|
| Latha Jishnu: Messiah, pirate or anarchist? | | PATENTLY ABSURD |
| Latha Jishnu / New Delhi Dec 10, 2008, 00:33 IST |
|
Anyone who is interested in software theology has heard of him. To those who believe that the tools of the digital world should be freely available to everyone, he is next to God, God being Richard Stallman. To the other side, the companies that treat software as a product and make their billions from it, he is a lethal antagonist, a man who knows his history and law so well that they shrink from the brilliance of his erudition and rapier thrusts against greed and theft.
Yes, it’s Eben Moglen I am talking about. Moglen, the professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, founder-director of the Software Freedom Law Centre and travelling Messiah of Software Freedom. Moglen is currently in India spreading the word at Delhi, Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram but unfortunately he is addressing the choir. It’s a great pity that general audiences will not be listening to this riveting speaker who makes a compelling case for the democratisation of information tools of the 21st century. Moglen belongs to that rare class of thinkers who can hold you spellbound for a couple of hours without the aid of any notes or power point presentations.
What does he preach? Moglen believes that knowledge should be open to everyone, and in this digital age, software, the key tool, should be free to all. But free, as he repeatedly emphasises, not as in free beer but free as in the freedom to pursue knowledge. That distinction is important. It means that you use the available tools to improve the human condition but give back to society the improvements you make on these tools. Thus, while “Microsoft sees software as a product, a thing that must be scarce,” Moglen views it as the accretion of human knowledge built over a long, long period and therefore “a culture” just like literature. In his world view, knowledge can never be a product to be shut off to people according to their ability to pay. That’s where the battle lines are drawn between the companies who thrive on products, which are fortified by patent laws, and the free software heretics.
In his address to a forum of Knowledge Commons in Delhi, Moglen said the free software community is committed to the diffusion of science and the useful arts, a goal akin to the ideals of the Enlightenment which sought to encourage the pursuit of scientific knowledge and thinking. It is, said the professor, rooted in the 18th century ambition of improving the human condition. What is standing in the way was the stifling intellectual property (IP) regime which he describes as illegitimate power. The patent laws are a hangover from the era when America was just building its innovative society during a period when people were few and the land was large and empty.
Moglen’s thesis is that the IP requirements of those times were different. They were crafted to meet a situation where the nascent nation had to attract talent and ideas from the old world. This it did, bringing manufacturers from Britain and intellectuals from Europe, specially France. But to continue with such an IP regime in the 21st century was to lose out on the vast opportunity of building collectively on the greatest natural resource that we possess: the human mind. And developing countries, says Moglen, need a different law to stimulate their development and should not be following the IP system of the developed world. If only India’s mandarins who were architects of the Patent Act amendments in 2004 and the politicians who passed the regulations had listened to him.
The free software movement has thrown up some fascinating thinkers but few as extraordinary as Moglen and Stallman, the other prophet of free software who was profiled earlier in this column. The diminutive professor is a software whiz who began programming as a child. When he was 16 he helped write the first networked email system and later joined IBM where he worked on applications software before switching to literary criticism and, later, degrees in history and law. He ended up teaching and writing about the roots of intellectual property law.
Some years ago, when the Free Software Foundation launched a campaign urging governments not to subsidise monopolists by buying ‘unfree’ or proprietary software, Mogen, like Stallman, was branded a communist — and worse. Which advocates of freedom in the new digital society have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists, he asks? To those hurling the epithets, he responds in similar vein. They are “merely thieves in power, whose talk of intellectual property is nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society that is changing irrevocably”.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Read Business news in |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Content Guide
