Eben Moglen

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pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Zimbardo (May 1975), “The chilling effects of surveillance: Deindividuation and reactance,” Office of Naval Research/National Technical Information Service, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013230.pdf. The net result is that GPS: US Supreme Court (23 Jan 2012), “Decision,” United States v. Jones (No. 10-1259), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=000&invol=10-1259#opinion1. Eben Moglen wrote: Eben Moglen (27 May 2014), “Privacy under attack: The NSA files revealed new threats to democracy,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy. Sources are less likely to contact: G. Alex Sinha (28 Jul 2014), “With liberty to monitor all,” Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/07/28/liberty-monitor-all.

Privacy is an inherent human right: Eben Moglen defines privacy in three parts: “First is secrecy, or our ability to keep the content of our messages known only to those we intend to receive them. Second is anonymity, or secrecy about who is sending and receiving messages, where the content of the messages may not be secret at all. It is very important that anonymity is an interest we can have both in our publishing and in our reading. Third is autonomy, or our ability to make our own life decisions free from any force that has violated our secrecy or our anonymity.” Eben Moglen (27 May 2014), “Privacy under attack: The NSA files revealed new threats to democracy,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy.

Madrid Privacy Declaration (2009): The Public Voice (3 Nov 2009), “The Madrid Privacy Declaration,” International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, Madrid, Spain, http://privacyconference2011.org/htmls/adoptedResolutions/2009_Madrid/2009_M1.2.pdf. Rebecca MacKinnon makes this point: Rebecca MacKinnon (2012), Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, Basic Books, http://www.owlasylum.net/owl_underground/social/ConsentoftheNetworked.pdf. 15: Solutions for the Rest of Us Law professor Eben Moglen wrote: Eben Moglen (27 May 2014), “Privacy under attack: The NSA files revealed new threats to democracy,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy. I’m going to break them down: Sociologist Gary Marx cataloged 11 different ways people resist surveillance; I’m going to be drawing on his taxonomy in this section.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Its roots go back to 1993-1994: long nights of conversations, as only graduate students can have, with Niva Elkin Koren about democracy in cyberspace; a series of formative conversations with Mitch Kapor; a couple of madly imaginative sessions with Charlie Nesson; and a moment of true understanding with Eben Moglen. Equally central from around that time, but at an angle, were a paper under Terry Fisher's guidance on nineteenth-century homesteading and the radical republicans, and a series of classes and papers with Frank Michelman, Duncan Kennedy, Mort Horwitz, Roberto Unger, and the late David Charny, which led me to think quite fundamentally about the role of property and economic organization in the construction of human freedom.

By the end of a two-hour conversation, we had formed a friendship and intellectual conversation that has been central to my work ever since. He has, over the past few years, played a pivotal role in changing the public understanding of control, freedom, and creativity in the digital environment. Over the course of these years, I spent many hours learning from Jamie Boyle, Terry Fisher, and Eben Moglen. In different ways and styles, each of them has had significant influence on my work. There was a moment, sometime between the conference Boyle organized at Yale in 1999 and the one he organized at Duke in 2001, when a range of people who had been doing similar things, pushing against the wind with varying degrees of interconnection, seemed to cohere into a single intellectual movement, centered on the importance of the commons to information production and creativity generally, and to the digitally networked environment in particular.

That growing literature, consistent with its own goals, has focused on software and the particulars of the free and open-source software development communities, although Eric von Hippel's notion of "user-driven innovation" has begun to expand that focus to thinking about how individual need and creativity drive innovation at the individual level, and its diffusion through networks of likeminded individuals. The political implications of free software have been central to the free software movement and its founder, Richard Stallman, and were developed provocatively and with great insight by Eben Moglen. Free software is but one salient example of a much broader phenomenon. Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free? Why do 4.5 million volunteers contribute their leftover computer cycles to create the most powerful supercomputer on Earth, SETI@Home?


