F2C2012: Eben Moglen keynote - "Innovation under Austerity"

Eben Moglen keynote - "Innovation under Austerity" at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 22 2012.

Discussants: Doc Searls. Isaac Wilder

Audio: http://bit.ly/f2cmoglenaudio

http://freedom-to-connect.net/

[David Isenberg] I've asked Doc Searls and Isaac Wilder to come up and sit with Eben and continue the discussion.

Eben Moglen. Thank You. [Applause]

[Eben Moglen] Thank you. it's a pleasure to be here, and to see so many friends.

I'm very grateful to David for the invitation, it's a privilege to be here.

I'm going to talk of mostly

about a subject almost as geeky as the stuff we all talk about all the time,namely political economy.

I'm going to try and make it less snooze-worthy than it sometimes seems to be,

but you'll forgive me I'm sure for starting fairly far from OpenSSL,

we'll get closer as time goes by.

The developed economies around the world, all of them now,

are beginning to experience a fundamentally similar and very depressing condition.

They are required to impose austerity because levels of private debt have gummed up the works

and the determination of the owners of capital to take vast risks with other peoples money

have worked out extremely badly for the last half decade.

And so austerity is the inevitable and politically damaging position for all the governments in the developed world,

and some of those governments have begun to slip into a death spiral,

in which the need to impose austerity and reduce public investment and welfare support for the young

is harming economic growth, which prevents the austerity from having its desirable consequences.

Instead of bad asset values being worked off and growth resuming,

we are watching as the third largest economy in the world, the European Union,

finds itself at the very verge of a currency collapse and a lost generation,

which would have a profoundly depressing effects on the entire global economy.

For the policy-makers

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

for the policy-makers in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand,

how do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity?

They do not know the answer to this question

and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.

Marginal parties in several very highly developed and thoughtful societies

are beginning to attract substantial numbers of votes,

and threatening the very stability of the economic planners' capacity to solve,

or to attempt to solve, the problem of innovation under austerity.

This is not good news for anybody.

This is not good for anybody.

We have no opportunity to cheer for this outcome,

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

it is partly the result of the political cowardice that gave them too much room to swing their cats.

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

There are very few people in the world who know how to have innovation under austerity.

We are they.

We have produced innovation under austerity for the last generation

and not only did we produce pretty good innovation

we've produced innovation that all the other smart rich people took most of the credit for.

Most of the growth that occurred

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

was with innovation we produced for them.

So now, despite the really bad circumstances which we too can deplore,

because the unemployment is my graduating law students, your children,

and all those other young people whose lives are being harmed for good by current bad economic circumstances.

The people beginning their careers now will suffer substantial wage losses throughout their lifetimes.

Their children will get a less good start in life because of what is happening now,

we cannot be pleased about this.

But we have a very substantial political opportunity.

Because we do have the answer

to the most important question pushing all the policy-makers in the developed world right now.

That means we have something very important to say and I came here this morning primarily

to begin the discussion about precisely how we should say it.

And I want to present a working first draft of our argument,

I say "our" because I look around the room and I see it's us here this morning.

Our argument, about what to do with the quandary the world is in.

Innovation under austerity is not produced

by collecting lots of money and paying it to innovation intermediaries.

One of the most important aspects of 21st century political economy

is that the process we call disintermediation,

when we're begin jargony about it, is ruthless, consistent, and relentless.

Television is melting.

I don't need to tell you that, you know already.

Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.

Amazon's lousy little I-will-let-you-read-some-books-unless-I-decide-to-take-them-back machine

is transforming publishing by eliminating the selective power of the book publishers,

much as Mr. Jobs almost destroyed the entire global music industry under the pretense of saving it.

A task his ghost is already performing for the magazine publishers as you can see.

Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the net,

is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy.

It proves itself all the time.

Somebody's going to win a Nobel Prize in economics for describing in formal terms the nature of disintermediation.

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

health insurers in the United States owing to political pathology, and the financial industry.

Health insurers in the United States may be able to capitalize on the continuing political pathology

to remain failing and expensive intermediaries for a while longer.

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

The consequence of which is that throughout the economic system, as the policy-maker observes it,

the reality that disintermediation happens and you can't stop it

becomes a guiding light in the formation of national industrial policy.

So we need to say it's true about innovation also.

The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web.

An invention less than 8000 days old.

That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.

We will see more of it.

The nature of that process, that innovation, both fuels disintermediation,

by allowing all sorts of human contacts to occur without intermediaries, buyers, sellers, agents, and controllers.

And poses a platform in which a war over the depth and power of social control goes on,

a subject I'll come back to in a few minutes.

For now what I want to call attention to is the crucial fact that the World Wide Web is itself

a result of disintermediated innovation.

What Tim first did at CERN was not the Web as we know it now,

the Web as we know it now was made by the disintermediated innovation of an enormous number of individual people.

I look back on what I wrote about the future of personal homepages in 1995,

and I see pretty much what I thought then would happen happening,

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

Of course, like all other innovation there were unintended consequences.

The browser made the Web very easy to read.

Though we built Apache, though we built the browsers,

though we built enormous numbers of things on top of Apache and the browsers,

we did not make the Web easy to write.

So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write,

and created a man in the middle attack on human civilization,

[Little Laughs]

which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm.

But that's the intermediary innovation that we should be concerned about.

We made everything possible including, regrettably, PHP,

and then intermediaries for innovation turned it into the horror that is Facebook.

This will not turn out, as we can already see from the stock market result,

to be a particularly favourable form of social innovation.

It's going to enrich a few people.

The government of Abu Dhabi,

a Russian thug with a billion dollars already,

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

and a few other relics of 20th century misbehavior.

But the reality of the story underneath is,

if we'd had a little bit more disintermediated innovation,

if we had made running your own web-server very easy,

if we had explained to people from the very beginning how important the logs are,

and why you shouldn't let other people keep them for you,

we would be in a rather different state right now.

The next Facebook should never happen.

It's intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people.

Which is not say that social networking shouldn't happen,

it shouldn't happen with a man in the middle attack built into it.

