talkingsticktv
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2013–2023
1:11:56 · 9.8K views · May 10, 2009
Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.
Recommended as a worthwhile, full-length statement of the free software philosophy, especially around the zero marginal cost of knowledge.
3 comments from Hacker News
Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: this video -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs. The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay? If you could make a
“Most of you have browsers, and most of those browsers show you advertisements, and I’m very puzzled about why. The advertisements are annoying most of the time, they slow you down, they injure the concentration that you bring to whatever task it is that you’re doing, and there’s no reason why they show you advertisements; my browser doesn’t show me any advertisements. I don’t see any ads when I read The New York Times, or go to wherever it is that you are happy going to, because my browser has Adblock in it, and that pretty much ends the story. Even in this town, many of you, indeed, I would guess, most of you are probably using the Firefox browser. That means you’re two clicks away from not having any advertising on the net anymore. All you need to do is google “Adblock Plus”, and say “I’m feeling lucky”, [Laughter] thank you very much. Now you know why my friends – and they are my friends – at the Mozilla Foundation are paid tens of millions of dollars every year by Google – basically, not to bundle Adblock Plus into the default distribution of Firefox. But you also know why all the talk about advertising supported models on the web is just talk, and why it is that in the end, all of those models are fated not to work. Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.” — Eben Moglen, Free and Open Software: Paradigm for a New Intellectual Commons , 2009-03-13
I'm super skeptical of this. They have been around since Jan 2015. And include Google not in attention companies but in platform companies. This is a strange divide considering Google makes YouTube, and which business is just to intercept as much information as possible, to build a profile of you, to target your attention to advertising and enough value that you don't mind. This is then continued by their recommendation of AdBlock which blocks ads (but not Google's by default, because Google pays them), and not tracking. Their message seems somewhat to what we have already been hearing from Richard Stallman and Eben Molgen for the past 30 years — this video — Aral Balkan from Indie for the past 5-10 years — [LINK] — but packaged up for consumers, blaming tech. However their delivery seems more at targeting consumers, with the illusion of targeting designers, by blaming those dam malicious tech folk because it is not the consumer's job to accept responsibility of how they spend their time - and instead, it is up to companies to stop wasting the irresponsible and perhaps addicted consumers attention, despite the consumer not wanting to support non-free business models, probably hence why this movement hasn't taken off in its 2 years. The video seems reminiscent of the rap video by another person, who's message was to consumers, hey there was a time before tech invaded our attention, you can put your phone away you know, perhaps do that. This version seems to be perhaps aimed at ch