 Thanks a lot actually when I originally gave the topic of the talk I hadn't read through a piece that I'd written some time ago about a year ago about the foundation of the term intellectual property and how dangerous it can actually be I'm sure many people have heard RMS talk about it as well but it is actually quite a dangerous term one of the most dangerous things about it is that people seem to believe that it has some soil in the common law it's embedded it's a deep and old concept which we attack anew in other words it is something that's been here for a long time and you're a bit of an iconoclast if you go and break it and so I thought there were one or two interesting quotes which I wanted to pepper my talk with and I went back and I looked at a judgment from some time ago and I found there were so many quotes in it that I thought quite a bit of my talk I'll just frankly share them with you because what I'm going to do is I'm going to be talking about some quotes initially from a court case that happened hundreds of years ago when a bookseller in Edinburgh had a bit of a punch-up with a bookseller in London and the result of this punch-up was concluded in the House of Lords which pretty much settled what we think of and what we know as copyright which then went on to the United States and became the basis of what was thought of as copyright then and why it's interesting to talk about this is to look at some of the thoughts that were had at that time and how I think I've probably discovered a bit of an RMS of that time which is 1774 except I don't think he's quite as moderate as RMS is and I bring this up to talk about how we should always obviously question our axioms and in so doing find out whether actually we are really part of a deeper mainstream than we sometimes feel we are it's easy to take the propagandists at face value and say well actually we're doing something new here we are on the fringe we are part of an organisation that hasn't really had its metal tested properly I would say that what we see in the proprietary world is actually the aberration and you can find that in some of the discussions that I had over here so I will go on and lead on to the discussion of what my talk was originally going to be about which was of course free as in markets and how indeed the freedom implicit in free software rather than the kind of technocracy which is usually discussed in the term open source is what actually gives businesses their best opportunity and indeed free markets require the kind of bounty that free software gives capitalism has always required bounties people often don't think that it does but actually capitalism always needs a bit of a free lunch in all senses of free sometimes that free lunch has been slavery then they got rid of slavery and actually found that there were these good things you could do with coal and steam and then of course we all know what the 20th century's free lunch was and that was a lovely bit of solar energy in the form of oil which we're now finding the lunch is coming to an end and we wonder what we're going to do next but all capitalistic and free market developments have required at its basis what Bidale called a commons have required that there be something there that little scurrying about mammals in the free market sense can manipulate and can use to their best advantage and the proprietary world if it were the only answer would not provide this and would as we are seeing with companies like Microsoft and indeed Windows Vista and so on and its development was very telling is that things do startify and the creativity that for whatever else you want to say about the capitalist or the free market system that is supposed to be at its core starts to freeze and eventually cannot replenish itself so in a big irony I think the free software world is going to be the world that provides the best platform for the continued evolution of computing in a commercial environment but before we do that let's go back and see what how the free software world axioms the notion of sharing and shared culture and indeed some of the broader questions about software patterns about the over overreaching of those people who want almost perpetual copyright and so on have our affecting people and have how they've affected people in the past now originally patents were basically a bribery somebody said I want to do X they would go to the king and they'd say I don't really wish to have any competitors if I give you some money will you ensure that I don't have any competitors and the king said yeah carry on giving me money and I'll ensure that you don't have any competitors and that's basically what patents were they were a way for the king to raise money to fight wars and so on and you know he think of patents in that sense as basically just another one of those ridiculous medieval taxes that we think of like windows taxes and things like that just ways of raising money ways of restricting trade that's where patents come from indeed the original notion of a patent letters patent were exactly that and in England's the English Revolution indeed they swept all that away now copyright has an even less auspicious start in the western world particularly in England and that it was actually used as a form of censorship naturally when certain despotic rulers came along they thought a good way to deal with this unruly printing press is to create basically a little protection racket of the what would now be called content owners who would then police themselves because it was in their interest that nobody else was allowed to do what they were doing and of course the monarch would ensure that it was a very tightly regulated system so basically we have a way of raising money for wars as the basis of patents and a way of running a kind of censorship protection racket as the basis of copyright now that's not an auspicious start and of course when the after the what was then called the glorious