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

In a paraphrase of Vladimir Lenin’s famous endorsement of electricity, Zizek exclaimed in a tongue-in-cheek way that: “socialism = free access to the Internet + power to the soviets”.12 Sporadic allusions to the Communist Manifest are frequent within the computer underground. The most renowned insider drawing parallels between Marx and the hacker movement is Eben Moglen. As the pro bono general counsellor for the Free Software Foundation, an influential organisation of hackers, Eben Moglen is well accustomed with the practice of hacking. He is convinced that capitalism will be brought to an end by a tide out of which hacking is just the first wave.13 Concurrently, a range of antagonists to the FOSS movement have accused GNU/Linux and alternative licensing schemes for being un-American, subversive, and cancerous.

Bloggers are stitched together in the loosest possible sense, relying on Internet search engines instead of an editor for sorting out noise from information. The loose way of organising their activity has contributed to the rapid growth of the bloggsphere. Once a critical mass of contributors has been built up, grass-root reporting is at an advantage over traditional news reporting. Eben Moglen, a prominent member of the Free Software Foundation, identified this mechanism when noticing that the broadcasting networks, with their over-paid celebrities and expensive equipment, are about the only organisations that cannot afford to be everywhere in the world at the same time. With a digital camera ready-at-hand and an Internet connection close by, the anarchistic mode of news reporting turns any passer-by into a potential journalist for a moment, just as the FOSS model turns every computer-user into a potential bug reporter.

Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (New York: Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1971), 54. 10. Jason Scott, BBS the Documentary (2004). 11. Andrew Sullivan, “Counter Culture: Dot-communist Manifesto”, New York Times (Sunday 11, June 2000). 12. Slavoj Zizek, “A Cyberspace Lenin: Why Not?”, International Socialism Journal 95, (summer 2002). 13. In “The DotCommunism Manifesto” Eben Moglen directly paraphrases Karl Marx’s manifesto.emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html (accessed 2007-02-08). 14. “Gates Taking a Seat in Your Den” CNetNews.com (January 5, 2005). 15. For a less cosy account of IBM’s political legacy, see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (London: Little, Brown & co, 2001).


pages: 188 words: 9,226

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

On Economism and Incentives If the above addresses the ‘with whom’ and ‘where’ can we collaborate, we can now return to the why. But it is an inquiry inflected by the initial comments on social production above. We are always producing with others, and why we do so has varied explanations not all of which can be explained in the language of incentives. Eben Moglen captures this well in his discussion of the energy behind creativity in general and free so ware in particular: “According to the econodwarf’s vision, each human being is an individual possessing “incentives,” which can be retrospectively unearthed by imagining the state of the bank account at various times.

So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, so ware flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone. —Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free So ware and the Death of Copyright The dogma of monetary incentives, with which Moglen quarrels, is rooted in a philosophical history which reached its apogee in the work of Jeremy Bentham. According to his prescription, individuals act to a ain that which is good for them—the useful.

But I dare to say that the labour perspective deserves more a ention than it has been given by popular and scholarly critics of intellectual property till now. Both hackers and academic writers tend to formulate their critique against intellectual property law from a consumer rights horizon and borrow arguments from a liberal, political tradition. There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions. People like Eben Moglen, 134 Slavoj Zizek and Richard Barbrook have reacted against the liberal ideology implicit in much talk about the Internet by courting the revolutionary rhetoric of the Second International instead. Their ideas are original and eye-catching and o en full of insight. Nevertheless, their rhetoric sounds oddly out of place when applied to pragmatic hackers.


Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

To understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine Richard Stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. The Richard Stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. If any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's Stallman. "I think if you want to understand Richard Stallman the human being, you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the Free Software Foundation and professor of law at Columbia University Law School. "All those personal eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know Stallman really are Stallman: Richard's strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental.

See Marco Boerries, interview with author (July, 2000). Such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the GPL and, indirectly, the political genius of man who played the largest role in creating it. "There isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the 150 GPL the way it is," says Eben Moglen, Columbia University law professor and Free Software Foundation general counsel. "But it works. And it works because of Richard's philosophy of design." A former professional programmer, Moglen traces his pro bono work with Stallman back to 1990 when Stallman requested Moglen's legal assistance on a private affair.