Everybody in this room knows that, the question is how do we teach everybody else.

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

how do we explain to them?

And here we begin to divide the conversation into two important parts.

One, what do we know about how to achieve innovation under austerity?

Two, what prevents governments from agreeing with us about that?

So let me present first my first draft of the positive case for innovation under austerity,

it's called "We Made The Cloud".

Everybody understands this in this room too.

The very point about what's happening to information technology in the world right now,

has to do with scaling up our late 20th century work.

We created the idea that we could share operating systems and all the rest of the commoditizable stack on top of them.

We did this using the curiosity of young people.

That was the fuel, not venture capital.

We had been at it for 15 years, and our stuff was already running everywhere,

before venture capital or even industrial capital raised by IT giants came towards us.

It came towards us not because innovation needed to happen,

but because innovation had already happened,

and they needed to monetize it.

That was an extremely positive outcome, I have nothing bad to say about that.

But the nature of that outcome, indeed the history as we lived it and as other can now study it,

will show how innovation under austerity occurred.

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

that's historically correct.

But there's more than that to say.

What we need to say is that that curiosity of young people could be harnessed

because all of the computing devices in ordinary day to day use were hackable.

And so young people could actually hack on what everybody used.

That made it possible for innovation to occur,

where it can occur, without friction, which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital.

This is happening now elsewhere in the world as it happened in the United States in the 1980s.

Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world hacking on laptops.

Hacking on servers.

Hacking on general purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their individual itches,

technical, social, career, and just plain ludic itches.

"I wanna do this it would be neat."

Which is the primary source of the innovation which drove all

of the world's great economic expansion in the last 10 years.All of it.

Trillions of dollars of electronic commerce.

Those of you old enough to remember when fighting Public Key Encryption tooth and nail,

was the United States government's policy

will remember how hard they fought,

to prohibit 3.8 trillion dollars worth of electronic commerce from coming into existence in the world.

We were (supposedly) proponents of nuclear terrorism and pedophilia in the early 1990s,

and all the money that they earned

in campaign donations and private equity profits and all the rest of it,

is owing to the globalization of commerce we made possible,

with the technology they wanted to send our clients to jail for making.

That demonstrates neatly I think, to the next generation of policy-makers

how thoroughly their adherence to the received wisdom

is likely to contribute to the death spiral they now fear they're going to get into.

And it should embolden us to point out once again that the way innovation really happens

is that you provide young people with opportunities to create

on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world, and share the results.

When Richard Stallman wrote the call at the university in Suffolk??? for the universal encyclopedia,

when he and Jimmy Wales and I were all much younger than we are now,

it was (considered) a frivolous idea.

It has now transformed the life of every literate person in the world.

And it will continue to do so.

The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons,

by the Free Software Movement,

by Free Culture,

which is reflected in the Web in the Wikipedia,

in all the Free Software operating systems now running everything,

even the insides of all those locked-down vampiric Apple things I see around the room.

All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way.

Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent now completely.

Increasingly, all around the world the actual computing artifacts of daily life

for human individual beings are being made so you can't hack them.

The computer science laboratory in every twelve year old's pocket is being locked-down.

When we went through the anti-lockdown phase of the GPL 3 negotiations in the middle of last decade,

it was somehow believed that the primary purpose for which Mr. Stallman and I were

engaged in pressing everybody against lock-down had something to do with bootlegging movies.

And we kept saying, this is not the Free Movie Foundation.

We don't care about that.

We care about protecting people's right to hack what they own.

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

you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.

That's still true.

And it is more important now precisely because very few people thought we were right then,

and didn't exert themselves to support that point of view,

and now you have Microsoft saying we won't allow third-party browsers on ARM-based Windows RT devices.

And you have the ghost of Mr. Jobs

trying to figure out how to prevent even a free tool chain from existing in relation to iOS,

and you have a world in which increasingly the goal of the network operators

is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment

that she can't learn from, can't study, can't understand, can't whet her teeth on,

can't do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.

And most of the so-called innovation in the world, in our sector,

now goes into creating IT for network operators that improves no technology for users.

Telecomms innovation in the world has basically ceased.

And it will not revive so long as it is impossible to harness the forms of innovation that really work under austerity.

This has a second-order consequence of enormous importance.

Innovation under austerity occurs in the first-order

because the curiosity of young people is harnessed to the improvement of the actual circumstances of daily life.

The second-order consequence is (that) populations becomes more educated.

Disintermediation is beginning to come to higher education in the United States,

which means it is beginning to come to higher education around the world.

We currently have two models.

Coursera, is essentially the googlization of higher education, spun-off from Stanford as a for-profit entity,

using closed software and proprietary educational resources.

MITx, which has now edX through the formation of the coalition with Harvard University,

is essentially the free world answer.

Similar online scalable curriculum for higher education

delivered over Free Software using free education resources.

We have an enormous stake in the outcome of that competition.

And it behooves all of us to put as much of our energy as we can

behind the solutions which depend upon free courseware everybody can use, modify and redistribute,

and educational materials based on the same political economy.

Every society currently trying to reclaim innovation

for the purpose of restarting economic growth under conditions of austerity needs more education,

deliverable more widely at lower cost,

which shapes young minds more effectively to create new value in their societies.

This will not be accomplished without precisely the forms of social learning we pioneered.

We said from the beginning that Free Software is the world's most advanced technical educational system.

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

by reading what is fully available and by experimenting with it, and sharing the consequences freely.

True computer science.

Experimentation, hypothesis formation, more experimentation, more knowledge for the human race.

We needed to expand that into other areas of culture,

and great heroes like Jimmy Wales and Larry Lessig laid out infrastructure for that to occur,

we now need to get governments to understand how to push it further.

The Information Society Directorate of the European Commission issued a report 18 months ago,

in which they said that they could scan 1/6th of all the books in European libraries

for the cost of 100 km of roadway.

That meant, and it is still true, that for the cost of 600 km of road,

in an economy that builds thousands of kilometers of roadway every year,

every book in all European libraries could be available to the entire human race, it should be done.

