I gave a talk last week at a gathering at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The gathering was called Come Together and the theme was technology, social movements, and social change. The line-up included 8 people in addition to myself and ended with a talk by Noam Chomsky.
The talk focused on introducing folks to the idea of social movements around information freedom by introducing a big picture view of problems introduced by contemporary IP and a quick breakdown of some of the types of ways that people are attempting to resist, provide alternatives to, or change the system for the better. I did not use slides but I have (very rough) notes available for those that are interested.
Information Freedom talk notes:
While adding the notes to my website, I noticed that I never uploaded the slides or notes from the longer (better) version of a talk on a similar topic that I gave at the Darklight Film Festival’s annual symposium last year. The talk was titled, Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs.
Aimed a non-technical audience, the talk began by introducing intellectual property and tries to describe the history of the current problems created by modern IP policy. Like the Come Together talk, it continued by offering the same rough classification of the types of "solutions" being offered. Unlike the Come Together talk, I then went into much more depth on the reasons Free Software has succeeded in the information technology realm and tried to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying the "open source" model to the production of other types of creative works. I gave the talk on October 28, 2005 in Dublin, Ireland. Slides and talk notes are available.
Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs slides:
- Open Document Presentation (i.e., OpenOffice.org 2.0)
Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs talk notes:
The slides say:
> Eben Moglen, a professor and historian at Columbia Law School proposed what he calls the great ethical question of the twenty-first century:
> If everyone can everything, everywhere, all of the time, how can it ever be ethically justifiable to deprive anyone of anything?
> If you could make food by pressing a button, there would be no ethical justification for hunger. Why is information any different?
.. but I’m getting no Google results for “make food by pressing a button” or even [moglen “great ethical question”]. What’s the source? :)
– C.
He’s said it several times so I paraphrased. The one that is googable is his “DotCommunist Manifesto” where he says:
“Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility–reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge–at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve.”
The language I used is more closely paralelled by a related talk he gave that is available here:
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/speakers/moglen/
I hope that helps!