Anarchism Triumphant
▻http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html
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.
I. Software as Property: The Theoretical Paradox
II. Software as Property: The Practical Problem
III. Anarchism as a Mode of Production
IV. Their Lordships Die in the Dark?
Conclusion
...
Our Media Lords are now at handigrips with fate, however much they may feel that the Force is with them. The rules about bitstreams are now of dubious utility for maintaining power by co-opting human creativity. Seen clearly in the light of fact, these Emperors have even fewer clothes than the models they use to grab our eyeballs. Unless supported by user-disabling technology, a culture of pervasive surveillance that permits every reader of every “property” to be logged and charged, and a smokescreen of droid-breath assuring each and every young person that human creativity would vanish without the benevolent aristocracy of BillG the Creator, Lord Murdoch of Everywhere, the Spielmeister and the Lord High Mouse, their reign is nearly done. But what’s at stake is the control of the scarcest resource of all: our attention. Conscripting that makes all the money in the world in the digital economy, and the current lords of the earth will fight for it. Leagued against them are only the anarchists: nobodies, hippies, hobbyists, lovers, and artists. The resulting unequal contest is the great political and legal issue of our time. Aristocracy looks hard to beat, but that’s how it looked in 1788 and 1913 too. It is, as Chou En-Lai said about the meaning of the French Revolution, too soon to tell.
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This paper was prepared for delivery at the Buchmann International Conference on Law, Technology and Information, at Tel Aviv University, May 1999; my thanks to the organizers for their kind invitation. I owe much as always to Pamela Karlan for her insight and encouragement. I especially wish to thank the programmers throughout the world who made free software possible.
About the Author
Eben Moglen is Professor of Law & Legal History, Columbia Law School.
E-mail: Mail: moglen@columbia.edu
source différente pour le même texte : ▻http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594
#capitalisme #software #droit #propriété_intellectuelle #histoire #politique