[shout of "Copyright" from audience]

Remember that most of those books are in the public domain, before you shout copyright at me.

Remember that the bulk of what constitutes human learning was not made recently,

before you shout the copyright at me.

We should move to a world in which all knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available.

If we don't, we will stunt the innovation which permits further growth.

That's a social requirement.

The copyright bargain is not immutable.

It is merely convenient.

We do not have to commit suicide culturally or intellectually

in order to maintain a bargain which does not even relevantly apply

to almost all of important human knowledge in most fields.

Plato is not owned by anybody.

So here we are, asking ourselves what the educational systems of the 21st century will be like,

and how they will socially distribute knowledge across the human race.

I have a question for you.

How many of the Einsteins who ever lived were allowed to learn physics?

A couple.

How many of the Shakespeares who ever lived, lived and died without learning to read and write?

Almost all of them.

With 7 billion people in the world right now, 3 billion of them are children;

how many Einsteins do you want to throw away today?

The universalization of access to knowledge,

is the single-most important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet.

Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout "copyright".

So we are now looking at the second-order consequence

of an understanding of how to conduct innovation under austerity.

Expand access to the materials that create the ability to learn,

adapt technology to permit the scientists below age 20 to conduct their experiments and share their results,

permit the continuing growth of the information technology universe we created,

by sharing, over the last quarter century,

and we'd begin to experience something like the higher rates of innovation available,

despite massive decreases in social investment occurring because of austerity.

We also afford young people an opportunity to take their economic and professional destinies

more into their own hands,

an absolute requirement if we are to have social and political stability in the next generation.

Nobody should be fooled

about the prospects for social growth in societies where 50 percent of the people under 30 are unemployed.

This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs.

Everybody sees that.

Governments are collectively throwing up their hands about what to do about the situation.

Hence, the rapidity with which, in systems of proportional representation,

young people are giving up on established political parties.

When the Pirates can take 8.3% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein,

it is already clear that young people realize that established political policy-making

is not going to be directed at their future economic welfare.

And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist

that internet freedom and an end to snooping and control

is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.

Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy

with whom we are directly in touch.

That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.

Young people around the world whether they are my law students about to get a law license,

or computer engineers about to begin their practices,

or artists, or musicians, or photographers,

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

A challenge to which their elders would not have risen successfully in 1955,

but we are new generation of human beings working under new circumstances, and those rules have changed.

They know the rules have changed. The indignados in every square in Spain know the rules have changed.

It's their governments that don't know.

Which brings us I will admit to back to this question of anonymity, or rather, personal autonomy.

One of the really problematic elements in teaching young people,

at least the young people I teach, about privacy,

is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things.

Privacy means secrecy, sometimes.

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

Privacy means anonymity, sometimes.

That means messages are not obscured, but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscured.

And there is a third aspect of privacy which in my classroom I call autonomy.

It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make

are unaffected by others' access to secret or anonymous communications.

There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth.

It isn't because bankers live there.

Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth.

The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer,

is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being.

Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village,

and the social control of the farm.

"How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?"

was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States.

The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity

and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living.

We are closing it.

Some years ago,

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

Two on two.

On one side Jamie Gorelick, then the Deputy Attorney General of the United States,

and Stewart Baker, then as now

at Steptoe & Johnson when he isn't in the United States government making horrendous social policy.

On the other side, Danny Weitzner, now in the White House, and me.

And we spent the afternoon talking back and forth about whether we should have to escrow our

keys with the United States government,

whether the clipper chip was going to work and many other very interesting subjects

now as obsolete as Babylonia.

And after it was all over, we walked across the Harvard campus for dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club

and on the way across the campus Jamie Gorelick said to me:

"Eben, on the basis of nothing more than your public statements this afternoon

I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations."

In 1995 that was a joke.

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

but it was a joke,

and we all laughed because everybody knew you couldn't do that.

So we ate our dinner,

and the table got cleared and all the plates went away, and the port and walnuts got scattered around, and

Stewart Baker looked up and said "alright, we'll let our hair down",

and he had none then and he has none now,

but "we'll let our hair down" Stewart said,

"we're not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmerman.

We've spent decades in a holding action against Public Key Encryption

it's worked pretty well but it's almost over now, we're gonna let it happen."

And then he looked around the table and he said,

"but nobody here cares about anonymity do they?"

And a cold chill went up my spine.

And I thought, "OK, Stewart, I understand how it is.

You're going to let there be Public Key Encryption because the bankers are going to need it.

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

and I'm going to spend those 20 years trying to stop you."

So far I must say from my friend Mr. Baker has been doing better than I had hoped,

and I have been doing even worse than I had feared.

Partly because of the thug in a hoodie, and partly for other reasons.

We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to be alone.

We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to do your own thinking,

in your own place, in your own way without anybody knowing.

Somebody in this room just proved a couple of minutes ago

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

Because one of the browsers is linked to his browsing history.

Prices, offers, commodities, opportunities,

are now being based upon the data mining of everything.

A senior government official in this government said to me after the United States changed its rules

about how long they keep information on everybody about whom nothing is suspected

- you all do know about that right?

Rainy Wednesday on the 21st of March, long after the close of business,

Department of Justice and the DNI, that's the Director of National Intelligence,

put out a joint press release announcing minor changes in the Ashcroft rules,

including a minor change that says that all personally identifiable information in government databases

at the National Center for Counter-Terrorism that are based around people of whom nothing is suspected,

will no longer be retained as under the Ashcroft rules for a maximum of 180 days,

the maximum has now been changed to 5 years, which is infinity.

In fact I told my students in my classroom,

the only reason they said 5 years was they couldn't get the sideways eight into the font [Laughs]

for the press release,so they used an approximation.

So I was talking to a senior official of this government about that outcome

and he said well you know we've come to realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States.

That's how we're going to connect new information to old information.

I said let's just talk about the constitutional implications of this for a moment.

You're talking about taking us from the society we have always known,

which we quaintly refer to as a free society,

to a society in which the United States government keeps a list of everybody every American knows.

