0:00:00.828,0:00:07.010
I've asked Doc Shearls and Isaac Wilder to come up and sit with Eben and continue the discussion.

0:00:07.010,0:00:09.417
Eben Moglen. Thank You.

0:00:11.448,0:00:15.928
Thank you. it's a pleasure to be here, and to see so many friends.

0:00:15.928,0:00:21.312
I'm very grateful to David for the invitation, it's a privilege to be here.

0:00:21.312,0:00:25.178
I'm going to talk of mostly

0:00:25.178,0:00:33.761
about a subject almost as geeky as stuff we all talk about all the time,namely political economy.

0:00:34.345,0:00:40.742
I'm going to try and make it less snooze-worthy than it sometimes seems to be,

0:00:41.588,0:00:50.261
but you'll forgive me I'm sure for starting fairly far from OpenSSL,

0:00:50.261,0:00:52.439
we'll get closer as time goes by.

0:00:53.824,0:00:58.795
The developed economies around the world, all of them now,

0:00:58.795,0:01:06.812
are beginning to experience a fundamentally similar and very depressing condition.

0:01:07.442,0:01:20.196
They are required to impose austerity because levels of private debt have gummed up the works

0:01:20.196,0:01:27.279
and the determination of the owners of capital to take vast risks with other peoples money

0:01:27.279,0:01:31.829
have worked out extremely badly for the last half decade.

0:01:31.829,0:01:41.546
And so austerity is the inevitable and politically damaging position for all the governments in the developed world,

0:01:41.546,0:01:46.830
and some of those governments have begun to slip into a death spiral,

0:01:46.830,0:01:54.630
in which the need to impose austerity and reduce public investment and welfare support for the young

0:01:54.630,0:02:03.868
is harming economic growth, which prevents the austerity from having its desirable consequences.

0:02:03.868,0:02:08.868
Instead of bad asset values being worked off and growth resuming,

0:02:08.868,0:02:14.796
we are watching as the third largest economy in the world, the European Union,

0:02:14.796,0:02:23.072
finds itself at the very verge of a currency collapse and a lost generation,

0:02:23.072,0:02:29.737
which would have a profoundly depressing effects on the entire global economy.

0:02:30.414,0:02:32.340
For the policy-makers

0:02:32.340,0:02:38.376
--I recognize that few of them are here, they have of course, better things to do than to listen to us--

0:02:38.714,0:02:45.754
for the policy-makers in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand,

0:02:45.754,0:02:51.257
how do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity?

0:02:52.765,0:02:55.914
They do not know the answer to this question

0:02:55.914,0:03:02.168
and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.

0:03:02.706,0:03:08.810
Marginal parties in several very highly developed and thoughtful societies

0:03:08.810,0:03:12.480
are beginning to attract substantial numbers of votes,

0:03:12.480,0:03:19.382
and threatening the very stability of the economic planners' capacity to solve,

0:03:19.382,0:03:24.631
or to attempt to solve, the problem of innovation under austerity.

0:03:24.631,0:03:27.318
This is not good news for anybody.

0:03:27.949,0:03:29.543
This is not good for anybody.

0:03:29.543,0:03:33.432
We have no opportunity to cheer for this outcome,

0:03:33.432,0:03:40.338
which is largely the result of incompetence in those people who claim to be worth all that money because they're so smart,

0:03:41.431,0:03:47.722
it is partly the result of the political cowardice that gave them too much room to swing their cats.

0:03:48.692,0:03:55.783
It is not that we are glad to see this happen, but there is a silver lining to the cloud.

0:03:57.553,0:04:02.694
There are very few people in the world who know how to have innovation under austerity.

0:04:03.341,0:04:04.627
We are they.

0:04:05.966,0:04:10.532
We have produced innovation under austerity for the last generation

0:04:10.532,0:04:13.467
and not only did we produce pretty good innovation

0:04:13.467,0:04:18.517
we've produced innovation that all the other smart rich people took most of the credit for.

0:04:19.733,0:04:22.483
Most of the growth that occurred

0:04:22.483,0:04:28.012
during this wild and wacky period in which they took other people's money and went to the racetrack with it,

0:04:28.166,0:04:30.817
was with innovation we produced for them.

0:04:31.833,0:04:38.633
So now, despite the really bad circumstances which we too can deplore,

0:04:38.633,0:04:43.249
because the unemployment is my graduating law students, your children,

0:04:43.249,0:04:52.213
and all those other young people whose lives are being harmed for good by current bad economic circumstances.

0:04:53.167,0:04:58.999
The people beginning their careers now will suffer substantial wage losses throughout their lifetimes.

0:04:59.799,0:05:04.051
Their children will get a less good start in life because of what is happening now,

0:05:04.051,0:05:06.230
we cannot be pleased about this.

0:05:08.000,0:05:11.446
But we have a very substantial political opportunity.

0:05:12.600,0:05:14.785
Because we do have the answer

0:05:14.785,0:05:22.202
to the most important question pushing all the policy-makers in the developed world right now.

0:05:23.649,0:05:29.391
That means we have something very important to say and I came here this morning primarily

0:05:29.391,0:05:34.267
to begin the discussion about precisely how we should say it.

0:05:35.637,0:05:41.437
And I want to present a working first draft of our argument,

0:05:41.837,0:05:46.178
I say "our" because I look around the room and I see it's us here this morning.

0:05:46.517,0:05:53.335
Our argument, about what to do with the quandary the world is in.

0:05:55.151,0:05:59.364
Innovation under austerity is not produced

0:06:00.118,0:06:05.527
by collecting lots of money and paying it to innovation intermediaries.

0:06:07.035,0:06:12.294
One of the most important aspects of 21st century political economy

0:06:13.325,0:06:18.520
is that the process we call disintermediation,

0:06:19.351,0:06:26.745
when we're begin jargony about it, is ruthless, consistent, and relentless.

0:06:28.391,0:06:29.935
Television is melting.

0:06:30.551,0:06:32.981
I don't need to tell you that, you know already.

0:06:33.334,0:06:38.875
Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.

0:06:41.122,0:06:49.130
Amazon's lousy little I-will-let-you-read-some-books-unless-I-decide-to-take-them-back machine

0:06:50.438,0:06:57.586
is transforming publishing by eliminating the selective power of the book publishers,

0:06:58.402,0:07:07.267
much as Mr. Jobs almost destroyed the entire global music industry under the pretense of saving it.

0:07:07.976,0:07:14.264
A task his ghost is already performing for the magazine publishers as you can see.

0:07:14.988,0:07:20.732
Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the net,

0:07:21.163,0:07:26.027
is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy.

0:07:26.597,0:07:29.267
It proves itself all the time.

0:07:29.652,0:07:37.378
Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in economics for describing in formal terms the nature of disintermediation.

0:07:38.471,0:07:45.772
The intermediaries who did well during the past 10 years, are limited to two sets:

0:07:46.203,0:07:53.847
health insurers in the United States owing to political pathology, and the financial industry.

0:07:55.171,0:08:01.154
Health insurers in the United States may be able to capitalize on the continuing political pathology

0:08:01.154,0:08:06.413
to remain failing and expensive intermediaries for a while longer.

0:08:07.121,0:08:15.345
But the financial industry crapped in it's own nest and is shrinking now and will continue for some time to do so.

0:08:16.653,0:08:24.594
The consequence of which is that throughout the economic system, as the policy-maker observes it,

0:08:25.071,0:08:30.795
the reality that disintermediation happens and you can't stop it

0:08:31.672,0:08:36.902
becomes a guiding light in the formation of national industrial policy.

0:08:37.672,0:08:42.115
So we need to say it's true about innovation also.

0:08:43.069,0:08:50.327
The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web.

0:08:50.866,0:08:55.269
An invention less than 8000 days old.

0:08:58.239,0:09:06.491
That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.

0:09:08.322,0:09:10.342
We will see more of it.

0:09:11.404,0:09:18.220
The nature of that process, that innovation, both fuels disintermediation,

0:09:18.851,0:09:27.547
by allowing all sorts of human contacts to occur without intermediaries, buyers, sellers, agents, and controllers.

0:09:28.440,0:09:35.646
And poses a platform in which a war over the depth and power of social control goes on,

0:09:35.646,0:09:38.289
a subject I'll come back to in a few minutes.

0:09:39.489,0:09:45.660
For now what I want to call attention to is the crucial fact that the World Wide Web is itself

0:09:45.722,0:09:49.233
a result of disintermediated innovation.

0:09:49.972,0:09:55.347
What Tim first did at CERN was not the Web as we know it now,

0:09:56.224,0:10:04.043
the Web as we know it now was made by the disintermediated innovation of an enormous number of individual people.

0:10:05.090,0:10:11.841
I look back on what I wrote about the future of personal homepages in 1995,

0:10:12.441,0:10:17.667
and I see pretty much what I thought then would happen happening,

0:10:17.806,0:10:25.180
I said then those few personal homepages are grass seed and a prairie is going to grow, and so it did.

0:10:26.857,0:10:30.802
Of course, like all other innovation there were unintended consequences.

0:10:31.556,0:10:36.271
The browser made the Web very easy to read.

0:10:37.656,0:10:41.528
Though we built Apache, though we built the browsers,

0:10:41.790,0:10:46.922
though we built enormous numbers of things on top of Apache and the browsers,

0:10:47.783,0:10:50.519
we did not make the Web easy to write.

0:10:52.858,0:10:58.699
So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write,

0:10:59.592,0:11:03.268
and created a man in the middle attack on human civilization,

0:11:03.376,0:11:05.424
[Little Laughs]

0:11:05.424,0:11:10.997
which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm.

0:11:13.458,0:11:18.944
But that's the intermediary innovation that we should be concerned about.

0:11:22.006,0:11:26.729
We made everything possible including, regrettably, PHP,

0:11:27.606,0:11:32.961
and then intermediaries for innovation turned it into the horror that is Facebook.

0:11:36.192,0:11:41.475
This will not turn out, as we can already see from the stock market result,

0:11:41.475,0:11:45.241
to be a particularly favourable form of social innovation.

0:11:45.426,0:11:48.192
It's going to enrich a few people.

0:11:48.392,0:11:50.425
The government of Abu Dhabi,

0:11:50.687,0:11:53.605
a Russian thug with a billion dollars already,

0:11:53.990,0:11:59.486
a guy who can't wait to change his citizenship so he doesn't have to pay taxes to support the public schools,

0:12:00.025,0:12:04.416
and a few other relics of 20th century misbehavior.

0:12:08.109,0:12:11.466
But the reality of the story underneath is,

0:12:11.759,0:12:16.522
if we'd had a little bit more disintermediated innovation,

0:12:17.507,0:12:21.405
if we had made running your own web-server very easy,

0:12:22.205,0:12:27.430
if we had explained to people from the very beginning how important the logs are,

0:12:27.877,0:12:31.387
and why you shouldn't let other people keep them for you,

0:12:32.711,0:12:35.934
we would be in a rather different state right now.

0:12:37.211,0:12:40.360
The next Facebook should never happen.