revolution or the inglorious revolution is now called all that was swept aside and effectively there was a new fresh start now some of the what today we call content owners were rather upset about this and they petitioned parliament and they got what was called the statute of Anne which was the first copyright act in the sense that we know it today which was allegedly there to promote the arts and the useful sciences and it it did this for it allowed fought basically allowed the copyright turn to be 14 years now still this wasn't good enough for the content owners of the time the disney's of the time of course if we want more and they carried on petitioning and eventually they said hold on a moment what whatever the statute of answers we've got a common law right we have property here and as you can do with any property descendants should be able to inherit it and it should be ours and our descendants for forever basically so there was a big argument and eventually as I said at the beginning this argument distilled into a final argument in the House of Lords which was is copyright just something that society has bargained for at the moment and needs to be reconsidered or is it really the notion of intellectual property or literary property as called there something that's really in the soil and kind of natural part of the common law as it was said and I'll now take some quotes which is actually from the Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England and basically the appellant started talking any reports and he says we need to rescue the cause of literature and authorship from the hands of a few monopolizing booksellers now I hope I don't really need to continually say when we talking about booksellers of course we're also talking about big media companies software houses and so on so it's interesting even in that time 1774 that was a concern and it's a concern that obviously is has repeated itself and indeed what what's quite amusing bearing in mind where we are of course is that it was put that one of the booksellers a Donaldson was of course the Scottish booksellers being accused of piracy and and he said well and and his counsel said well when the question concerning literary property was laterally agitated in the Kingdom of Scotland they found themselves justified in affirming that no such property ever existed or ever was claimed in any civilized nation well England accepted and so at this point of course there was no real notion of intellectual property at all and when we talk when they discussed the stationers company which was that protection record I told you about they said like every despotic prince they wish to crush the liberty of the press the booksellers however acquiesced in this act because such of them as were members of the stationers company were benefited by it so it's interesting that we can see that vested interests are understood at a very early time as well and we can see how much it has little to do with the author the book that they were arguing about was called The Seasons by Mr. Thompson and they said 12 or 13 booksellers are hovering like eagles over a carcass about the remains of poor Thompson I hope their lordships will protect those remains from such hungry vultures so you know this sort of language talking about big media as these vultures having very little to do with the creative process as you can see it has a hundred years old antithesis now what we have over here is another comment what property can a man have in ideas whilst he keeps them to himself they are his own when he publishes them they are his no longer if I take water from the ocean it is mine if I pour it back it is mine no longer so you can see these ideas of there being some kind of shared culture there beyond the kind of atomization of it are being discussed at a very early age in a sense the notion of a creative commons is much older than the term and this is these are of course what you would expect the the Appellants Council to be saying what's more interesting is what Lord Camden who's one of the law laws at the time discusses in in one of his in his findings and I shall go on to what he has to say at the moment and I'm going to just almost quote verbatim because virtually everything he said is pretty much fantastic it first of all talks about these precedents and arguments the propaganda that the content manages the content owners the booksellers of the time were trying to say well this is a natural right it's it's theft if you go against it and so on it's part of the common law and he says that no all that you discuss all your propaganda were founded on privileges and corruption all of them the effects of the grossest tyranny and use a patient and yet by a variety of subtle reasoning and metaphysical refinements have they endeavored to squeeze out the spirit of the common law from premises in which it could not possibly have existence and what what's one of the most wonderful phrases ever and I'd love to use it myself from now on when I hear these content managers talk about things he says that all these citations and precedents all the propaganda he calls it that heterogeneous heap of rubbish and he says it's calculated to confound your law chips and mislead the argument and as he says the stationers company assumes powers of seizure confiscation and imprisonment and this worries him because of course he says when an organization that is supposed to be there to protect its own members starts to have quasi state powers this is not really something that a modern state should allow this is of course in 1774 when we hear that the RIAA MPAA and the various software alliances going around getting people audited wondering around these offices with the police to help them with the audit and so on one begins to see modern ways that this is happening as well and it's interesting of course lobbying also happened at that time he talks about after the revolution when everything was up for grabs