Hearing Sarah describe what attracted her to Stallman and hearing Stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, I was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. Since July, 2000, I have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the Richard Stallman persona. Like Eben Moglen before me, I feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. In many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable. While I'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for Stallman-indeed, after reading this book, some might feel zero affinityI'm sure most will agree.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Developers of free software are committed to the idea that all users should be free to run software, study it, modify it, and redistribute it. Those core beliefs are reflected in free software licenses like the GNU General Public License, or GPL. Examples of free software products include the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, and MySQL relational database software. As Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Center and one of the drafters of the current version of the GPL explains, “Licenses are not contracts: the work’s user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn’t have any right to act at all except as the license permits.”40 An approach that roots licenses in property law is preferable to one that treats them like contracts.

Melvin Aron Eisenberg, “The Limits of Cognition and the Limits of Contract,” Stanford Law Review 47 (January 1995): 211–259, at 243–244. 37. ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447, 1454 (7th Cir. 1996). 38. Ibid., 1452. 39. Chris Newman, “A License Is Not a ‘Contract Not to Sue’: Disentangling Property and Contract in the Law of Copyright Licenses,” Iowa Law Review 98 (March 2013): 1103–1160, at 1141. 40. Eben Moglen, “Enforcing the GNU GPL,” GNU.org, September 10, 2001, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html, accessed July 7, 2015. 41. See 17 U.S.C. § 107 (2012). 42. Jeremy Gordon, “RZA Says Wu-Tang Clan Offered $5 Million for New Album That’s Only Available as One Copy,” Pitchfork, April 2, 2014, http://pitchfork.com/news/54627-rza-says-wu-tang-clan-offered-5-million-for-new-album-thats-only-available-as-one-copy/, accessed July 7, 2015. 43.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

A group of programmers in the Seattle area has developed open-source social networking software called Crabgrass, tailored specifically for the needs of political activists. An older project, StatusNet, enables people to set up their own Twitter-like microblogging services that they can control locally. In early 2011 Columbia University professor Eben Moglen announced a new project dubbed FreedomBox, aimed at addressing the vulnerability of activists and dissidents who currently rely too much on centralized corporate services like Facebook and Amazon to store their data and disseminate their media messages. The problem, he explained in a speech, was caused by the creation of a standard service architecture that is “very subject to misuse” because it consists of “vast repositories of hierarchically organized data about people at the edges of the network that they do not control.”

Disclosure: I served on its board of directors for one year in 2007. 230 Diaspora: See “Taking a Look at Social Network Diaspora,” NY Convergence, March 14, 2011, http://nyconvergence.com/2011/03/taking-a-look-at-social-network-diaspora.html. 230 Crabgrass: http://crabgrass.riseuplabs.org. 230 StatusNet: http://status.net. 230 FreedomBox: https://freedomboxfoundation.org.Also see Jim Dwyer, “Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You,” New York Times, February 15, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html; and “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing—A Speech Given by Eben Moglen at a Meeting of the Internet Society’s New York Branch on Feb. 5, 2010,” Software Freedom Law Center, www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html. 232 Chaos Computer Club: www.ccc.de/en; for a colorful description of the CCC’s characters and culture, see Becky Hogge, Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno—Utopia (London: Rebecca Hogge, 2011). 232 Chaos Communication Camp: http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011. 232 yearly winter conferences: See http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/wiki/Welcome. 232 “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. 233 Douglas Rushkoff called on the netizens of the world to unite: Douglas Rushkoff, “The Next Net,” Shareable.net, January 3, 2011, http://shareable.net/blog/the-next-net.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

The hurdles are gargantuan; the sanctioned channels for political change in the US are frighteningly narrow.15 The technical architecture of the Internet—wherein centralized, corporate-controlled servers house most of our data—makes capture both trivially easy and ubiquitous; this technical scenario has been described by civil liberties lawyer Eben Moglen as a “recipe for disaster,” prompting him and other Internet technologists, like Bruce Schneier, to declare, “We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying.”.16 Finally, as ACLU staff technologist Chris Soghoian argues, so long as Internet firms continue to “monetize their users’ private data,” they can never adopt a truly “pro-user” privacy policy.17 And yet, a field which seemed barren now resembles fertile terrain.