0:12:41.360,0:12:48.367
It's intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people.

0:12:49.060,0:12:52.442
Which is not say that social networking shouldn't happen,

0:12:52.442,0:12:56.088
it shouldn't happen with a man in the middle attack built into it.

0:12:56.227,0:13:01.735
Everybody in this room knows that, the question is how do we teach everybody else.

0:13:04.165,0:13:09.247
But as important as I consider everybody else to be right now, I want to talk about the policy-makers:

0:13:09.494,0:13:11.985
how do we explain to them?

0:13:12.509,0:13:17.192
And here we begin to divide the conversation into two important parts.

0:13:17.562,0:13:23.062
One, what do we know about how to achieve innovation under austerity?

0:13:23.693,0:13:29.177
Two, what prevents governments from agreeing with us about that?

0:13:30.193,0:13:36.067
So let me present first my first draft of the positive case for innovation under austerity,

0:13:36.344,0:13:38.756
it's called "We Made The Cloud".

0:13:40.895,0:13:43.490
Everybody understands this in this room too.

0:13:43.813,0:13:50.478
The very point about what's happening to information technology in the world right now,

0:13:50.478,0:13:55.107
has to do with scaling up our late 20th century work.

0:13:56.462,0:14:06.341
We created the idea that we could share operating systems and all the rest of the commoditizable stack on top of them.

0:14:07.095,0:14:11.723
We did this using the curiosity of young people.

0:14:12.662,0:14:15.935
That was the fuel, not venture capital.

0:14:17.412,0:14:23.640
We had been at it for 15 years, and our stuff was already running everywhere,

0:14:24.194,0:14:32.633
before venture capital or even industrial capital raised by IT giants came towards us.

0:14:33.510,0:14:37.270
It came towards us not because innovation needed to happen,

0:14:37.794,0:14:39.911
but because innovation had already happened,

0:14:40.218,0:14:42.534
and they needed to monetize it.

0:14:42.827,0:14:47.616
That was an extremely positive outcome, I have nothing bad to say about that.

0:14:48.479,0:14:55.987
But the nature of that outcome, indeed the history as we lived it and as other can now study it,

0:14:55.987,0:15:00.387
will show how innovation under austerity occurred.

0:15:01.787,0:15:06.951
It's all very well to say that it happened because we harnessed the curiosity of young people,

0:15:06.951,0:15:09.109
that's historically correct.

0:15:09.648,0:15:11.791
But there's more than that to say.

0:15:12.315,0:15:17.859
What we need to say is that that curiosity of young people could be harnessed

0:15:18.321,0:15:24.691
because all of the computing devices in ordinary day to day use were hackable.

0:15:25.830,0:15:31.235
And so young people could actually hack on what everybody used.

0:15:32.697,0:15:36.607
That made it possible for innovation to occur,

0:15:36.607,0:15:43.850
where it can occur, without friction, which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital.

0:15:46.097,0:15:52.830
This is happening now elsewhere in the world as it happened in the United States in the 1980s.

0:15:52.830,0:15:58.381
Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world hacking on laptops.

0:16:00.412,0:16:02.180
Hacking on servers.

0:16:03.180,0:16:10.274
Hacking on general purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their individual itches,

0:16:10.613,0:16:16.433
technical, social, career, and just plain ludic itches.

0:16:16.756,0:16:20.164
"I wanna do this it would be neat."

0:16:21.302,0:16:27.335
Which is the primary source of the innovation which drove all

0:16:28.397,0:16:35.675
of the world's great economic expansion in the last 10 years.All of it.

0:16:36.414,0:16:39.302
Trillions of dollars of electronic commerce.

0:16:40.133,0:16:45.355
Those of you old enough to remember when fighting Public Key Encryption tooth and nail,

0:16:45.771,0:16:48.469
was the United States government's policy

0:16:48.931,0:16:51.698
will remember how hard they fought,

0:16:51.698,0:16:59.136
to prohibit 3.8 trillion dollars worth of electronic commerce from coming into existence in the world.

0:16:59.813,0:17:06.782
We were (supposedly) proponents of nuclear terrorism and pedophilia in the early 1990s,

0:17:06.998,0:17:10.798
and all the money that they earned

0:17:10.798,0:17:16.884
in campaign donations and private equity profits and all the rest of it,

0:17:16.884,0:17:21.448
is owing to the globalization of commerce we made possible,

0:17:21.448,0:17:26.958
with the technology they wanted to send our clients to jail for making.

0:17:28.005,0:17:34.274
That demonstrates neatly I think, to the next generation of policy-makers

0:17:34.274,0:17:38.232
how thoroughly their adherence to the received wisdom

0:17:38.232,0:17:43.646
is likely to contribute to the death spiral they now fear they're going to get into.

0:17:44.216,0:17:51.162
And it should embolden us to point out once again that the way innovation really happens

0:17:51.532,0:17:56.114
is that you provide young people with opportunities to create

0:17:56.114,0:18:02.742
on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world, and share the results.

0:18:05.066,0:18:10.178
When Richard Stallman wrote the call at the university in Suffolk??? for the universal encyclopedia,

0:18:10.917,0:18:14.985
when he and Jimmy Wales and I were all much younger than we are now,

0:18:15.385,0:18:17.452
it was (considered) a frivolous idea.

0:18:18.298,0:18:23.986
It has now transformed the life of every literate person in the world.

0:18:25.617,0:18:27.256
And it will continue to do so.

0:18:29.348,0:18:33.697
The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons,

0:18:34.467,0:18:36.399
by the Free Software Movement,

0:18:36.784,0:18:37.946
by Free Culture,

0:18:38.716,0:18:41.894
which is reflected in the Web in the Wikipedia,

0:18:42.233,0:18:46.482
in all the Free Software operating systems now running everything,

0:18:47.559,0:18:54.103
even the insides of all those locked-down vampiric Apple things I see around the room.

0:18:55.334,0:19:01.414
All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way.

0:19:02.984,0:19:09.701
Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent now completely.

0:19:10.916,0:19:17.066
Increasingly, all around the world the actual computing artifacts of daily life

0:19:17.066,0:19:21.597
for human individual beings are being made so you can't hack them.

0:19:23.459,0:19:29.591
The computer science laboratory in every twelve year old's pocket is being locked-down.

0:19:31.084,0:19:38.109
When we went through the anti-lockdown phase of the GPL 3 negotiations in the middle of last decade,

0:19:38.986,0:19:45.151
it was somehow believed that the primary purpose for which Mr. Stallman and I were

0:19:45.704,0:19:53.592
engaged in pressing everybody against lock-down had something to do with bootlegging movies.

0:19:55.485,0:19:58.871
And we kept saying, this is not the Free Movie Foundation.

0:19:59.887,0:20:01.451
We don't care about that.

0:20:01.867,0:20:07.388
We care about protecting people's right to hack what they own.

0:20:08.219,0:20:15.619
And the reason we care about it is, that if you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves,

0:20:15.619,0:20:22.078
you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.

0:20:24.432,0:20:25.667
That's still true.

0:20:26.622,0:20:34.029
And it is more important now precisely because very few people thought we were right then,

0:20:35.168,0:20:38.822
and didn't exert themselves to support that point of view,

0:20:40.453,0:20:48.741
and now you have Microsoft saying we won't allow third-party browsers on ARM-based Windows RT devices.

0:20:49.388,0:20:51.419
And you have the ghost of Mr. Jobs

0:20:51.419,0:20:57.894
trying to figure out how to prevent even a free tool chain from existing in relation to iOS,

0:20:58.987,0:21:03.720
and you have a world in which increasingly the goal of the network operators

0:21:03.720,0:21:11.619
is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment

0:21:11.619,0:21:17.812
that she can't learn from, can't study, can't understand, can't whet her teeth on,

0:21:17.812,0:21:26.215
can't do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.

0:21:29.369,0:21:34.536
And most of the so-called innovation in the world, in our sector,

0:21:34.536,0:21:41.894
now goes into creating IT for network operators that improves no technology for users.

0:21:43.187,0:21:46.755
Telecomms innovation in the world has basically ceased.

0:21:49.709,0:21:59.575
And it will not revive so long as it is impossible to harness the forms of innovation that really work under austerity.

0:22:02.052,0:22:05.709
This has a second-order consequence of enormous importance.

0:22:06.371,0:22:10.792
Innovation under austerity occurs in the first-order

0:22:11.454,0:22:19.532
because the curiosity of young people is harnessed to the improvement of the actual circumstances of daily life.

0:22:20.056,0:22:25.369
The second-order consequence is (that) populations becomes more educated.

0:22:28.755,0:22:33.610
Disintermediation is beginning to come to higher education in the United States,

0:22:33.610,0:22:37.450
which means it is beginning to come to higher education around the world.

0:22:37.819,0:22:39.738
We currently have two models.

0:22:40.938,0:22:48.860
Coursera, is essentially the googlization of higher education, spun-off from Stanford as a for-profit entity,

0:22:49.322,0:22:53.789
using closed software and proprietary educational resources.

0:22:54.589,0:23:02.122
MITx, which has now edX through the formation of the coalition with Harvard University,

0:23:02.322,0:23:04.911
is essentially the free world answer.

0:23:05.558,0:23:09.673
Similar online scalable curriculum for higher education

0:23:09.673,0:23:14.087
delivered over Free Software using free education resources.

0:23:14.472,0:23:19.386
We have an enormous stake in the outcome of that competition.

0:23:20.033,0:23:25.109
And it behooves all of us to put as much of our energy as we can

0:23:25.556,0:23:34.356
behind the solutions which depend upon free courseware everybody can use, modify and redistribute,

0:23:34.356,0:23:39.381
and educational materials based on the same political economy.

0:23:40.874,0:23:45.477
Every society currently trying to reclaim innovation

0:23:45.724,0:23:53.480
for the purpose of restarting economic growth under conditions of austerity needs more education,

0:23:53.773,0:23:57.392
deliverable more widely at lower cost,

0:23:57.392,0:24:04.248
which shapes young minds more effectively to create new value in their societies.

0:24:05.525,0:24:13.232
This will not be accomplished without precisely the forms of social learning we pioneered.

0:24:14.740,0:24:21.462
We said from the beginning that Free Software is the world's most advanced technical educational system.

0:24:21.878,0:24:29.758
It allows anybody anywhere on earth, to get to the state of art in anything computers can be made to do,

0:24:29.758,0:24:38.036
by reading what is fully available and by experimenting with it, and sharing the consequences freely.

0:24:38.575,0:24:40.864
True computer science.

0:24:41.557,0:24:49.553
Experimentation, hypothesis formation, more experimentation, more knowledge for the human race.

0:24:50.507,0:24:55.256
We needed to expand that into other areas of culture,

0:24:55.256,0:25:01.911
and great heroes like Jimmy Wales and Larry Lessig laid out infrastructure for that to occur,

0:25:02.003,0:25:07.888
we now need to get governments to understand how to push it further.