So if you're going to take us from what we used to call a free society

to a society in which the US government keeps a list of everybody every American knows,

what should be the constitutional procedure for doing this?

Should we have, for example, a law?

He just laughed.

Because of course they didn't need a law.

They did it with a press release on a rainy Wednesday night after everybody went home,

and you live there now.

Whether it is possible to have innovation under conditions of complete despotism

is an interesting question.

Right-wing Americans or maybe even center-right Americans,

have long insisted that one of the problems with 20th century totalitarianism,

from which they legitimately distinguish themselves,

was that it eliminated the possibility of what they call free markets and innovation.

We're about to test whether they were right.

The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control.

Very rapidly, and with no apparent remorse,

the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America and the People's Republic of China

have adopted essentially identical points of view.

[Clapping]

A robust social graph connecting government to everybody

and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments fundamental policy

with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to, or think of, as stability maintenance.

It is true of course that they have different theories of how to maintain stability for whom and why,

but the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.

We need, we, who understand what is happening, need,

to be very vocal about that.

But it isn't just our civil liberties that are at stake,

I shouldn't need to say that, that should be enough, but of course it isn't.

We need to make clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and vibrancy

of invention culture and discourse,

that wide open robust and uninhibited public debate

that the Supreme Court so loved in New York Times against Sullivan.

And that freedom to tinker, to invent, to be different, to be non-conformist

for which people have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity,

and a chance to experiment with who they are, and what they can do.

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

Of course we need anonymity for other reasons.

Of course we are persuing something that might be appropriately described

as protection for the integrity of the human soul.

But that's not government's concern.

It is precisely the glory of the way we understand civil society that that is not government's concern.

It is precisely our commitment to the idea of the individual's development at her own pace,

and in her own way,

that has been the centerpiece of what we understood to be our society's fundamental commitment

that means that the protection for the integrity of the human soul is our business,

not the government's business.

But government must attend to the material welfare of its citizens

and it must attend to the long run good of the society they manage.

And we must be clear to government that there is no tension

between the maintenance of civil liberty in the form of the right to be let alone,

there is no distinction between the civil liberty policy of assuring the right to be let alone,

and the economic policy of securing innovation under austerity.

They require the same thing.

We need Free Software,

we need Free Hardware we can hack on,

we need Free Spectrum we can use to communicate with one another,without let or hindrance.

We need to be able to educate and provide access to educational material to everyone on earth

without regard to the ability to pay.

We need to provide a pathway to an independent economic and intellectual life, for every young person.

The technology we need, we have.

I have spent some time and many people in this room, including Isaac have spent more time now,

trying to make use of cheap, power efficient compact server computers, the size of AC chargers for mobile phones,

which with the right software we can use to populate the net with robots that respect privacy,

instead of the robots that disrespect privacy which we now carry in almost every pocket.

We need to retrofit the first law of robotics into this society within the next few minutes or we're cooked.

We can do that. That's civil innovation.

We can help to continue the long lifetime of general purpose computers everybody can hack on.

By using them, by needing them, by spreading them around.

We can use our own force as consumers and technologists to deprecate

closed networks and locked-down objects,

but without clear guidance in public policy we will remain a tiny minority,

8.3% let's say.

Which will not be sufficient to lift us out of the slough into which the bankers have driven us.

Innovation under austerity is our battle-cry.

Not a battle-cry for the things we most care about, but the ones the other people most care about.

Our entrée to social policy for the next five years,

and our last chance to do in government

what we have not been able to do by attempting to preserve our mere liberties.

Which have been shamefully abused by our friends in government as well as by our adversaries.

We have been taken to the cleaners with respect to our rights,

and we have been taken to the cleaners with respect to everybody's money.

I wish that I could say that the easiest thing to do was going to be to get our freedoms back,

it isn't.

Nobody will run in the election this year on the basis of the restoration of our civil liberties.

But they will all talk about austerity and growth.

And we must bring our message where they are.

That's my first draft.

Inadequate in every way, but at least a place to start.

And if we have no place to start,

we will lose.

And our loss will be long.

And the night will be very dark.

Thank you very much.

[Applause]

Thank you that's very kind of you, now let's talk about it.

[Laughter]

[Oh, yeah I'll I,m sorry]

[Some Murmuring]

[Ok Thank you]

Ahh we should begin,

yeah.

Not yet... Aha, that on.

[Doc Searls]I'd like to begin this because, I hope I speak for a lot of the people here.

That was not just one of the best speeches that I have ever heard,

it's one of the most important.

And it won't be unless we follow up on it,

we act on it.

I felt like... actually Elliot that sitted next to be to says he felt like

this is an I Have a Dream speech and I think that's what it is.

But I think Eben ended it with the nightmare.

And if you weren't moved by the speech your frog is boiled.

And I think our frogs have been boiling for a long time.

I along with everybody else we aquiesce to prevailing conditions, whatever those happen to be.

And they have gradually worsened over time, and in ways that we don't fully understand,

and our lives are busy so we go about what we have to do.

So, what I want to do is

test this audience with participating with the Free Everything Movement

that Eben has laid out for us, now.

So, I don't see that just as a Q&A session but as all of use freely contributing

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

I love the way he included us in this. This is --

there is natural selection here.

This is a select group.

David has done an amazing job of pulling in the right people together.

The name of this event begins with Freedom,

and I think that needs to be our end as well.

So... and I have nothing more to add to such a fabulous talk.

[Isaac Wilder] Eben I would like to ask you a question.

I see a tension between Freedom and Conveinience.

And I wonder how you see that tension playing out?

I think you urged us to focus on innovation but I wonder if....

and I think that does -- that's compelling to this audience, perhaps the policy makers,

but, to the average user, convenience is an issue.

[Eben Moglen] Yeah, it's true,

which is not only the relation between technology and society, it's true about lots of other things as well.

The constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman wrote a lengthy multi-volume history of the Constitution in the US,

on the basic premise that most of the time, most people don't want to engage in

deep thinking about politics and society.

It only happens very occasionally, and the Founders of the American Republic, Bruce said,

tried in the Federalist structure to take advantage of those occasional moments,

when people want to pay attention.

