places. They are also vulnerable, as anybody who remembers the burning of the Sarajevo library will recall vividly. It takes a day with contemporary technology to destroy the libraries it takes centuries to build. And in times of great social stress, libraries burn.
-- Eben Moglen

All the basic knowledge, all the refined physics, all the deep mathematics, everything of beauty in music, in the visual arts, all of literature, all of the video arts of the twentieth century can be given to everybody everywhere at essentially no additional cost beyond the cost it required to make the first copy.

And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, “What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them”, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don’t know who to charge for the crime.
-- Eben Moglen

We find ourselves now in a very different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there. It’s a place in which the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of that mode of production in the broader society is now established. Plus or minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now proven either the adequacy or final superiority in crass economic terms of the way we make things. We have brought forward now the possibility of distributing everything that every public education system uses freely everywhere to everyone: true universal public education for the first time. We have shown how our software, plus commodity hardware, plus electromagnetic spectrum that nobody owns, can build a robust, deep, mesh-structured communications network which can be built out in poor parts of the world far more rapidly than the twentieth century infrastructures of broadcast technology and telephones. We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produce for private exclusive proprietary benefit. We are solving epochal problems.

There are other people with other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this technology too can be shaped to support hierarchy, that it can be shaped to support ownership, that it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral question I have put forward, but to make that moral question invisible to almost everybody. Forever. The folks on the other side are also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite clear-sighted. They also understand that there is an epochal openness here, and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now than they ever have had.
-- Eben Moglen

The reason that we now face a more than usually polarized circumstance is that the sides that have confronted one another over equality and social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than they have ever been before.
-- Eben Moglen