0:25:10.442,0:25:15.617
The Information Society Directorate of the European Commission issued a report 18 months ago,

0:25:16.325,0:25:22.630
in which they said that they could scan 1/6th of all the books in European libraries

0:25:23.292,0:25:26.373
for the cost of 100 km of roadway.

0:25:27.543,0:25:33.104
That meant, and it is still true, that for the cost of 600 km of road,

0:25:33.643,0:25:38.027
in an economy that builds thousands of kilometers of roadway every year,

0:25:38.027,0:25:45.073
every book in all European libraries could be available to the entire human race, it should be done.

0:25:45.458,0:25:49.792
[shout of "Copyright" from audience]

0:25:49.792,0:25:57.766
Remember that most of those books are in the public domain, before you shout copyright at me.

0:26:00.259,0:26:07.002
Remember that the bulk of what constitutes human learning was not made recently,

0:26:07.187,0:26:10.575
before you shout the copyright at me.

0:26:12.776,0:26:23.543
We should move to a world in which all knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available.

0:26:23.543,0:26:30.020
If we don't, we will stunt the innovation which permits further growth.

0:26:30.728,0:26:33.533
That's a social requirement.

0:26:34.210,0:26:37.784
The copyright bargain is not immutable.

0:26:38.277,0:26:41.087
It is merely convenient.

0:26:42.102,0:26:47.250
We do not have to commit suicide culturally or intellectually

0:26:47.250,0:26:53.027
in order to maintain a bargain which does not even relevantly apply

0:26:53.027,0:26:58.456
to almost all of important human knowledge in most fields.

0:26:59.010,0:27:02.407
Plato is not owned by anybody.

0:27:04.961,0:27:12.954
So here we are, asking ourselves what the educational systems of the 21st century will be like,

0:27:13.662,0:27:19.083
and how they will socially distribute knowledge across the human race.

0:27:19.545,0:27:21.228
I have a question for you.

0:27:21.444,0:27:26.666
How many of the Einsteins who ever lived were allowed to learn physics?

0:27:27.942,0:27:29.055
A couple.

0:27:30.118,0:27:34.774
How many of the Shakespeares who ever lived, lived and died without learning to read and write?

0:27:35.713,0:27:37.291
Almost all of them.

0:27:38.276,0:27:41.802
With 7 billion people in the world right now, 3 billion of them are children;

0:27:42.495,0:27:44.680
how many Einsteins do you want to throw away today?

0:27:46.880,0:27:49.529
The universalization of access to knowledge,

0:27:49.529,0:27:56.580
is the single-most important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet.

0:27:56.996,0:28:04.273
Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout "copyright".

0:28:07.397,0:28:10.802
So we are now looking at the second-order consequence

0:28:11.079,0:28:15.917
of an understanding of how to conduct innovation under austerity.

0:28:15.917,0:28:21.316
Expand access to the materials that create the ability to learn,

0:28:22.163,0:28:30.997
adapt technology to permit the scientists below age 20 to conduct their experiments and share their results,

0:28:31.490,0:28:38.147
permit the continuing growth of the information technology universe we created,

0:28:39.778,0:28:43.493
by sharing, over the last quarter century,

0:28:44.447,0:28:52.248
and we'd begin to experience something like the higher rates of innovation available,

0:28:52.864,0:28:59.254
despite massive decreases in social investment occurring because of austerity.

0:29:01.624,0:29:07.795
We also afford young people an opportunity to take their economic and professional destinies

0:29:07.795,0:29:09.899
more into their own hands,

0:29:10.469,0:29:16.813
an absolute requirement if we are to have social and political stability in the next generation.

0:29:17.613,0:29:19.647
Nobody should be fooled

0:29:20.432,0:29:28.082
about the prospects for social growth in societies where 50 percent of the people under 30 are unemployed.

0:29:30.143,0:29:35.937
This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs.

0:29:36.384,0:29:37.850
Everybody sees that.

0:29:38.805,0:29:44.766
Governments are collectively throwing up their hands about what to do about the situation.

0:29:45.397,0:29:51.648
Hence, the rapidity with which, in systems of proportional representation,

0:29:51.648,0:29:55.455
young people are giving up on established political parties.

0:29:56.639,0:30:03.410
When the Pirates can take 8.3% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein,

0:30:04.949,0:30:11.256
it is already clear that young people realize that established political policy-making

0:30:11.380,0:30:16.085
is not going to be directed at their future economic welfare.

0:30:17.116,0:30:25.198
And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist

0:30:25.198,0:30:29.315
that internet freedom and an end to snooping and control

0:30:29.315,0:30:35.042
is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.

0:30:36.673,0:30:43.131
Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy

0:30:43.131,0:30:46.236
with whom we are directly in touch.

0:30:46.498,0:30:53.561
That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.

0:30:54.131,0:30:59.160
Young people around the world whether they are my law students about to get a law license,

0:30:59.499,0:31:02.581
or computer engineers about to begin their practices,

0:31:02.581,0:31:06.599
or artists, or musicians, or photographers,

0:31:06.599,0:31:15.921
need more freedom in the net, and more tools with which to create innovative service delivery platforms for themselves.

0:31:16.691,0:31:23.039
A challenge to which their elders would not have risen successfully in 1955,

0:31:23.532,0:31:31.866
but we are new generation of human beings working under new circumstances, and those rules have changed.

0:31:32.082,0:31:38.880
They know the rules have changed. The indignados in every square in Spain know the rules have changed.

0:31:40.865,0:31:42.662
It's their governments that don't know.

0:31:46.447,0:31:53.432
Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal autonomy.

0:31:54.417,0:31:58.417
One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people,

0:31:58.417,0:32:02.001
at least the young people I teach, about privacy,

0:32:02.601,0:32:07.959
is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things.

0:32:09.083,0:32:12.002
Privacy means secrecy, sometimes.

0:32:12.433,0:32:19.520
That is to say, the content of a message is obscured to all but it's maker and intended recipient.

0:32:20.751,0:32:23.398
Privacy means anonymity, sometimes.

0:32:23.568,0:32:31.711
That means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscured.

0:32:33.219,0:32:38.842
And there is a third aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy.

0:32:39.519,0:32:44.803
It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make

0:32:44.803,0:32:51.719
are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communications.

0:32:54.504,0:33:00.916
There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth.

0:33:02.101,0:33:05.193
It isn't because bankers live there.

0:33:06.362,0:33:10.656
Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth.

0:33:11.518,0:33:16.959
The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer,

0:33:17.667,0:33:22.490
is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being.

0:33:23.352,0:33:30.729
Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village,

0:33:31.253,0:33:34.246
and the social control of the farm.

0:33:35.354,0:33:39.903
"How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?"

0:33:39.903,0:33:47.324
was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States.

0:33:49.171,0:33:54.894
The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity

0:33:54.894,0:34:00.200
and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living.

0:34:01.185,0:34:02.742
We are closing it.

0:34:07.219,0:34:08.416
Some years ago,

0:34:09.370,0:34:15.786
to wit, at the beginning of 1995 we were having a debate at the Harvard Law School about Public Key Encryption.

0:34:16.571,0:34:17.565
Two on two.

0:34:18.258,0:34:22.571
On one side Jamie Gorelick, then the Deputy Attorney General of the United States,

0:34:22.571,0:34:24.586
and Stewart Baker, then as now

0:34:24.586,0:34:30.818
at Steptoe & Johnson when he isn't in the United States government making horrendous social policy.

0:34:32.003,0:34:35.736
On the other side, Danny Weitzner, now in the White House, and me.

0:34:36.798,0:34:42.388
And we spent the afternoon talking back and forth about whether we should have to escrow our

0:34:42.388,0:34:44.654
keys with the United States government,

0:34:44.654,0:34:48.368
whether the clipper chip was going to work and many other very interesting subjects

0:34:48.368,0:34:50.591
now as obsolete as Babylonia.

0:34:52.053,0:34:56.303
And after it was all over, we walked across the Harvard campus for dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club

0:34:56.303,0:34:59.237
and on the way across the campus Jamie Gorelick said to me:

0:34:59.237,0:35:03.604
"Eben, on the basis of nothing more than your public statements this afternoon

0:35:03.604,0:35:07.721
I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations."

0:35:08.321,0:35:10.440
In 1995 that was a joke.

0:35:11.071,0:35:16.788
It was a joke in bad taste when told to a citizen by an official of the United States Justice Department,

0:35:16.788,0:35:17.980
but it was a joke,

0:35:17.980,0:35:21.512
and we all laughed because everybody knew you couldn't do that.

0:35:23.405,0:35:24.666
So we ate our dinner,

0:35:25.605,0:35:30.574
and the table got cleared and all the plates went away, and the port and walnuts got scattered around, and

0:35:31.021,0:35:34.939
Stewart Baker looked up and said "alright, we'll let our hair down",

0:35:34.939,0:35:36.371
and he had none then and he has none now,

0:35:36.371,0:35:38.243
but "we'll let our hair down" Stewart said,

0:35:39.105,0:35:41.729
"we're not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmerman.

0:35:42.560,0:35:47.206
We've spent decades in a holding action against Public Key Encryption

0:35:47.206,0:35:51.737
it's worked pretty well but it's almost over now, we're gonna let it happen."

0:35:52.844,0:35:54.957
And then he looked around the table and he said,

0:35:55.573,0:35:58.386
"but nobody here cares about anonymity do they?"

0:35:59.448,0:36:01.617
And a cold chill went up my spine.

0:36:02.371,0:36:04.898
And I thought, "OK, Stewart, I understand how it is.

0:36:05.222,0:36:09.007
You're going to let there be Public Key Encryption because the bankers are going to need it.

0:36:09.838,0:36:14.805
And you're going to spend the next 20 years trying to stop people from being anonymous ever again,

0:36:14.805,0:36:17.484
and I'm going to spend those 20 years trying to stop you."

0:36:18.638,0:36:24.156
So far I must say from my friend Mr. Baker has been doing better than I had hoped,

0:36:24.156,0:36:27.189
and I have been doing even worse than I had feared.

0:36:27.882,0:36:31.278
Partly because of the thug in a hoodie, and partly for other reasons.

0:36:32.770,0:36:37.188
We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to be alone.

0:36:38.373,0:36:41.956
We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to do your own thinking,

0:36:41.956,0:36:45.382
in your own place, in your own way without anybody knowing.

0:36:47.706,0:36:50.389
Somebody in this room just proved a couple of minutes ago

0:36:50.389,0:36:56.222
that if he shops at a particular web-store using one browser, he gets a different price than on the other.

0:36:56.807,0:36:59.768
Because one of the browsers is linked to his browsing history.

0:37:00.722,0:37:06.922
Prices, offers, commodities, opportunities,

0:37:08.307,0:37:13.253
are now being based upon the data mining of everything.

0:37:14.777,0:37:20.490
A senior government official in this government said to me after the United States changed its rules

0:37:20.490,0:37:25.323
about how long they keep information on everybody about whom nothing is suspected

0:37:25.323,0:37:27.114
- you all do know about that right?