They concluded what many already suspected to be the case: “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspective on Politics, forthcoming. 16. Eben Moglen, “Freedom In the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy, and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing,” speech given at meeting of the New York branch of the Internet Society, Feb. 5, 2010. Available at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html. (Last accessed July 2, 2014.)


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The Linux kernel made it possible for thousands of prosumers around the world to collaborate via the Internet on improving free software code.6 Today, GNU/Linux is used in more than 90 percent of the fastest 500 supercomputers, as well as by Fortune 500 companies, and even runs on embedded systems like tablet computers and mobile phones.7 Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, wrote in 1999 of the seminal importance of the Linux achievement: Because Torvalds chose to release the Linux kernel under the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License . . . the hundreds and eventually thousands of programmers around the world who chose to contribute their effort towards the further development of the kernel could be sure that their effort would result in permanently free software that no one could turn into a proprietary product.

Arvind Kumar, Welcome to the ‘Free’ World: A Free Software Initiative (Hyderabad: Indian Universities Press, 2011), 28. 5. Lawrence Lessig, “Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace,” Harvard Magazine, January-February 2000, http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html (accessed June 13, 2013). 6. Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday 4(8) (August 2, 1999), http://pear.accc.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594 (June 10, 2013). 7. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “Fast, Faster, Fastest: Linux Rules Supercomputing,” ZD Net, June 19, 2012, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/fast-faster-fastest-linux-rules-supercomputing/ 11263 (accessed June 13, 2013); Roger Parloff, “How Linux Conquered the Fortune 500,” CNN Money, May 6, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/06/technology/linux-500.pr.fortune/ (accessed November 13, 2013). 8.


pages: 483 words: 145,225

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

Slashdot is a highly visible example of where the open source philosophy challenges the traditional structures of information, especially economic and legal, and its dissemination. But some believe that open source software itself may have just as great an impact as open journalism in reshaping the landscape of intellectual property. One such is Professor Eben Moglen, professor of legal history at Columbia University and general counsel to the Free Software Foundation. His contention is that the current overlapping legal systems of patents, copyright law, and trade secrets are becoming unworkable. Moglen says that the history of law offers precedents to suggest that such unstable situations cannot persist.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants copyright owners wide-ranging powers to pursue copyright infringement. Slashdot responded by declaring its “hesitation to engage in censorship” through withdrawal of postings made by its readers. The Kerberos saga therefore makes explicit the increasingly tangled relationships between trade secrets, free software, copyright, and freedom—as Eben Moglen, general counsel to the Free Software Foundation, had predicted. Moglen is able to speak directly from experience regarding another area where free software potentially faces legal challenges. Some have suggested that the GNU GPL, the de facto constitution for the entire free-software movement, may not stand up in court.


pages: 315 words: 93,522

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

“Do not steal music” See, for example, Brandenburg’s keynote lecture, Techfest 2012, IIT Bombay, India. Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers Chris “Monty” Montgomery, who led the development of the Ogg standard, later called these kinds of actions a “protection racket.” Open-source advocate Eben Moglen observed that “an accusation of infringement has no legal weight, so there is no real downside to making such a claim.” For more, see Jake Edge, “Xiph.org’s ‘Monty’ on Codecs and Patents,” Lwn.net, November 9, 2011. CHAPTER 11 The document that outlined the methodology for encoding and distributing Scene mp3s Historical Scene releasing standards for a variety of media can currently be found at Scenerules.irc.gs.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Benkler situates these as a third alternative to market-based and hierarchy-based forms of organizing economic activity, one that creates sufficient gains (in information and in allocation) that compensate sufficiently for the “information exchange costs due to the absence of pricing and managerial direction and the added coordination costs created by the lack of property and contract.” In “Coase’s Penguin,” Benkler also attributes the original concept of commons-based peer production to Eben Moglen’s 1999 First Monday article, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright” (see http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594). 20. Benkler, “‘Sharing Nicely,’” 278. 21. Ibid., 343. 22. Ibid., 358. 23. Michel Bauwens, “The Political Economy of Peer Production.”


