Great interview with Eban Moglan, the Free Software Foundation legal counsel, and Columbia University law professor. Kind of long, and a little technical, but you really should find the time to read this. He is very clear about many very difficult to think about issues."What we have here are two different structures of the
distribution of cultural product. You have a set of people whose
fundamental belief is that cultural products are best distributed when
they are owned, and they are attempting to construct a leak proof pipe
from production studio to eardrum or eyeball of the consumer. Their goal
is to construct a piping system that allows them to distribute
completely dephysicalized cultural entities which have zero marginal
cost and which in a competitive economy would therefore be priced at
zero, but they wish to distribute them at non-zero prices. In the ideal
world, they would distribute them at the same prices they get for
physical objects which cost a lot of money to make, move and sell, and
they would become ferociously profitable. They are prepared to give on
price, but at every turn, as with the VCR at the beginning of the last
epoch, their principle is any ability of this content to escape their
control will bring about the end of civilization." From what I can see, Moglan is the main legal mind behind a huge change in society of which the Napster story and the Decss case (making DVD's play on Linux machines despite industy efforts to stop this) are just the tips of the iceburg. Some people think he goes too far (for instance, in another place he makes the very curious argument that all digital content, by virtue of being digital, exists as long strings of zeros and ones, or in other words, all pieces of digital content - things like programs, music, movies, ebooks - are really very long numbers, and it shouldn't be possible to copyright a number) but I think it would be more true to say that most people aren't aware of how fast, and how radically, the world is changing. Of course I could be wrong. I don't think Richard Stallman is a crackpot either, so what do I know? Anyway, read this article, I think Eban Moglan knows.
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- jim 12-15-2000 4:48 pm