0:37:27.807,0:37:32.457
Rainy Wednesday on the 21st of March, long after the close of business,

0:37:33.058,0:37:37.358
Department of Justice and the DNI, that's the Director of National Intelligence,

0:37:37.358,0:37:42.372
put out a joint press release announcing minor changes in the Ashcroft rules,

0:37:43.326,0:37:49.065
including a minor change that says that all personally identifiable information in government databases

0:37:49.065,0:37:57.266
at the National Center for Counter-Terrorism that are based around people of whom nothing is suspected,

0:37:57.790,0:38:03.431
will no longer be retained as under the Ashcroft rules for a maximum of 180 days,

0:38:03.908,0:38:09.093
the maximum has now been changed to 5 years, which is infinity.

0:38:10.278,0:38:12.341
In fact I told my students in my classroom,

0:38:12.341,0:38:16.791
the only reason they said 5 years was they couldn't get the sideways eight into the font [Laughs]

0:38:16.791,0:38:20.041
for the press release,so they used an approximation.

0:38:22.241,0:38:26.041
So I was talking to a senior official of this government about that outcome

0:38:26.041,0:38:32.516
and he said well you know we've come to realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States.

0:38:33.870,0:38:37.819
That's how we're going to connect new information to old information.

0:38:38.958,0:38:43.369
I said let's just talk about the constitutional implications of this for a moment.

0:38:44.308,0:38:48.055
You're talking about taking us from the society we have always known,

0:38:48.809,0:38:51.631
which we quaintly refer to as a free society,

0:38:52.308,0:38:57.786
to a society in which the United States government keeps a list of everybody every American knows.

0:38:58.910,0:39:02.392
So if you're going to take us from what we used to call a free society

0:39:02.392,0:39:09.727
to a society in which the US government keeps a list of everybody every American knows,

0:39:10.127,0:39:12.933
what should be the constitutional procedure for doing this?

0:39:13.441,0:39:16.456
Should we have, for example, a law?

0:39:17.610,0:39:18.706
He just laughed.

0:39:19.891,0:39:21.585
Because of course they didn't need a law.

0:39:22.309,0:39:26.859
They did it with a press release on a rainy Wednesday night after everybody went home,

0:39:26.859,0:39:28.361
and you live there now.

0:39:30.792,0:39:37.210
Whether it is possible to have innovation under conditions of complete despotism

0:39:37.902,0:39:39.557
is an interesting question.

0:39:40.727,0:39:45.975
Right-wing Americans or maybe even center-right Americans,

0:39:45.975,0:39:51.642
have long insisted that one of the problems with 20th century totalitarianism,

0:39:51.642,0:39:54.569
from which they legitimately distinguish themselves,

0:39:55.016,0:40:00.562
was that it eliminated the possibility of what they call free markets and innovation.

0:40:00.993,0:40:03.443
We're about to test whether they were right.

0:40:05.843,0:40:13.212
The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control.

0:40:14.489,0:40:19.366
Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse,

0:40:20.043,0:40:27.110
the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China

0:40:27.110,0:40:30.578
have adopted essentially identical points of view.

0:40:30.578,0:40:34.293
[Clapping]

0:40:34.293,0:40:39.011
A robust social graph connecting government to everybody

0:40:39.011,0:40:46.677
and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments fundamental policy

0:40:47.031,0:40:55.136
with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as stability maintenance.

0:40:57.244,0:41:02.394
It is true of course that they have different theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why,

0:41:02.394,0:41:08.611
but the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.

0:41:09.826,0:41:14.163
We need, we, who understand what is happening, need,

0:41:14.163,0:41:16.445
to be very vocal about that.

0:41:18.984,0:41:22.261
But it isn't just our civil liberties that are at stake,

0:41:22.261,0:41:26.152
I shouldn't need to say that, that should be enough, but of course it isn't.

0:41:28.414,0:41:36.713
We need to make clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and vibrancy

0:41:36.713,0:41:39.720
of invention culture and discourse,

0:41:40.413,0:41:44.612
that wide open robust and uninhibited public debate

0:41:44.612,0:41:49.304
that the Supreme Court so loved in New York Times against Sullivan.

0:41:50.212,0:41:56.713
And that freedom to tinker, to invent, to be different, to be non-conformist

0:41:56.713,0:42:02.816
for which people have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity,

0:42:02.816,0:42:07.942
and a chance to experiment with who they are, and what they can do.

0:42:08.896,0:42:18.359
This more than anything else, is what sustains social vitality and economic growth in the 21st century.

0:42:19.914,0:42:23.897
Of course we need anonymity for other reasons.

0:42:24.651,0:42:30.380
Of course we are persuing something that might be appropriately described

0:42:30.380,0:42:33.333
as protection for the integrity of the human soul.

0:42:35.595,0:42:37.511
But that's not government's concern.

0:42:38.511,0:42:45.175
It is precisely the glory of the way we understand civil society that that is not government's concern.

0:42:45.745,0:42:53.524
It is precisely our commitment to the idea of the individual's development at her own pace,

0:42:54.078,0:42:55.674
and in her own way,

0:42:56.028,0:43:02.300
that has been the centerpiece of what we understood to be our society's fundamental commitment

0:43:02.300,0:43:07.067
that means that the protection for the integrity of the human soul is our business,

0:43:07.067,0:43:08.868
not the government's business.

0:43:10.715,0:43:14.717
But government must attend to the material welfare of its citizens

0:43:14.717,0:43:19.852
and it must attend to the long run good of the society they manage.

0:43:20.268,0:43:24.133
And we must be clear to government that there is no tension

0:43:24.579,0:43:30.427
between the maintenance of civil liberty in the form of the right to be let alone,

0:43:30.951,0:43:36.881
there is no distinction between the civil liberty policy of assuring the right to be let alone,

0:43:36.881,0:43:41.701
and the economic policy of securing innovation under austerity.

0:43:41.701,0:43:44.065
They require the same thing.

0:43:44.712,0:43:46.571
We need Free Software,

0:43:47.018,0:43:49.304
we need Free Hardware we can hack on,

0:43:49.551,0:43:56.447
we need Free Spectrum we can use to communicate with one another,without let or hindrance.

0:43:57.001,0:44:04.435
We need to be able to educate and provide access to educational material to everyone on earth

0:44:04.435,0:44:07.633
without regard to the ability to pay.

0:44:08.202,0:44:17.408
We need to provide a pathway to an independent economic and intellectual life, for every young person.

0:44:18.685,0:44:21.629
The technology we need, we have.

0:44:23.153,0:44:29.231
I have spent some time and many people in this room, including Isaac have spent more time now,

0:44:29.293,0:44:39.964
trying to make use of cheap, power efficient compact server computers, the size of AC chargers for mobile phones,

0:44:40.657,0:44:47.973
which with the right software we can use to populate the net with robots that respect privacy,

0:44:48.835,0:44:54.654
instead of the robots that disrespect privacy which we now carry in almost every pocket.

0:44:56.854,0:45:05.599
We need to retrofit the first law of robotics into this society within the next few minutes or we're cooked.

0:45:07.061,0:45:10.427
We can do that. That's civil innovation.

0:45:11.674,0:45:19.079
We can help to continue the long lifetime of general purpose computers everybody can hack on.

0:45:19.803,0:45:24.399
By using them, by needing them, by spreading them around.

0:45:25.153,0:45:32.053
We can use our own force as consumers and technologists to deprecate

0:45:32.053,0:45:35.929
closed networks and locked-down objects,

0:45:37.053,0:45:44.469
but without clear guidance in public policy we will remain a tiny minority,

0:45:45.654,0:45:48.718
8.3% let's say.

0:45:49.903,0:45:58.746
Which will not be sufficient to lift us out of the slough into which the bankers have driven us.

0:46:00.623,0:46:04.371
Innovation under austerity is our battle-cry.

0:46:05.371,0:46:11.070
Not a battle-cry for the things we most care about, but the ones the other people most care about.

0:46:11.070,0:46:15.487
Our entree to social policy for the next five years,

0:46:15.487,0:46:20.747
and our last chance to do in government

0:46:20.747,0:46:26.228
what we have not been able to do by attempting to preserve our mere liberties.

0:46:26.844,0:46:33.616
Which have been shamefully abused by our friends in government as well as by our adversaries.

0:46:34.355,0:46:39.021
We have been taken to the cleaners with respect to our rights,

0:46:39.021,0:46:42.670
and we have been taken to the cleaners with respect to everybody's money.

0:46:43.455,0:46:48.048
I wish that I could say that the easiest thing to do was going to be to get our freedoms back,

0:46:48.772,0:46:49.450
it isn't.

0:46:50.189,0:46:56.071
Nobody will run in the election this year on the basis of the restoration of our civil liberties.

0:46:56.733,0:47:00.683
But they will all talk about austerity and growth.

0:47:01.221,0:47:04.880
And we must bring our message where they are.

0:47:06.480,0:47:07.923
That's my first draft.

0:47:08.739,0:47:13.253
Inadequate in every way, but at least a place to start.

0:47:14.238,0:47:15.972
And if we have no place to start,

0:47:17.588,0:47:18.437
we will lose.

0:47:19.422,0:47:21.506
And our loss will be long.

0:47:22.322,0:47:24.073
And the night will be very dark.

0:47:25.181,0:47:26.440
Thank you very much.

0:47:26.440,0:47:57.436
[Aplause]

0:47:57.436,0:48:00.123
Thank you that's very kind of you, now let's talk about it.

0:48:00.585,0:48:01.764
[Lauging]

0:48:28.581,0:48:30.430
[Oh, yeah I'll I,m sorry]

0:48:30.430,0:48:34.468
[Some Murmuring]

0:48:35.914,0:48:36.834
[Ok Thank you]

0:48:43.818,0:48:45.365
Ahh we should begin,

0:48:45.365,0:48:46.062
yeah.

0:48:48.401,0:48:51.074
Not yet... Aha, that on.

0:48:51.074,0:48:55.447
[Doc Shearls]I like to begin this because, I hope I'd speak for a lot of the people here.

0:48:55.724,0:49:00.532
That was not just one of the best speeches that I have ever heard,

0:49:01.086,0:49:02.883
it's one of the most important.

0:49:04.007,0:49:08.108
And it wouldn't be unless we follow up on it,

0:49:08.508,0:49:09.885
we act on it.

0:49:10.209,0:49:14.192
I felt like... actually Elliot that sitted next to be to says he felt like

0:49:14.192,0:49:17.792
this is an “I have a dream speech” and I think that's what it is.

0:49:17.792,0:49:20.916
But I think Eben ended it with the nightmare.

0:49:21.624,0:49:25.954
And if you weren't moved by the speech your frog is boiled.

0:49:26.724,0:49:29.959
And I think our frogs have been boiling for a lot of time.

0:49:29.959,0:49:36.667
I don't know if anybody else but ??? to prevailing conditions, whatever those happen to be.

0:49:37.051,0:49:42.910
And they have gradually worsen over time, and in ways that we don't fully understand,

0:49:42.910,0:49:45.917
and our lives are busy so we go about what we have to do.

