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An email from Alec van Gelder of the International Policy Network:
[The Economist article on Mstislav Rostropovich] was a tremendous insight into an economic system where the liberty afforded to artists through property rights is taken away through force and government intervention - and how far artists will go to express their creativity.
Property rights aren't just about profit awarded to corporations: Rostropovich wasn't primarily motivated by profit when he fled the Soviet Union - as evidenced by the amount of time he stayed in his own country and suffered the consequences of its brutality - to perform his music elsewhere. But the fact that property rights facilitate the means to profit gives all artists the liberty to be as creative as they like, without running the risk of clashing with their, in this particular case, sole supporters. I think that a significant cause of the opposition to IP rights by the copyleft is political -- if creators are forced to rely on a government-run system of payments for their livelihoods, then only art regarded as politically correct by the authorities will be produced.
Eben Moglen is one of the leading ideologians of the free software movement. Read his Dot.Communist Manifesto, and you will note that it is content-free iabout the actual mechanics of his collectivized, IPless, ideal society. But it is clear that if you abolish property and market exchange, then the government decides who gets supported to produce what.
When I look at IBM, Sun. HP, and others pouring millions into support for the Moglen/Stallman branch of the open source software movement, I remember the unknown German of 1917 who decided to send Lenin from Switzerland to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg in a sealed train (so he would not contaminate Germany). There were some short-term benefits -- but a few problems in the long term. As the Brits would say, "Too clever by half."
For another view of Moglen the democrat, see "Intellectual Property Is So Last Year," from the Dartmouth Review (2005). And for those who wonder what GPLv3 is all about, please do read the end of the Dot.Communist Manifesto:
We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of ``intellectual property,'' as well as the medium of electromagnetic transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be pretty generally applicable:
1. Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.
2. Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges and rights to use of electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title to electromagnetic frequencies.
3. Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements every person's equal right to communicate.
4. Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of software, including genetic information, as public goods.
5. Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.
6. Protection for the integrity of creative works.
7. Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all educational material used in all branches of the public education system.
By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that liberates the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property in ideas, we bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
posted by James DeLong @ 8:12 AM | Big Tent, Software
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