Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright

[Raju Mathur <raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Some more stuff to ponder over:

     http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

Summary:

The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention
at the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far
from being a marginal participant in the commercial software market,
is the vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual
property system.

Excerpt:

When we reach this point in the argument, we find ourselves contending
with the other primary protagonist of educated idiocy: the
econodwarf. Like the IPdroid, the econodwarf is a species of
hedgehog,[9] but where the droid is committed to logic over
experience, the econodwarf specializes in an energetic and
well-focused but entirely erroneous view of human nature. According to
the econodwarf's vision, each human being is an individual possessing
"incentives," which can be retrospectively unearthed by imagining the
state of the bank account at various times. So in this instance the
econodwarf feels compelled to object that without the rules I am
lampooning, there would be no incentive to create the things the rules
treat as property: without the ability to exclude others from music
there would be no music, because no one could be sure of getting paid
for creating it.

Music is not really our subject; the software I am considering at the
moment is the old kind: computer programs. But as he is determined to
deal at least cursorily with the subject, and because, as we have
seen, it is no longer really possible to distinguish computer programs
from music performances, a word or two should be said. At least we can
have the satisfaction of indulging in an argument ad pygmeam.  When
the econodwarf grows rich, in my experience, he attends the opera. But
no matter how often he hears Don Giovanni it never occurs to him that
Mozart's fate should, on his logic, have entirely discouraged
Beethoven, or that we have The Magic Flute even though Mozart knew
very well he wouldn't be paid. In fact, The Magic Flute, St. Matthew's
Passion, and the motets of the wife-murderer Carlo Gesualdo are all
part of the centuries-long tradition of free software, in the more
general sense, which the econodwarf never quite acknowledges.

The dwarf's basic problem is that "incentives" is merely a metaphor,
and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it's pretty
crummy. I have said this before,[10] but the better metaphor arose on
the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a
coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in
such a wire, but we don't ask what the incentive is for the electrons
to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent
property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask
is "what's the resistance of the wire?" So Moglen's Metaphorical
Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around
every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the
network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they
create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy
sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, what's the
resistance of the network? Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm's
Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional
to the field strength of the "intellectual property" system. So the
right answer to the econodwarf is, resist the resistance.

Enjoy,

-- Raju
-- 
Raju Mathur          raju@xxxxxxxxxxxxx           http://kandalaya.org/