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Although F/OSS is foremost a technical movement based on the principles of free speech, its historical role in transforming other arenas of life is not primarily rooted in the power of language or the discursive articulation of a broad political vision. Instead, it effectively works as a politics of critique by providing a living counterexample, or in the words of free software’s most famous legal counsel, Eben Moglen: “Practical revolution is based upon two things: proof of concept and running code.”1 Returning to the terminology offered by Bruno Latour (1993, 87), F/OSS production acts as a “theater of proof” that economic incentives are unnecessary to secure creative output—a message that attained visibility as various groups were inspired to follow in the footsteps of free software, and extend the legal logic of free software into other domains of artistic, academic, journalistic, and economic production.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

We learned in recent years that America’s security state, just as much as Russia’s and China’s, is hell-bent on spying electronically on its citizens, then lying about the fact, while justifying its actions with secret interpretations of the law. The communications revolution was being used, in Eben Moglen’s words, to ‘fasten the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance of democratic society’. The governments of America, Europe and Asia, it emerged, all implicitly agreed that they should be free to listen to each other’s populations’ conversations. Only nobody told those populations that this was the new agreement.


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The third distinctive feature of the new system of production follows directly from the second: FOSS peer production is commons based, meaning that FOSS products cannot be privately owned; anyone can use then, and anyone can improve them. The General Public License (also known colloquially as copyleft), which was developed for the Free Software Foundation by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, assures that FOSS cannot become private property and remains instead a Common Good from which anyone may benefit and to which anyone may contribute (if she is able). This Internet-mediated intellectual commons is a key feature of the peer-production system, and we will return to it later. The final Im portant feature of the new system is that peer produc­ tion is based neither on incentives coming from the market nor on or­ ders coming from a boss or managing supervisor.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Back to note reference 6. Drew Mitnick, “The urgent need for MLAT reform,” Access Now, September 12, 2014, https://www.accessnow.org/the-urgent-needs-for-mlat-reform/. Back to note reference 7. By coincidence, another judicial clerk arrived at the same time with a personal computer. His name was Eben Moglen, and he worked for a judge across the corridor on the twenty-second floor in Foley Square. We often chatted about our common interest in PCs. Eben would go on to become an impressive academic and leader of the open-source movement, becoming a professor of law at Columbia University and the chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Those who grew up in the late twentieth century have known the latter sort of idealism mainly as it manifests itself on the Internet in grand collaborative projects such as the blogosphere or Wikipedia and also in such controversial undertakings as Google’s digitization of great libraries. This impulse is part of what has attracted thinkers like Lawrence Lessig, originally a constitutional theorist, to Internet studies, examining the anthropological and psychological consequences of complete openness and the promise it holds. Scholars such as Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, Eben Moglen, and many others have devoted considerable attention to understanding what moves men and women to produce and share information for the sake of some abstract good. Of course the human urge to speak, create, build things, and otherwise express oneself for its own sake, without expectation of financial reward, is hardly new.


pages: 1,025 words: 150,187

ZeroMQ by Pieter Hintjens

AGPL, anti-pattern, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, cloud computing, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, eat what you kill, Eben Moglen, exponential backoff, factory automation, fail fast, fault tolerance, fear of failure, finite state, Internet of things, iterative process, no silver bullet, power law, premature optimization, profit motive, pull request, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Skype, smart transportation, software patent, Steve Jobs, Valgrind, WebSocket

For the rest of us who want to build large-scale software, there’s Option Two, which is open source, and more specifically, free software. If you’re asking how the choice of software license is relevant to the scale of the software you build, that’s the right question. The brilliant and visionary Eben Moglen once said, roughly, that a free software license is the contract on which a community builds. When I heard this, about 10 years ago, the following idea came too: Can we deliberately grow free software communities? Ten years later, the answer is “yes,” and there is almost a science to it. I say “almost” because we don’t yet have enough evidence of people doing this deliberately with a documented, reproducible process.