0:49:46.825,0:49:48.992
So, what I want to do is

0:49:48.992,0:49:55.292
test this audience with participating with the “Free Everything Movement”

0:49:55.292,0:49:59.009
that Eben has laid out for us, now.

0:49:59.009,0:50:05.010
So, I wouldn't see that just as a Q&A session but as all of use freely contributing

0:50:05.010,0:50:10.777
to the framework that Eben has laid out, and that we've been part of for a long time.

0:50:10.777,0:50:14.141
I love the way he included us in this. This is …

0:50:14.141,0:50:15.842
There is natural selection here.

0:50:15.842,0:50:18.035
This is a select group.

0:50:18.682,0:50:22.242
David has done an amazing job of pulling in the right people together.

0:50:22.242,0:50:25.443
The name of this event begins with Freedom,

0:50:25.443,0:50:27.909
and I think that needs to be our end as well.

0:50:27.909,0:50:32.241
So... and I have nothing to add to such a fabulous talk.

0:50:33.287,0:50:35.135
[Isaac Wilder]Eben I would like to ask you a question.

0:50:37.075,0:50:42.187
Is it tension between Freedom and Convinience?

0:50:43.111,0:50:50.428
And I wonder how you see that tension playing out?

0:50:51.244,0:51:02.004
I think you urged us to focus on innovation but I wonder if....

0:51:03.081,0:51:12.962
and I think that's compelling to this audience, perhaps the policy makers,

0:51:13.593,0:51:19.283
but to the average user convenience is an issue.

0:51:19.760,0:51:21.082
[Eben Moglen] Yeah it's true,

0:51:21.944,0:51:29.807
which is not only the relation between technology and society, it's too about lots of other things as well.

0:51:32.376,0:51:40.678
The constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman wrote a lengthy multi-volume history of the Constitution in the US,

0:51:40.678,0:51:48.245
on the basic premise that most of the time, most people don't want to engage in

0:51:48.245,0:51:51.161
deep thinking about politics and society.

0:51:51.161,0:51:57.043
It only happens very occasionally, and the Founders of the American Republic, Bruce said,

0:51:57.043,0:52:02.988
tried in the Federalist structure to take advantage of those occasional moments,

0:52:02.988,0:52:05.717
when people want to pay attention.

0:52:05.779,0:52:12.644
But here again, and I focus on this because the demographics are so important.

0:52:12.844,0:52:17.828
That sense, of convenience being more important than other values,

0:52:17.828,0:52:21.625
moment by moment is more true of grown-ups than it is for children.

0:52:22.979,0:52:26.195
I go all around the world, I talk to goverments about all sorts of things

0:52:26.195,0:52:29.530
connected with technology of 21st century society,

0:52:29.530,0:52:34.763
and I hear from people, from presidents to ministers, to local planning commitees,

0:52:34.763,0:52:40.245
all sorts of stories about the terrible social problems (that) their cultures and communities face.

0:52:40.245,0:52:44.895
And I find my self often saying “Yes, all right, this is a really really horrible problem.

0:52:44.895,0:52:49.412
It's extraordinary difficult and it demands immense amounts of energy to deal with.

0:52:49.412,0:52:53.512
You need the strongest social force possible to deal with this.

0:52:53.512,0:52:58.854
And the strongest social force ever, available, anywhere is the curiocity of children.

0:52:58.978,0:53:00.928
You need to harness it.”

0:53:00.928,0:53:06.032
We have actually both lessons. The thing you call tension, right?

0:53:06.032,0:53:08.145
It's a tension indeed.

0:53:08.145,0:53:14.680
Because it is true that grown ups in their busy lives find themselves willing to do anything that works,

0:53:14.680,0:53:17.893
and if you hand them a box with an F-Button on it they'll push it,

0:53:18.263,0:53:23.296
whether it costs them or not, or whether it connects them a great big

0:53:23.296,0:53:26.114
man-in-the-middle-attack on their social lives or not,

0:53:26.114,0:53:29.447
or whether their friends are riding them out of the weekends to their employers,

0:53:29.447,0:53:31.219
they pay very little attention.

0:53:31.219,0:53:32.565
It's now.

0:53:33.181,0:53:36.183
But you give a thing to an 8-year-old and it's not like that anymore.

0:53:36.614,0:53:38.413
He's got plenty of time.

0:53:38.413,0:53:41.896
You give a 12-year-old a thing like that and she is ready to take it apart.

0:53:41.896,0:53:44.761
She's not thinking about convenience, she's thinking about learning.

0:53:45.115,0:53:46.597
She's doing science.

0:53:47.197,0:53:48.793
She's playing around.

0:53:49.363,0:53:54.023
And I have seen in more places of the world that I can think to name,

0:53:54.253,0:53:59.394
that force of those children, fooling around with computers and doing amazing things.

0:53:59.871,0:54:01.565
You'd see it everywhere you'd go.

0:54:02.319,0:54:04.649
So I believe the tension is there.

0:54:04.649,0:54:10.140
I believe usability is a crucial problem in building tools for privacy in Freedom.

0:54:10.140,0:54:14.822
FreedomBox, the stack of software we need to make for all these little objects in the world,

0:54:14.822,0:54:20.739
you know this even better than I do, it's partly about function, but it's mostly about integration and usability.

0:54:20.739,0:54:25.240
We've done all the hard work. My laptop, your laptop we are pretty safe.

0:54:25.240,0:54:30.005
The problem is how we make this work for real people with real, busy, daily lives.

0:54:30.005,0:54:32.526
So the tension is there but the answer is there too.

0:54:32.526,0:54:34.604
We need to empower children.

0:54:34.604,0:54:40.342
And part of what is wrong with the technology is the extent to which they are becoming not inventors but consumers.

0:54:40.789,0:54:43.788
If that process is completed, we really are sunk.

0:54:46.204,0:54:49.036
[Doc Shearls] Let them go back and forth with both sides over here. (You) first.

0:54:49.390,0:54:50.861
[Michael Nelson] Michael Nelson of Georgetown University.

0:54:51.723,0:54:54.191
I have at least 15 different questions that I would like to ask you,

0:54:54.638,0:54:57.742
starting with encryptions as I was[br][Eben Moglen]I remember...

0:54:57.742,0:55:00.797
[Michael Nelson] Stuart Baker's best friend, from the White House.[br][Eben Moglen] Yeah Yeah

0:55:01.013,0:55:05.495
It make things very hard for me, Mike, I'm really it's not true anymore. It's isn't true anymore, right?

0:55:05.788,0:55:06.910
[Laughs]

0:55:07.125,0:55:09.389
[Michael Nelson] I would like to urge you to run for Congress,

0:55:09.389,0:55:13.237
preferably by moving to Palm Springs moving against Mary Bono Mack,[br][Laughs]

0:55:15.144,0:55:17.543
[Eben Moglen] I don't think they would like me in Palm Springs May,

0:55:18.190,0:55:21.423
But the thing I hope you'll do after that speech,

0:55:21.423,0:55:27.123
which I agree it's like the “I have a dream” speech is to actually engage your critics.

0:55:27.123,0:55:31.741
I mean the speech is great, and youtube video would be seen by thousands of people,

0:55:31.741,0:55:33.559
mostly your friends and supporters.

0:55:33.943,0:55:35.648
I think you need to engage your critics.

0:55:35.648,0:55:41.673
I mean something like the federalists papers where we have the two big questions debated from both sides,

0:55:41.673,0:55:46.450
and we get both parties... both viewpoints expressed.

0:55:46.450,0:55:49.549
But I would like to ask one quick, very specific question.

0:55:50.057,0:55:52.323
Because I think the first part of your speech

0:55:52.323,0:55:58.673
about general purpose computing and user-centric computing is really where we have to start.

0:55:58.673,0:56:01.925
And I would like to have your assessment , and anyone else's assessment,

0:56:01.925,0:56:08.322
as to why Nicolas Negreponte in the One Laptop Per Child which was based on the same principles...

0:56:08.507,0:56:14.947
empowering the children, building open-source, creating things from the ground-up, why that didn't happen?

0:56:14.947,0:56:19.349
Even though tens of millions of dollars invested and lots of people bought it.

0:56:20.042,0:56:24.571
What was that... what was missing there? And how we can not have the same problem this time around.

0:56:24.925,0:56:28.114
Well Nick is by best friend too sometimes,

0:56:28.591,0:56:31.147
which makes it a little hard to answer the question.

0:56:32.056,0:56:36.175
Hardware is difficult, right? ,and software is easy.

0:56:36.175,0:56:39.475
That's why the FreedomBox isn't a Box, it's just some software,

0:56:39.475,0:56:44.322
because we can make it better, quicker, cheaper and we don't have to buy off all the problems.

0:56:46.259,0:56:49.391
Two things happened as a consequence of One Laptop Per Child.

0:56:49.391,0:56:53.109
The IT industry around the world realized that there was a thing that was better

0:56:53.109,0:56:56.726
to make the laptops with a high profit margin and they started making them.

0:56:56.726,0:57:02.275
So Nick in fact proved my point, in that side pretty well., no failure there.

0:57:02.275,0:57:05.189
He conducted innovation with tiny amounts of money,

0:57:05.189,0:57:11.406
which capitalism in it's biggest globalists ??? wasn't going to get to because it was too riskoverse??? to try.

0:57:11.822,0:57:17.079
So in one sense it panned out, it's just that it panned out as more products for consumers.

0:57:17.326,0:57:23.593
The second thing is that Nick tried to do something really really important with Mesh Networking,

0:57:23.593,0:57:27.609
and it was as another friend of ours very close to the thing said:

0:57:27.609,0:57:29.531
“It was a wonderful failed experiment.”.

0:57:30.193,0:57:31.376
It didn't work.

0:57:31.376,0:57:36.716
It worked great in the lab but it didn't work real well in Montevideo and it worked even less well in Peru,

0:57:36.716,0:57:39.260
and after a while everybody went back to:

0:57:39.260,0:57:41.919
“Well, let's have a classroom server and use wifi”.

0:57:42.427,0:57:49.790
And this is the part of the thing that I was really trying to talk about in the big broad general way, right?

0:57:49.975,0:57:50.969
We need Mesh.

0:57:51.708,0:57:58.377
We need a way of doing communication which is not based around operation-centric architecture.

0:57:58.377,0:58:00.910
Is the FCC going to do that for us? No.

0:58:00.910,0:58:06.077
You want to engage my critics. They'd bought decades of it, right?

0:58:06.077,0:58:12.593
So now we are in a situation in which if there is one man in this room doing ???Hendrix,

0:58:12.593,0:58:16.841
there is one man in this room who might help us to figure out what we're gonna do about this.

0:58:16.841,0:58:22.029
We must have Build-it-Yourself networking that really works.

0:58:22.029,0:58:24.678
Nick was a vissionary and he tried.

0:58:24.678,0:58:29.635
And if it had been ready then, we would be living in a different world now.

0:58:30.051,0:58:31.260
But it wasn't.

0:58:31.260,0:58:36.278
I think that technical failure of an honorable and important kind.