But here again, and I focus on this because the demographics are so important,

that sense, of convenience being more important than other values,

moment by moment is more true of grown-ups than it is for children.

I go all around the world, I talk to goverments about all sorts of things

connected with technology of 21st century society,

and I hear from people, from presidents to ministers, to local planning commitees,

all sorts of stories about the terrible social problems their cultures and communities face.

And I find my self often saying "Yes, you're right. This is a really really horrible problem.

It's extraordinary difficult and it requiress immense amounts of energy to deal with.

You need the strongest social force possible to deal with this.

And the strongest social force ever, available, anywhere is the curiosity of children.

You need to harness it."

We have actually both lessons. The thing you call a tension, right?

It's a tension indeed.

Because it is true that grown ups in their busy lives find themselves willing to do anything that works,

and if you hand them a box with an F-Button on it they'll push it,

whether it costs them or not, and whether it connects them a great big

man-in-the-middle-attack on their social lives or not,

or whether their friends are ratting them out of the weekends to their employers,

they pay very little attention.

It's now.

But you give a thing to an 8-year-old and it's not like that anymore.

He's got plenty of time.

You give a 12-year-old a thing like that and she's ready to take it apart.

She's not thinking about convenience, she's thinking about learning.

She's doing science.

She's playing around.

And I have seen in more places in the world that I can think to name,

that force of those children, fooling around with computers and doing amazing things.

You see it everywhere you'd go.

So I believe the tension is there.

I believe usability is a crucial problem in building tools for privacy in Freedom.

FreedomBox, the stack of software we need to make for all those little objects in the world,

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

We've done all the hard work. My laptop, your laptop, we're pretty safe.

The problem is how do we make this work for real people with real, busy, daily lives.

So the tension's there but the answer's there too.

We need to empower children.

And part of what is wrong with the technology is the extent to which they are becoming not inventors but consumers.

If that process is completed, we really are sunk.

[Doc Searls] Why don't we go back and forth with both sides over here, first .

[Michael Nelson] Mike Nelson of Georgetown University.

I have at least 15 different questions that I'd like to ask you,

starting with encryptions as I was
[Eben Moglen]I remember...

[Michael Nelson] Stuart Baker's best friend, from the White House.
[Eben Moglen] Yeah Yeah

It made things very hard for me, Mike, I'm really glad it's not true anymore. It's isn't true anymore, right?

[Laughter]

[Michael Nelson] I would like to urge you to run for Congress,

preferably by moving to Palm Springs and running against Mary Bono Mack,

[Eben Moglen] [laughs] I don't think they would like me in Palm Springs, much.

[Doc Searls] But the thing I hope you'll do after that speech,

which I agree is sort of like the I Have a Dream speech, is to actually engage your critics.

I mean the speech is great, and the YouTube video would be seen by thousands of people,

mostly your friends and supporters.

I think you need to engage your critics.

And we need something like the federalists papers, where we have the two big questions debated from both sides,

and we get both parties -- both viewpoints expressed.

But I would like to ask one quick, very specific question.

Because I really think the first part of your speech

about general purpose computing and user-centric computing is really where we have to start.

And I would like to have your assessment , and anyone else's assessment,

as to why Nicholas Negroponte in the One Laptop Per Child which was based on the same principles...

empowering the children, building open source, creating things from the ground up, why that didn't happen?

Even though tens of millions of dollars were invested and lots of people bought it.

Why didn't that... what was missing there? And how can we not have the same problem this time around?

[Eben Moglen] Yeah, well, Nick has been my best friend too sometimes, um,

which makes it a little hard to answer the question.

Hardware is difficult, right? And software is easy.

That's why the FreedomBox isn't a box, it's just some software,

because we can make it better, quicker, cheaper and we don't have to bite off all the problems.

Two things happened as a consequence of One Laptop Per Child.

The IT industry around the world realized that there was a thing that was better

to make the laptops with a higher profit margin and they started making them.

So Nick in fact proved my point on that side pretty well., no failure there.

He conducted innovation with tiny amounts of money,

which capitalism in its biggest globules wasn't going to get to because it was too risk averse to try.

So, in one sense it panned out, it's just that it panned out as more products for consumers.

The second thing is that Nick tried to do something really really important with mesh networking,

and it was as another friend of ours very close to the thing said:

it was a wonderful failed experiment..

It didn't work.

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

and after a while everybody went back to:

Well, let's have a classroom server and use Wi-Fi.

And this -- and this is the part of the thing that I was really trying to talk about in the big broad general way, right?

We need mesh.

We need a way of doing communication which is not based around operater-centric architecture.

Is the FCC going to do that for us? No.

You want to engage my critics. They were bought decades ago, right?

So now we are in a situation in which if there is one man in this room, Dwayne Hendricks,

there is one man in this room who might help us to figure out what we're gonna do about this.

We must have build-it-yourself networking that really works.

Nick was a visionary and he tried.

And if it had been ready then, we would be living in a different world now.

But it wasn't.

I think that's technical failure of an honorable and important kind.

I think he conducted a vast innovative experiment and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams,

but the other guys ran away with the profits as usual,

and the one peace we really really needed

which was communications technology that deprives the centralized network operator of power,

we weren't ready for .

Now we have more closed network than open network,

more people using proprietary closed forms of somewhat like the Internet,

than the Internet itself,

and we've lost big in that process.

Now it's a harder thing to deal with.

I don't....

I have the feeling, as in some any other ways in life,

that I've been guided by my friend Lary Lessig,

running for Congress is what I'm not going to do.

[Laughter]

Do you have another suggestion about how to engage critics, Mike?

I would love to take one. But that's not one that I wanna take.

[Michael Nelson] No, the Federalists papers analogy was a serious one.
[Eben Moglen]Allright.

[Michael Nelson] It means something every week. With a critic who will point out your fallacies so you could point out their fallacies.

[Eben Moglen] Alright. Let's do it. Let's find the ones who want to engage.

[Doc Searls] We have 27 minutes left, so try to make it quick. It's not much time.

