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Moglen: 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3' (Groklaw)

Groklaw has posted a transcription of a talk that FSF attorney Eben Moglen gave to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law on June 26. "The theme is the connection between GPLv3, mathematics, and the sharing of human knowledge. As a jumping off point, he asks us to imagine a world in which arithmetic has become property. Even stating that diminishes it, actually."
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Moglen: 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3' (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 4, 2007 3:40 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

"I think people began by pretty much assuming that the conversation was being conducted for the benefit of a decision-maker who could not be fooled, who would not be bought, and who could not be intimidated, and we skipped a lot of bad legislative behavior on that basis."

Isn't it grand to have a truly incorruptible benevolent dictator, with a cabinet full of geniuses?

Moglen has an incredibly creative legal mind. I would like him next to turn his mind to constructive ways in which "bad legislative behaviour" can be "skipped" in the venal world most of us live in.

Moglen: 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3' (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 4, 2007 4:44 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

Eben talks about "legislation by community" in the QA of the following talk.
And I think "legislation by community" is the solution to the venality.

"Freeing the Mind"
Talk by Eben Moglen
05-06-2007, Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala

Download Audio recording of this speech (36MB) in Ogg/Vorbis
http://web.space-kerala.org/Freeing_the_Mind-Eben_Moglen-...

skipping bad legislative behaviour

Posted Jul 4, 2007 14:45 UTC (Wed) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

This boils down to the reputation and accountability of those involved. Currently we don't really know how to do reputation and accountability other than in a centralised manner, despite the keen awareness within the free software community that all forms of monopoly are fundamentally corrupting. Richard Stallman only fulfills the "benevolent dictator" role he does due to the limits to our community's ability to know good reputation from bad for more than a few people. The same goes for the information system we call money and creditworthiness; although I have been involved for some time in a project to try to decentralise this system our success so far is really very limited. Decentralising reputation information and accountability is a technical and social project as well as a legislative one.

Personally I think that by the time we have figured out how to create a reasonably effective and decentralised anti-spam reputation system (which creates a tight feedback loop between sender behaviour and recipient filtering) we will probably have more of an idea about the precise nature of the technical problem we are trying to deal with. Until then our chances of successfully tackling much harder aspects of the wider accountability/reputation problem are probably less good. If we can't do this in respect of spam email what are the chances of sorting out the systems we call politics and money ? But if we could do this in respect of spam then what is to prevent the knowledge so gained from being applied elsewhere ?

Moglen: 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3' (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 6, 2007 11:55 UTC (Fri) by danshearer (guest, #18686) [Link]

> I would like him next to turn his mind to constructive ways in which "bad
> legislative behaviour" can be "skipped" in the venal world most of us live in.

That's what Larry Lessig has started concentrating on these days.

Dan

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