0:58:36.278,0:58:42.427
I think he conducted a vast innovative experiment and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams,

0:58:42.427,0:58:45.925
but the other guys run away with the profits as usual,

0:58:46.310,0:58:48.897
and the one peace we really really needed

0:58:48.897,0:58:54.911
which was communications technology that deprives the centralized network operator of power,

0:58:54.911,0:58:56.446
we weren't ready for it.

0:58:56.446,0:59:00.162
Now we have more closed network than open network,

0:59:00.162,0:59:06.278
more people using propietary closed ver??? of forms somewhat like the Internet,

0:59:06.278,0:59:07.631
than the Internet itself,

0:59:08.278,0:59:11.318
and we've lost big in that process.

0:59:11.595,0:59:14.429
Now it's a harder thing to deal with.

0:59:14.429,0:59:15.298
I don't....

0:59:16.329,0:59:19.211
I have the felling as in some any other ways in life

0:59:19.211,0:59:21.447
that I've been guided by my friend Lary Lessig

0:59:22.184,0:59:24.547
running for Congress is what I'm not going to do.

0:59:24.547,0:59:25.411
[Laughs]

0:59:25.411,0:59:30.412
Do you have another suggestion of how to engage critics Mike?

0:59:30.412,0:59:34.045
I'd love to take one. But that's not one that I wanna take.

0:59:34.045,0:59:36.972
[Michael Nelson] But the Federalists papers was a serious one.[br][Eben Moglen]Allright.

0:59:37.388,0:59:42.194
[Michael Nelson]It means something every week. With the critic point at your falacies and you could point out their falacies.

0:59:42.194,0:59:46.312
Allright. Let's do it. Let's find the ones who want to engage.

0:59:46.312,0:59:51.959
[Doc Shearls] We have 27 minutes left, so try to make it quick. It's not much time.

0:59:51.959,0:59:56.397
[Kery Nelson] My question would be, what do you mean by this World Wall??? that could serve as a Server,

0:59:56.397,0:59:59.729
and how close are we to the hardware and why do you want to have it.

0:59:59.729,1:00:05.263
Let me ??? the question by saying that in order to do the Onion Router,

1:00:06.478,1:00:09.746
you need to be able to have your own server.

1:00:09.746,1:00:14.466
In order to do anonymization you need to have your own server ability,

1:00:14.466,1:00:21.458
in order to build an network of our own within the network that is increasingly out of our control,

1:00:21.458,1:00:25.862
we need to be able to upload and download from our own servers,

1:00:25.862,1:00:31.881
I often wonder if the amount of energy being put into

1:00:31.881,1:00:39.781
prevention of file sharing out of all proportion to the economic value of any copyright infridgement that's going on,

1:00:39.781,1:00:47.330
is a sign that those in power understand that they must stop our ability to be our own nodes.

1:00:47.330,1:00:49.610
This is that ... the answer??? lies with you, thank you.

1:00:51.315,1:00:55.731
[Isaac Wilder] So, there are two things in play here.

1:00:55.731,1:00:58.896
There is logical peer to peer, overlay networks,

1:00:59.359,1:01:04.354
and there is what we call material peer to peer, physical material networks.

1:01:04.847,1:01:08.814
And there is a complex interplay of those forces.

1:01:09.014,1:01:16.539
So the FreedomBox tends to be a tool that participates in that logical network,

1:01:17.063,1:01:20.058
no matter what its connection to the Internet is,

1:01:20.797,1:01:25.442
and can serve as seed of a material, physical network.

1:01:25.781,1:01:29.765
Now the question was, how close are we, (and) what needs to be done.

1:01:29.765,1:01:34.576
As Eben said, the basic tools are there.

1:01:34.915,1:01:36.823
We know how to build overlay networks.

1:01:36.823,1:01:44.759
There's been incredible advances over the last decade in distributed computational systems.

1:01:45.698,1:01:53.074
So that's there. It really at this point is a matter of integrating those tools in a way that makes them usable.

1:01:53.782,1:01:59.865
And as developers, that's something, we are not always great at.

1:02:00.050,1:02:09.838
But it's certainly tractable, and we are at the point where these pieces just need to fit together.

1:02:10.085,1:02:17.150
The hardware is in production, and the software is in

1:02:18.166,1:02:22.317
not quite alpha stage I guess you would say, but there are building blocks there.

1:02:22.733,1:02:26.584
[Eben Moglen]The world is gonna fill up over there in the next 6 or 7 years

1:02:26.584,1:02:30.933
with small, very inexpensive, very powerful servers,

1:02:30.933,1:02:36.032
which are based around ARM chips and fit in a thing that fits in your hand,

1:02:36.032,1:02:41.711
and uses small amounts of power that you could really run of a battery or array.

1:02:41.835,1:02:50.194
The FreedomBox project, which we started talking about in early 2010 and got serious about in early 2011,

1:02:50.671,1:02:55.979
is basically a pro-privacy router stack based on Debian

1:02:56.194,1:02:59.119
that fits in servers like that.

1:02:59.596,1:03:02.714
James Vizil??? of the Open Internet Tools Project,

1:03:02.714,1:03:06.113
who used to work for me at Software Freedom Law Center has just left the room,

1:03:06.113,1:03:09.482
has one with him this morning he told me.

1:03:09.806,1:03:13.528
Isaac and hundreds of really good people around the world

1:03:13.528,1:03:17.632
including Jacob Appelbaum of Tor are working on FreedomBox.

1:03:17.632,1:03:21.948
The Tor project would be developing on FreedomBox stack in future.

1:03:23.024,1:03:30.047
Our goal is to put a small cheap object that replaces your wireless router

1:03:30.047,1:03:36.400
in as many places, homes, and businesses, and safe-deposit boxes in the world as we can get,

1:03:36.507,1:03:40.413
running software which makes secure peer to peer connections

1:03:40.413,1:03:47.714
between people whose identities have been assured in civil society in a web of trust like way,

1:03:47.914,1:03:54.814
and which can provide a soft migration away from centralized social networking tools

1:03:54.814,1:03:59.020
like Facebook and Flickr and so on,

1:03:59.282,1:04:05.232
towards systems which actually share only with the people you really mean to share with,

1:04:05.232,1:04:09.999
and which resist the effort of other people to see what's going on.

1:04:09.999,1:04:17.532
Some of that work is work we all use all the time based around Tunneling VPNs,and other simple stuff,

1:04:17.532,1:04:21.083
some of this is the Onion Router Infrastructure we are building,

1:04:21.083,1:04:27.948
some of it is efforts to increase our meshablitity by spreading a lot of stuff,

1:04:27.948,1:04:31.285
which is both base station and client around the world,

1:04:31.285,1:04:38.482
some of it is efforts to take advantage of skunkworks projects now inside the large IT vendors,

1:04:38.482,1:04:44.998
who also know that small ARM-based servers are gonna replace the heavy iron they've selling,

1:04:44.998,1:04:49.716
but the real net of it, bottom seed of it is

1:04:49.716,1:04:52.365
control your own server, keep your own logs,

1:04:52.365,1:04:59.584
do it in a away that resists tampering from external parties who aren't working in your interest,

1:04:59.584,1:05:04.967
create some robots who really do have the first law of robotics inside them, [Small Laugh]

1:05:04.967,1:05:10.806
and put them at the portals between private networks and the open public net.

1:05:10.883,1:05:18.366
If we do that, we begin as Isaac says to interleave the virtual peer to peerage of the net

1:05:18.366,1:05:23.376
with some actual hundreds of thousands and then millions, then tens of millions,

1:05:23.376,1:05:28.933
ultimately billions of peers that run in the interests of the people who own them.

1:05:28.933,1:05:29.812
[David ??? Event Organizer] Isaac and

1:05:29.966,1:05:37.591
[Kery Nelson] I would like to introduce my self. I'm Kery Nelson, ????? thank you.

1:05:38.899,1:05:44.217
[David ??? Event Organizer]Guys, Isaac and Eben, do you know Tim Sheppard?

1:05:44.217,1:05:45.617
[Isaac] We met last night.

1:05:45.617,1:05:54.685
Ok, good. The reason that I put these kinds of things together is that people like you can meet people like Tim.

1:05:54.685,1:06:01.951
Tim's MIT Phd thesis was on the practical,

1:06:03.074,1:06:06.845
the applied mathematics and for that matter the physics

1:06:06.845,1:06:14.376
of Mesh Networking and he is an early pioneer, this was 1991.

1:06:15.437,1:06:16.840
[Tim Sheppard?] 1995

1:06:16.840,1:06:22.530
[???] 95 ok. With David Clark at MIT. You guys really ought to talk.

1:06:22.884,1:06:25.634
[Eben] I still have location-based routing. I wish it could work.

1:06:25.634,1:06:27.151
[Small Laugh]

1:06:27.920,1:06:32.093
[Preston Ray] Hi Eben, my name is Preston Ray, I'm with the Open Technology Institute.

1:06:32.093,1:06:37.036
You mentioned towards the interview speech, about how the community people in this room, and the people,

1:06:37.036,1:06:42.919
the community we are part of, has the knowledge, understands the technology, grasps,

1:06:42.919,1:06:46.400
appreciates and evangelizes the philosophy that you are talking about,

1:06:46.400,1:06:49.719
to make free collaborative education to all,

1:06:49.719,1:06:55.345
to solve our world's problems of economic stagnation, innovation stagnation, austerity.

1:06:56.499,1:07:00.668
You know, we should recognize that we are also very much a community of privilege

1:07:00.668,1:07:06.846
in many ways, not only of our grasp of knowledge, and not only of our grasp, you know,

1:07:06.846,1:07:12.057
of the tools and everything that makes these things work, but the backgrounds we come from,

1:07:12.057,1:07:16.679
we are able to afford this conference, and many other privileges that I won't go into.

1:07:17.140,1:07:21.694
What do you feel our responsibility, a role is in,

1:07:22.926,1:07:25.617
bringing about the world you are talking about,

1:07:25.617,1:07:32.170
if we are indeed only 8,3% of the world we can't assume to represent the entire world,

1:07:32.170,1:07:35.369
but what is our role in that entire ...

1:07:35.369,1:07:37.269
[Eben Moglen] I doubt that we are 8.3% of the world.

1:07:37.269,1:07:40.868
What supprises we are 8.3% of Schleswig-Holstein [Laughs].

1:07:40.868,1:07:44.502
But let me say a little bit about.

1:07:44.502,1:07:52.202
I'm been engaged for several years now, with a community computing center located in a slum in Bangalore,

1:07:52.202,1:07:58.770
the original center was located in a cluster of people who have been living in that spot,

1:07:58.770,1:08:03.619
first as a untouchable people, now as merely poor people for very long time,

1:08:04.326,1:08:06.501
-2200 people with only one toilet-

1:08:07.808,1:08:12.828
Where some young communists working for the big IT firms in Bangalore,

1:08:12.828,1:08:19.064
fished out computer out of the garbage, put free software open, and opened a computer center in that slum.