[Audience member] My question would be, what do you mean by this wallwart that could serve as a server?

And how close are we to the hardware? Why do you want to have it?

Let me preface the question by saying that, in order to do the Onion router,

you need to be able to have your own server.

In order to do anonymization you need to have your own server ability.

In order to build an network of our own within the network that is increasingly out of our control,

we need to be able to upload and download from our own servers.

I often wonder if the amount of energy being put into

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

is a sign that those in power understand that they must stop our ability to be our own nodes.

Is that resonant with you? Thank you.

[Eben Moglen] Why don't you talk about this

[Isaac Wilder] So, there are two things in play here.

There's logical peer to peer, overlay networks,

and there is what we call material peer to peer, physical material networks.

And there is a complex interplay between those forces.

So the FreedomBox tends to be a tool that participates in that logical network,

no matter what its connection to Internet is,

and can serve as a seed of a material physical network.

Now your question was, how close are we? What needs to be done?

As Eben said, the basic tools are there.

We know how to build overlay networks.

There's been incredible advances over the last decade in distributed computational systems.

So that's there. It really at this point is a matter of integrating those tools in a way that makes them usable.

And, as developers, that's something, we are not always great at.

But it's certainly tractable, and we are at the point where these pieces just need to be fit together.

The hardware is in production, and the software is in

not quite alpha stage, I guess you would say, but there are building blocks there.

[Eben Moglen]The world is gonna fill up over there in the next 6 or 7 years

with small, very inexpensive, very powerful servers,

which are based around ARM chips and fit in a thing that fits in your hand,

and uses small amounts of power that you could really run of a battery array.

The FreedomBox project, which we started talking about in early 2010 and got serious about in early 2011,

is basically a pro-privacy router stack based on Debian

that fits in servers like that.

James Vasile of the Open Internet Tools Project,

who used to work for me at Software Freedom Law Center, and who just left the room,

has one with him this morning he told me.

Isaac and hundreds of other, really good people around the world,

including Jacob Appelbaum of Tor, are working on FreedomBox.

The Tor project would be developing on FreedomBox stack in future.

Our goal is to put a small cheap object that replaces your wireless router

in as many places, homes, and businesses, and safe-deposit boxes in the world as we can get,

running software which makes secure peer to peer connections

between people whose identities have been assured in a civil society web of trust-like way,

and which can provide a soft migration away from centralized social networking tools

like Facebook and Flickr and so on,

towards systems which actually share only with the people you really mean to share with,

and which resist the effort of other people to see what's going on.

Some of that work is work we all use all the time based around Tunneling VPNs, and other simple stuff.

Some of this is the Onion routing infrastructure we are building.

Some of it is efforts to increase our meshablity by spreading a lot of stuff

which is both base station and client around the world.

Some of it is efforts to take advantage of skunkworks projects now inside the large IT vendors,

who also know that small ARM-based servers are gonna replace the heavy iron they've been selling,

but the real net of it, the bottom seed of it is --

Control your own server. Keep your own logs,

Do it in a a way which resists tampering from external parties who aren't working in your interest.

Create some robots who really do have the first law of robotics inside them,

[Doc Searls] [chuckles]

[Eben Moglen] And put them at the portals between private networks and the open public net.

If we do that, we begin, as Isaac says, to interleave the virtual peer to peerage of the net

with some actual hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions,

ultimately billions of peers, that run in the interests of the people who own them.

[David Isenberg] Isaac and

[Terry Nelson] I would like to introduce my self. I'm Terry Nelson, no relation to Mike Nelson [unintelligible]

[David Isenberg]Guys, Isaac and Eben, do you know Tim Shepard?

[Isaac] We met last night.

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

Tim's MIT PhD thesis was on the practical,

the applied mathematics, and for that matter the physics

of Mesh Networking, and he is an early pioneer, this was 1990-what?.

[Tim Shepard] 1995

[David Isenberg] 95 ok. With David Clark at MIT. You guys really ought to talk.

[Eben Moglen] I still have location-based routing. I wish it could work.

[Small Laugh]

[Preston Ray] Hi Eben, my name is Preston Ray, I'm with the Open Technology Institute.

You mentioned towards the interview speech, about how the community people in this room, and the people,

the community we are part of, has the knowledge, understands the technology, grasps,

appreciates and evangelizes the philosophy that you are talking about,

to make free collaborative education to all,

to solve our world's problems of economic stagnation, innovation stagnation, austerity.

You know, we should recognize that we are also very much a community of privilege

in many ways, not only of our grasp of knowledge, and not only of our grasp, you know,

of the tools and everything that makes these things work, but the backgrounds we come from,

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

What do you feel our responsibility, a role is in,

bringing about the world you are talking about,

if we are indeed only 8,3% of the world we can't assume to represent the entire world,

but what is our role in that entire ...

[Eben Moglen] I doubt that we are 8.3% of the world.

What supprises we are 8.3% of Schleswig-Holstein [Laughs].

But let me say a little bit about.

I'm been engaged for several years now, with a community computing center located in a slum in Bangalore,

the original center was located in a cluster of people who have been living in that spot,

first as a untouchable people, now as merely poor people for very long time,

-2200 people with only one toilet-

Where some young communists working for the big IT firms in Bangalore,

fished out computer out of the garbage, put free software open, and opened a computer center in that slum.

And what came out was not so much people who wanted to learn how to use an office suite and get an office job.

It turned out they were painters using the GIMP to paint the pictures one pixel at a time,

and they were singers, and they were writers.

They were people whose communities had never had so much as the possibility of dreaming of any of those things,

but that didn't matter the kids, because they were kids.

They just did whatever and it was it has changed many people's lives.

My financial support for that activity has been rather minor,

because they'd not take more money that they can use in order to avoid corruption.

And my moral support has been, I'd say, grossly inadequate.

But nonetheless, working together, we've achieved some quite interesting things

which have changed dozens of lives and which have produced some teachers,

so they can go out and change a bunch of lives more.

I try to work really quite heavily in my classroom

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

to think of themselves as privileged in the way you say, and it's important to do.

But even more important maybe that recognizing our difference

from the other people in the world who have so much less is recognizing our similarity.

When given the opportunity, those Einsteins in the street are just like our Einsteins.

There are better than us. Smarter, stronger, more capable of ferreting out the mysteries of the universe.

We really need to begin at the stage of life that we are pretty equal. That is when we are children.

And we really need to make possible for those children

to experiment and learn and grow, regardless of their state of economic deprivation.

The beauty of the zero marginal cost revolution in human affairs,

is we can put all knowledge, all culture, all music, all art,

all everything that matters to the development of the human mind, everywhere, all the time.

In the Sudharshan Layout in Bangalore, 2200 people, one toilet, 1700 children and 914 mobile phones.

- Everyone of these mobile phone which is carried by the poorest of the poor in many societies,

and which it would be carried by everybody in the human race by 2050 -

Everyone of those devices can have every book, and every play,

and every piece of music, every equation, every experiment on it.

And every brain will grow.

Try that and we can worry less about deprivation and more about progress.

[Little Applause]

[Isaac Wilder] The will of humanity towards total connectedness is at manifest at this point.

And I said it before and I'll say it again, the fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this.

Will we be enslaved by our technology, or liberated by it?

As technologists, as those privileged enough to understand what exists now and what is coming,

I viewe our responsibility as to making it sure that is liberation technology

instead of enslavement technology?

And I think everyone in this room understands that but,

the priviledge does come with responsibility.

And it's to sound that alarm.

[Doc Searls] Very god. Over here.

[Nick Grossman] Hi, Nick Grossman from MIT Media Lab.

At first, I thought your thoughts about why cities are innovative and why interesting thing happen,

why people go there and how autonomy.... What autonomy is and why that matters.

Very compelling, super-relevant Internet, and I think it's a metaphor that will only gain in momentum.

So, I thank you for laying that out. And I also agree...

So getting back to how we convince our governments to go in this general direction.

I agree that innovation is a very powerful frame.My question is the...

the line between full truly open innovation , you are talking about it,

and sort of semi-open innovation as new-ons???.

I think everyone in this room gets it.

But it's easy to say:

Look at how many apps you can build on the facebook platform,

or look at how many, you know, how many things on the iPhone platform, and that's innovation.

And when you are talking to Ś whoever, you know that Ś there is a distinction there.

And so, what do you see is the best way illustrate that and try and walk the line between Ś

you know ... fully open and kind of open and is that Ś is possible to do that?

[Eben Moglen] Well you know we went down this road before.

Because as The Free Software Movement was gaining strength,

Microsoft was creating that enormous ecosystem of Windows Developers, of which it was justly proud.

They were justly proud because they gave them control of the API,

but the developers were justly proud of the software they wrote.

They were only two things Ś [Laugher]

One was it was totally dependent on the Microsoft Ecosystem,

which as ???Richard Claxer said was K-Mart software.

And the other was that they were hampered by the fact that they have to invent everything themselves.

In order to get in, you had to buy the SDK and then you were alone in your garage,

trying to make something great.

But the whole system have been biased in such a way that you couldn't share and you couldn't learn.

And so it didn't turn out to be as good as the C shell, that created a generation of computer scientists.

So they got us a bunch of Windows developers, they made a bunch of stuff and we went fine.

And now the Microsoft is closing the code museum and freezing them out.

That's the problem, isn't, it with proprietary innovation.

It runs according to the strength of the business model and then it fails.

The reason we beat Microsoft was (that) we were even less subject to evolutionary data,

and they were and they knew it.

That's what the strength was of the GPL, and I'm not so happy

if ??? decides that it doesn't need to keep some copyleft stuff at the middle of it.

Because it closes the end on innovation.

The important thing about innovation,

-and we say it when we are in places which I have the grandeur of MIT to say it in -

is, it's a long run business. Not a short run business.

Proprietary software development whether for the Windows Ecosystem

or the iOS Ecosystem is a game of base hits, not home runs.

You can put a neat app on a thing and it's neat and we really love it,

and why don't you share it with us so we can do better?

Oh, the SDK terms this,

and the App Store terms that and no sharing allowed

because Steve Jobs slept here once,

and nobody else can sleep in any bed he ever slept in, unless they have his permission and all that stuff.

It's OK, it's B+ innovation, but we can do better.

And the point of being at experts or inspirers of innovation

is to help those bright young people to do stuff that lasts for the long term.

And you can explain in that frame,

why the political economy of closed end innovation

isn't really where you want to put your good idea when you are 17.

If Jimmy Wales have gone to work for Encyclopedia Brittanica or Compton,

I'm sure they'd be paying him a decent salary , and that's become what innovation was supposed to be.

It gets you a job.

That's when we are really in trouble. Thomas Edison didn't want a job.

[comment in background]

Fair Enough.

I'm not going to speak in favor of Mr. Edison as an individual.

I'm no in speak...[Laugh]

I'm only going to speak in favor of the idea of innovation is for the long run, and that's what counts.

And if you go to a guy who sells you your life back in return for your idea, that's not long run.

[Doc Searls] So we had 10 minutes here, and we've got I think five people left, so John quick.

[Joe Plotkin] I'll be quick as I see Chris Savage and Harold. I want to hear their questions as well.

John Plotkin from NYC Wireless, once again, Eben, great talk, always I enjoy it here when you talk.

A couple unrelated points.

One, when we talked about convenience vs control,

you know, everybody is using the wireless microphone,

they come out of that is spectrum, everyone should be aware of in this room at least.

But more, I want to give you a chance to talk and end in more of an optimistic note.

I see that the Maker Movement and all the hardware hacking that's going on, as tremendously optimistic for the future.

I see... you are in a maker fair and you see kids,

doing exactly what you described, playing around.

How can we get your message sort of...

you don't want to mess with that fooling around,

but somehow direct it to understanding the larger ecosysstem that they eventually gonna live in,

with those innovations.

[Eben Moglen] I don't know. I'll learn from you.

[Doc Searls] Actually I would like to touch a??? point and a prior point.