1:08:19.725,1:08:26.863
And what came out was not so much people who wanted to learn how to use an office suite and get an office job.

1:08:27.371,1:08:33.420
It turned out they were painters using the GIMP to paint the pictures one pixel at a time,

1:08:33.420,1:08:36.856
and they were singers, and they were writers.

1:08:37.287,1:08:45.488
They were people whose communities had never had so much as the possibility of dreaming of any of those things,

1:08:45.488,1:08:47.959
but that didn't matter the kids, because they were kids.

1:08:48.022,1:08:52.762
They just did whatever and it was it has changed many people's lives.

1:08:54.501,1:08:57.745
My financial support for that activity has been rather minor,

1:08:57.745,1:09:02.910
because they'd not take more money that they can use in order to avoid corruption.

1:09:03.772,1:09:09.272
And my moral support has been, I'd say, grossly inadequate.

1:09:09.703,1:09:15.403
But nonetheless, working together, we've achieved some quite interesting things

1:09:15.403,1:09:20.287
which have changed dozens of lives and which have produced some teachers,

1:09:20.287,1:09:23.891
so they can go out and change a bunch of lives more.

1:09:23.891,1:09:28.722
I try to work really quite heavily in my classroom

1:09:28.722,1:09:35.638
to remind American Law Students who are genuinely sagging at an ease a little bit with all their debt,

1:09:35.638,1:09:40.750
to think of themselves as privileged in the way you say, and it's important to do.

1:09:40.750,1:09:45.246
But even more important maybe that recognizing our difference

1:09:45.246,1:09:50.208
from the other people in the world who have so much less is recognizing our similarity.

1:09:51.131,1:09:56.654
When given the opportunity, those Ainsteins in the street are just like our Ainstens.

1:09:56.654,1:10:03.029
There are better than us. Smarter, stronger, more capable of farthing??? out the mysteries of the universe.

1:10:03.721,1:10:08.473
We really need to begin at the stage of life that we are pretty equal. That is when we are children.

1:10:08.473,1:10:11.725
And we really need to make possible for those children

1:10:11.725,1:10:17.605
to experiment and learn and grow, regardless of their state of economic deprivation.

1:10:17.605,1:10:21.771
The beauty of the zero marginal cost revolution in human affairs,

1:10:21.771,1:10:26.507
is we can put all knowledge, all culture, all music, all art,

1:10:26.507,1:10:31.208
all everything that matters to the development of the human mind, everywhere, all the time.

1:10:31.655,1:10:40.015
In the Sudharshan Layout in Bangalore, 2200 people, one toilet, 1700 children and 914 mobile phones.

1:10:40.323,1:10:45.558
- Everyone of these mobile phone which is carried by the poorest of the poor in many societies,

1:10:45.558,1:10:49.198
and which it would be carried by everybody in the human race by 2050 -

1:10:49.198,1:10:52.672
Everyone of those devices can have every book, and every play,

1:10:52.672,1:10:57.511
and every piece of music, every equation, every experiment on it.

1:10:57.665,1:10:59.773
And every brain will grow.

1:10:59.773,1:11:04.632
Try that and we can worry less about deprivation and more about progress.

1:11:07.216,1:11:10.603
[Little Applause]

1:11:12.141,1:11:18.301
[Isaac Wilder] The will of humanity towards total connectedness is at manifest at this point.

1:11:19.040,1:11:24.751
And I said it before and I'd say it again, the fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this.

1:11:26.290,1:11:29.601
Will we be enslaved by our technology, or liberated by it?

1:11:30.525,1:11:37.867
As technologists, as those privileged enough to understand what exists now and what is coming,

1:11:39.437,1:11:43.951
aren't it be our responsibility as to making it sure that is liberation technology

1:11:43.951,1:11:45.864
instead of enslavement technology?

1:11:46.033,1:11:50.429
And I think everyone in this room understands that but,

1:11:51.644,1:11:53.752
the priviledge does come with responsibility.

1:11:54.060,1:11:57.059
And it's to so sound that alarm.

1:11:59.705,1:12:01.462
[Doc Shearls] Look it over here.

1:12:01.462,1:12:03.774
[Nick Grossman] Hi, Nick Grossman from MIT Media Lab.

1:12:03.774,1:12:09.875
At first, I thought your thoughts about why cities are innovative and why interesting thing happen,

1:12:09.875,1:12:15.675
why people go there and how autonomy.... What autonomy is and why that matters.

1:12:15.675,1:12:21.076
Very compelling, super-relevant Internet, and I think it's a metaphor that will make gain in momentum's.

1:12:21.076,1:12:23.615
So, thank you for laying that out. And I also agree...

1:12:23.615,1:12:29.023
So getting back to how we convince our governments to go in this general direction.

1:12:29.023,1:12:35.108
I agree that innovation is a very powerful frame.My question is the...

1:12:36.031,1:12:39.992
the line between full truly open innovation , you are talking about it,

1:12:39.992,1:12:41.673
and sort of semi-open innovation as new-ons???.

1:12:41.673,1:12:44.158
I think everyone in this room gets it.

1:12:44.158,1:12:45.292
But it's easy to say:

1:12:45.292,1:12:47.860
“Look at how many apps you can build on the facebook platform,

1:12:47.860,1:12:52.045
or look at how many, you know, how many things on the iPhone platform, and that's innovation.

1:12:52.492,1:12:57.365
And when you are talking to … whoever, you know that … there is a distinction there.

1:12:57.365,1:13:04.959
And so, what do you see is the best way illustrate that and try and walk the line between …

1:13:05.557,1:13:11.614
you know ... fully open and kind of open and is that … is possible to do that?

1:13:11.614,1:13:14.877
[Eben Moglen] Well you know we went down this road before.

1:13:14.877,1:13:19.674
Because as The Free Software Movement was gaining strength,

1:13:19.674,1:13:26.461
Microsoft was creating that enormous ecosystem of Windows Developers, of which it was justly proud.

1:13:27.015,1:13:30.632
They were justly proud because they gave them control of the API,

1:13:30.632,1:13:33.683
but the developers were justly proud of the software they wrote.

1:13:33.683,1:13:37.232
They were only two things … [Laugher]

1:13:37.232,1:13:40.713
One was it was totally dependent on the Microsoft Ecosystem,

1:13:40.713,1:13:43.649
which as ???Richard Claxer said was K-Mart software.

1:13:44.433,1:13:48.940
And the other was that they were hampered by the fact that they have to invent everything themselves.

1:13:49.464,1:13:53.853
In order to get in, you had to buy the SDK and then you were alone in your garage,

1:13:53.853,1:13:55.865
trying to make something great.

1:13:55.865,1:14:01.665
But the whole system have been biased in such a way that you couldn't share and you couldn't learn.

1:14:01.665,1:14:09.105
And so it didn't turn out to be as good as the C shell, that created a generation of computer scientists.

1:14:09.105,1:14:14.915
So they got us a bunch of Windows developers, they made a bunch of stuff and we went fine.

1:14:14.915,1:14:19.222
And now the Microsoft is closing the code museum and freezing them out.

1:14:19.775,1:14:23.265
That's the problem, isn't, it with proprietary innovation.

1:14:23.265,1:14:27.051
It runs according to the strength of the business model and then it fails.

1:14:27.051,1:14:32.417
The reason we beat Microsoft was (that) we were even less subject to evolutionary data,

1:14:32.417,1:14:34.189
and they were and they knew it.

1:14:34.235,1:14:38.560
That's what the strength was of the GPL, and I'm not so happy

1:14:38.560,1:14:44.565
if ??? decides that it doesn't need to keep some copyleft stuff at the middle of it.

1:14:44.565,1:14:48.434
Because it closes the end on innovation.

1:14:48.434,1:14:50.265
The important thing about innovation,

1:14:50.265,1:14:55.306
-and we say it when we are in places which I have the grandeur of MIT to say it in -

1:14:55.306,1:14:59.000
is, “it's a long run business. Not a short run business.

1:14:59.185,1:15:02.767
Proprietary software development whether for the Windows Ecosystem

1:15:02.767,1:15:06.809
or the iOS Ecosystem is a game of base hits, not home runs.

1:15:07.117,1:15:10.884
You can put a neat app on a thing and it's neat and we really love it,

1:15:10.884,1:15:13.825
and why don't you share it with us so we can do better?

1:15:13.825,1:15:15.796
Oh, the SDK terms this,

1:15:15.796,1:15:19.300
and the App Store terms that and no sharing allowed

1:15:19.300,1:15:21.934
because Steve Jobs slept here once,

1:15:21.934,1:15:27.402
and nobody else can sleep in any bet he ever slept in, unless they have his permission and all that stuff.

1:15:27.402,1:15:32.117
It's OK, it's B+ innovation, but we can do better.

1:15:32.117,1:15:36.734
And the point of being at experts or inspirers of innovation

1:15:36.734,1:15:41.552
is to help those bright young people to do stuff that lasts for the long term.

1:15:41.706,1:15:44.585
And you can explain in that frame,

1:15:44.585,1:15:47.653
why the political economy of closed end innovation

1:15:47.653,1:15:51.324
isn't really where you want to put your good idea when you are 17.

1:15:51.324,1:15:55.867
If Jimmy Wales have gone to work for Encyclopedia Brittanica or Compton,

1:15:55.867,1:16:02.687
I'm sure they'd be paying him a decent salary , and that's become what innovation was supposed to be.

1:16:02.687,1:16:04.114
It gets you a job.

1:16:04.668,1:16:08.491
That's when we are really in trouble. Thomas Edison didn't want a job.

1:16:08.491,1:16:11.218
[comment in backround]

1:16:11.218,1:16:12.062
Fair Enough.

1:16:12.386,1:16:15.591
I'm not going to speak in favor of mister Edison as an individual.

1:16:15.591,1:16:16.939
I'm no in speak...[Laugh]

1:16:16.939,1:16:23.334
I'm only going to speak in favor of the idea of innovation is for the long run, and that's what counts.

1:16:23.334,1:16:29.768
And if you go to a guy who sells you your life back in return for your idea, that's not long run.

1:16:33.335,1:16:37.088
[Doc Shearls] So we had 10 minutes here, and we've got I think five people left, so John quick.

1:16:37.504,1:16:41.255
[John Platkin]I'll be quick as I see Chris Savage and Harold. I want to hear their questions as well.

1:16:41.379,1:16:47.058
John Platcik from MIC???, once again, even great talk, always I enjoy it here when you talk.

1:16:47.058,1:16:49.151
A couple unrelated points.

1:16:49.151,1:16:54.403
One, when we talked about convenience vs control,

1:16:54.403,1:16:56.487
you know, everybody is using the wireless microphone,

1:16:56.487,1:17:02.351
they come out of that is spectrum, everyone should be aware of in this room at least.

1:17:02.351,1:17:07.835
But more, I want to give you a chance to talk and end in more of an optimistic note.

1:17:07.835,1:17:15.451
I see that the Maker Movement and all the hardware hacking that's going on, as tremendously optimistic for the future.

1:17:15.451,1:17:18.504
I see... you are in a maker fair and you see kids,

1:17:19.504,1:17:22.131
doing exactly what you described, playing around.

1:17:22.485,1:17:25.875
How can we get your message sort of...

1:17:26.737,1:17:28.836
you don't want to mess with that fooling around,

1:17:28.836,1:17:35.139
but somehow direct it to understanding the larger ecosysstem that they eventually gonna live in,

1:17:35.139,1:17:36.529
with those innovations.

1:17:36.698,1:17:38.490
[Eben Moglen] I don't know. I'll learn from you.

1:17:39.506,1:17:43.764
[Doc Shearls] Actually I would like to touch a??? point and a prior point.

1:17:43.764,1:17:48.487
I was remembering, when Eben was talking about, kids.

1:17:48.487,1:17:55.758
You know, what I did when I was a kid was I loved radio and I loved to ??? screwdrivers, and I was a Ham radio operator.

1:17:56.220,1:18:02.319
You know, there was no computing in 1961 that a kid could do, but I hacked on radios.

1:18:02.319,1:18:07.548
And I just wanna call Dwayne Hendrix to the mike for a second to talk about,

1:18:08.087,1:18:13.450
what we were talking about at the Hall about opportunities with amateur radio that still exist.

1:18:16.972,1:18:20.177
[Dwayne Hendrix] Thanks. Amateur radio has been around for about 100 years now.

1:18:20.470,1:18:26.602
And by treaty, it's in most countries on the planet.

1:18:27.156,1:18:30.242
I can take my amateur radio privileges from the US

1:18:30.242,1:18:33.681
and go to all those countries, and operate just like I was here.

1:18:35.020,1:18:40.628
Eben talked about (the) need to have free access to spectrum with no middle man, ok?

1:18:40.936,1:18:44.885
The amateur radio service is just that, ok?

1:18:45.270,1:18:47.114
There is no FCC in the middle.

1:18:47.638,1:18:53.582
You can create wireless devices, you self certify them, ok?

1:18:53.998,1:18:59.850
And as I said, you can take them to other places on the planet and operate them without asking anybody.

1:19:00.389,1:19:04.623
In fact, with the licence class I have, I can put a

1:19:04.623,1:19:10.186
communications platform in orbit without asking permission of the FCC.

1:19:10.432,1:19:11.840
That is powerful.

1:19:12.516,1:19:18.907
So there is a lot of misapprehensions and misunderstandings about what amateur radio is about,

1:19:18.907,1:19:22.983
perpetrated by organizations like American Radio Relay League.

1:19:23.522,1:19:27.508
It's all about innovation under your own control.

1:19:27.755,1:19:32.940
Gives you complete access to spectrum, as long as you don't use it for commersial purposes.

1:19:33.371,1:19:35.250
So let me just leave you with one thought.

1:19:35.789,1:19:41.685
Ten years ago, I was working for a company called COM21 the founder of which was Paul Baran,

1:19:41.855,1:19:44.885
who is sort of known as the Grand Father of the Internet, right?

1:19:45.192,1:19:53.280
Paul basically said: “Look what I've learned is that I look at all these people around building proprietary radios, ok?,

1:19:53.603,1:19:54.947
and they come and go.

1:19:55.409,1:20:00.039
If you gonna create a business look at mass produced radios.

1:20:00.546,1:20:03.425
And use those and more of them to your own needs.

1:20:03.887,1:20:05.780
There is two mass produced radios today.

1:20:06.057,1:20:08.056
WiFi and Cable modems.

1:20:08.672,1:20:11.278
With a little construct called a transverter,

1:20:11.740,1:20:13.907
-a transverter also known as a linear translator-

1:20:13.907,1:20:18.040
you could take the inputs and outputs of a cable modem or any wifi device

1:20:18.040,1:20:20.891
and put it anywhere in the radio spectrum.

1:20:21.614,1:20:24.938
And couple that with an amateur radio licence

1:20:24.938,1:20:32.717
and now you have cheap hardware that you can go anywhere and not ask permission of anybody, ok?

1:20:33.271,1:20:40.379
So, look into this. I mean, Amateur radio, basically output devices that

1:20:41.056,1:20:43.463
.... you don't have to have an amateur licence to use it.

1:20:43.463,1:20:51.758
I mean, under my amateur radio authority I can have as many transmitters operating in the US territory without...

1:20:51.758,1:20:53.840
and have people just like you use them,

1:20:53.840,1:20:57.448
all I have to do is to be able to turn on and off the device,ok?

1:20:57.772,1:21:03.534
When I was working at COM21 we littered the bay area with cable modems that have transverters

1:21:03.534,1:21:07.190
and have a wireless Internet network, ok?,

1:21:07.974,1:21:11.574
(and) that we had a lot of people use it, ok?,

1:21:11.758,1:21:15.507
so we didn't get any money for it, we didn't charge anybody for Internet access,

1:21:15.799,1:21:19.342
but we provided innovation of a different nature.

1:21:19.558,1:21:20.391
That's it.

1:21:20.899,1:21:22.304
[Doc Shearls] Also thanks, thanks Dwayne.

1:21:22.304,1:21:23.417
[Applause]

1:21:23.417,1:21:25.405
[Doc Shearls]Yeah. Go.

1:21:25.929,1:21:28.457
[Harold Phelp]Harold Phelp ??? with public knowledge.

1:21:30.734,1:21:34.575
First of all, I have to say that maybe I'm alone in this

1:21:34.575,1:21:40.097
but I tend to think of this more as the ???? speech rather than the “I have a dream speech”.[Laughs]

1:21:41.974,1:21:50.352
And in those small part, because I'll notice who kicked butt on the field of Ozonecorp ???.

1:21:51.522,1:21:58.706
But the one thing that I did want to raise and ask is if you have seen

1:21:58.706,1:22:03.264
Corry Doctorow's recent pissed on the failure of geek politics.

1:22:03.741,1:22:05.056
And this is a …

1:22:07.641,1:22:14.553
I'll confess to my own self interest as Washington Insider focused on the FCC,

1:22:14.553,1:22:20.376
but I just wanna to stress and ask folks like you who are out there

1:22:20.376,1:22:27.237
to encourage engagement in these processes,

1:22:28.176,1:22:34.962
and especially when the temptation to despair about getting productive results is so high.

1:22:35.809,1:22:39.283
But also point out the posiv aspect of this is …

1:22:39.807,1:22:41.009
-Dwayne actually focused this-

1:22:41.501,1:22:47.204
there are actually a lot of opportunities that are here and around us,

1:22:47.204,1:22:51.851
and I really think that there is a lot that could be done,

1:22:53.389,1:23:03.411
as has been done now already with a number of folks who in trying to organize a more focused agenda,

1:23:04.427,1:23:10.746
that would be a positive, legislative and regulatory agenda, rather than a defensive one.

1:23:11.577,1:23:15.062
And I just wanna put that out there,

1:23:15.062,1:23:24.776
as well as any interest in working with anybody who is interested in taking up arms here.

1:23:29.608,1:23:36.560
Hi, ???? .

1:23:36.560,1:23:39.039
Thanks for bringing up the Ham radio issue.

1:23:39.039,1:23:42.053
That's really very very interesting field right now,

1:23:42.053,1:23:48.816
especially since we got ten box STRs in the form of TVB-T receivers.

1:23:49.525,1:23:52.085
Just take them out and reprogram them. It's very interesting.

1:23:53.301,1:23:56.311
And one other thing for Eben …

1:23:56.787,1:24:00.729
when you were talking about OLPC, sort of I had a small dejavu.

1:24:01.699,1:24:05.389
I was there at that time, when they were doing their mesh research,

1:24:05.928,1:24:10.507
I was flying from Boston to Europe, and I was couple of time was telling them,

1:24:10.923,1:24:14.150
we got these huge networks there we got it already done,

1:24:14.535,1:24:19.562
and they were still working on the specific ???? implementation which just failed.

1:24:19.946,1:24:24.002
So I would like to deposit the thought that we should cooperate more closely,

1:24:24.002,1:24:30.190
because we have quite some experience, and it might save us 8 years of R&D. Thanks.

1:24:32.283,1:24:36.119
[Doc Shearls]OK. We have 2 minutes and 33 seconds left and the musicians are here so here's Chris...

1:24:37.058,1:24:38.346
[Chris Savage]Chris Savage, Random Medicine.

1:24:39.962,1:24:45.137
I agree with Harold. This was not quite a “I have a Dream Speech” was more like “Saint Christmas Day”

1:24:45.137,1:24:45.786
[Little Laugh]

1:24:45.786,1:24:50.677
and I would like to ask you and the folks would ask themselves the following question.

1:24:50.677,1:24:53.976
Assuming that you've laid down the battlelines correctly,

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what would Gandhi do?[br]

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[Doc Shearls]Would Gandhi battle?

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[Backround speech]

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[Eben Moglen] Well, then I'm in total agree with you.

1:25:16.454,1:25:18.725
I'm uncomfortable with all the comparisons.

1:25:18.725,1:25:23.186
So let me put them aside and say that

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my part of this work ugly??? enough is just making lawyers. Right?

1:25:30.044,1:25:30.650
[Laughs]

1:25:30.650,1:25:33.745
That's what I actually do for a living.

1:25:33.745,1:25:38.759
And before we all get grunt about it, what that really means is,

1:25:39.021,1:25:45.302
teaching young people who have enormous opportunities to change society,

1:25:45.302,1:25:50.020
that they shouldn't go and take jobs pushing corporate finance paper instead.

1:25:50.405,1:25:58.680
I'm not actually trying in my earnest suggestions to the contrary of what I'm standing,

1:25:58.680,1:26:01.038
I'm not trying to wield any power.

1:26:01.683,1:26:03.067
I do want to talk to people,

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and I admit that bad happens when you talk to people in large groups for long periods of time,

1:26:07.805,1:26:10.825
which is actually not terribly productive,

1:26:10.825,1:26:13.538
but what I think we are trying to do,

1:26:13.538,1:26:19.488
and here you question about Mahatma Gandhi seems relevant to me,

1:26:19.488,1:26:23.128
I'm trying to make the people to believe that they are the solution to the problem.

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I'm trying to get people to believe that it's in their hands, not in hands of some mysterious power far away.

1:26:30.504,1:26:32.426
We got to win this close up.

1:26:33.088,1:26:36.478
You must have to AsianCorp motiv then that's the one to have.

1:26:36.771,1:26:39.562
This is not going to be dealt with at a distance.

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This is actually done in those muddy slipping and falling places where all this goes on.

1:26:45.395,1:26:48.723
If Harold thinks that we can do it at the FCC, that's great.

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I'm not sure that I believe him, but he can, if I can.

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What I'm really asking is for all of us to recognize,

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we are gonna have to talk to language of political economy and government policy for a while.

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We've talked the language of licencing and how to make Free Software, and that has run out.

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So now the time has come to talk about how we save societies itches,by scratching them with freedom.

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And if we can do that, then we'll win.

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Thanks everybody.

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[Applause]