I was remembering, when Eben was talking about, kids.

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.

You know, there was no computing in 1961 that a kid could do, but I hacked on radios.

And I just wanna call Dwayne Hendrix to the mike for a second to talk about,

what we were talking about at the Hall about opportunities with amateur radio that still exist.

[Dwayne Hendrix] Thanks. Amateur radio has been around for about 100 years now.

And by treaty, it's in most countries on the planet.

I can take my amateur radio privileges from the US

and go to all those countries, and operate just like I was here.

Eben talked about (the) need to have free access to spectrum with no middle man, ok?

The amateur radio service is just that, ok?

There is no FCC in the middle.

You can create wireless devices, you self certify them, ok?

And as I said, you can take them to other places on the planet and operate them without asking anybody.

In fact, with the licence class I have, I can put a

communications platform in orbit without asking permission of the FCC.

That is powerful.

So there is a lot of misapprehensions and misunderstandings about what amateur radio is about,

perpetrated by organizations like American Radio Relay League.

It's all about innovation under your own control.

Gives you complete access to spectrum, as long as you don't use it for commersial purposes.

So let me just leave you with one thought.

Ten years ago, I was working for a company called COM21 the founder of which was Paul Baran,

who is sort of known as the Grand Father of the Internet, right?

Paul basically said: Look what I've learned is that I look at all these people around building proprietary radios, ok?,

and they come and go.

If you gonna create a business look at mass produced radios.

And use those and more of them to your own needs.

There is two mass produced radios today.

WiFi and Cable modems.

With a little construct called a transverter,

-a transverter also known as a linear translator-

you could take the inputs and outputs of a cable modem or any wifi device

and put it anywhere in the radio spectrum.

And couple that with an amateur radio licence

and now you have cheap hardware that you can go anywhere and not ask permission of anybody, ok?

So, look into this. I mean, Amateur radio, basically output devices that

.... you don't have to have an amateur licence to use it.

I mean, under my amateur radio authority I can have as many transmitters operating in the US territory without...

and have people just like you use them,

all I have to do is to be able to turn on and off the device,ok?

When I was working at COM21 we littered the bay area with cable modems that have transverters

and have a wireless Internet network, ok?,

(and) that we had a lot of people use it, ok?,

so we didn't get any money for it, we didn't charge anybody for Internet access,

but we provided innovation of a different nature.

That's it.

[Doc Searls] Also thanks, thanks Dwayne.

[Applause]

[Doc Searls]Yeah. Go.

[Harold Phelp]Harold Phelp ??? with public knowledge.

First of all, I have to say that maybe I'm alone in this

but I tend to think of this more as the ???? speech rather than the I have a dream speech.[Laughs]

And in those small part, because I'll notice who kicked butt on the field of Ozonecorp ???.

But the one thing that I did want to raise and ask is if you have seen

Corry Doctorow's recent pissed on the failure of geek politics.

And this is a Ś

I'll confess to my own self interest as Washington Insider focused on the FCC,

but I just wanna to stress and ask folks like you who are out there

to encourage engagement in these processes,

and especially when the temptation to despair about getting productive results is so high.

But also point out the posiv aspect of this is Ś

-Dwayne actually focused this-

there are actually a lot of opportunities that are here and around us,

and I really think that there is a lot that could be done,

as has been done now already with a number of folks who in trying to organize a more focused agenda,

that would be a positive, legislative and regulatory agenda, rather than a defensive one.

And I just wanna put that out there,

as well as any interest in working with anybody who is interested in taking up arms here.

Hi, ???? .

Thanks for bringing up the Ham radio issue.

That's really very very interesting field right now,

especially since we got ten box STRs in the form of TVB-T receivers.

Just take them out and reprogram them. It's very interesting.

And one other thing for Eben Ś

when you were talking about OLPC, sort of I had a small dejavu.

I was there at that time, when they were doing their mesh research,

I was flying from Boston to Europe, and I was couple of time was telling them,

we got these huge networks there we got it already done,

and they were still working on the specific ???? implementation which just failed.

So I would like to deposit the thought that we should cooperate more closely,

because we have quite some experience, and it might save us 8 years of R&D. Thanks.

[Doc Searls]OK. We have 2 minutes and 33 seconds left and the musicians are here so here's Chris...

[Chris Savage]Chris Savage, Random Medicine.

I agree with Harold. This was not quite a I have a Dream Speech was more like Saint Christmas Day

[Little Laugh]

and I would like to ask you and the folks would ask themselves the following question.

Assuming that you've laid down the battlelines correctly,

what would Gandhi do?

[Doc Searls]Would Gandhi battle?

[Backround speech]

[Eben Moglen] Well, then I'm in total agree with you.

I'm uncomfortable with all the comparisons.

So let me put them aside and say that

my part of this work ugly??? enough is just making lawyers. Right?

[Laughs]

That's what I actually do for a living.

And before we all get grunt about it, what that really means is,

teaching young people who have enormous opportunities to change society,

that they shouldn't go and take jobs pushing corporate finance paper instead.

I'm not actually trying in my earnest suggestions to the contrary of what I'm standing,

I'm not trying to wield any power.

I do want to talk to people,

and I admit that bad happens when you talk to people in large groups for long periods of time,

which is actually not terribly productive,

but what I think we are trying to do,

and here you question about Mahatma Gandhi seems relevant to me,

I'm trying to make the people to believe that they are the solution to the problem.

I'm trying to get people to believe that it's in their hands, not in hands of some mysterious power far away.

We got to win this close up.

You must have to AsianCorp motiv then that's the one to have.

This is not going to be dealt with at a distance.

This is actually done in those muddy slipping and falling places where all this goes on.

If Harold thinks that we can do it at the FCC, that's great.

I'm not sure that I believe him, but he can, if I can.

What I'm really asking is for all of us to recognize,

we are gonna have to talk to language of political economy and government policy for a while.

We've talked the language of licencing and how to make Free Software, and that has run out.

So now the time has come to talk about how we save societies itches,by scratching them with freedom.

And if we can do that, then we'll win.

Thanks everybody.

[Applause]