the lobbyists quote came up to parliament in the form of petitioners with tears in their eyes hopeless and fall on they brought with their wives and children to excite compassion and induce parliament to grant them a statutory security they obtained the act and again and again sought further legislative security that again is very familiar as anybody who has fought software patents in the European Union for example knows that they come back again and again they bring the stories of the starving software author who needs these poor little patents to protect him from the big wide world this was known about some time ago and again he says while they are in his brain talking about ideas no one indeed can perloin them but what if he speaks and let them fly out in private or public discourse will he claim the breath the air the words in which his thoughts are clothed where does this fanciful property begin or end or continue so again people are thinking very hard about what exactly is this so-called intellectual property and what basis can it have for all the very strong laws that are being were being proposed then are indeed now being proposed here and finally he comes out with some of his best quotes and we will we I'll continue with these and then move on but he says he says are there any public principles of sound policy or good sense so okay even though it doesn't have its soil in the common law is there actually really a good reason is it really promoting people is it really helping the the arts and sciences and he says as his founding principal if there be anything in the world common to all mankind science and learning are in their late in their nature publicly jurists and they ought to be as free and general as air or water now that's why I said he's pretty much like the RMS of his time you can almost imagine that coming out of RMS his mouth and he says they forget their creator as well as their fellow creatures who wish to monopolize his noblest gifts and greatest benefits why did we enter into society at all but to enlighten one another's minds and improve our faculties for the common welfare of the species people given the gift of genius are entrusted by Providence with the delegated power of imparting to their fellow creatures that instruction which heaven meant for universal benefit they must not be niggards to the world or hoard up for themselves the common stock so here is not some counter-cultural revolutionary this is a law lord in the 18th century saying these things which were then part of a very significant prevailing thought well basically I'm saying that this movement is then doing is it is rediscovering something that was perhaps forgotten about the revolutions that happened around the Enlightenment and that is that a shared common culture cannot simply be atomized in a very simple way apportioned out in soul and if it is then eventually you are going to complete the common stock and all business will suffer and I mean business in all senses of this world word and that's basically what we can see happening now if the patent mongers had their way I happen to be a co-director of a little web hosting and managed server company that's only been using free software and a particular new Linux since 97 98 so it's for 10 years now mostly Debian and that leaves some Ubuntu as well and what our customers are very interested about is not what often you hear people talk about which is of course oh how much is it going to cost for the licenses how much is it going to be the total cost of ownership that's not actually their particular concern what we find time and time again that the real unique cell for free software is not what the open source people would say which is oh it's a collaborative effort which produces good software and it's a peer reviewed nor that that's lovely what the key cell is the freedom it's that if they want to change something they want to adapt something they want to do something in a way that's completely against what was originally thought of they don't have to answer to anybody to do that and we find this with organizations and companies that they themselves have no idea how they would even achieve that freedom they realize how useful it is to give a very simple example very recently we are writing some changes to the simple mailing list server which we are then going to redistribute the patches up to mains to the mainstream in order that it can be continued now the organization that asked us to do this knows very little about programming and software and how it can be maintained what they said is we know that you're using free software you did the hard sell on that can you actually do these things and change them radically so that it works exactly how we allow them what you want them to work and the answer was yes we could and this came as a very interesting counter example to them so what they are told by the other side of their business where they run things like Microsoft exchange servers and so on where the only real opportunity to change things is to basically cross your fingers and hope it comes in the next release now when we thinking about it is that really the way a mature competitive multinational organization is going to be expected to develop itself in the information age keep its fingers crossed and hope that it will be fixed in the next release because that's basically all that the proprietary world allows you and when it comes down to that fundamental choice and that fundamental point people actually do get it they don't get it immediately because they like to see the flashy installer and they like to see the good marketing but when it comes down to it people really do begin to appreciate that freedom a few a couple of years ago I was at a what was called a Microsoft open source briefing day very curious to see what they had to brief about in open source world they had a very good buffet you will get a good free lunch from Microsoft I'll give them that Phil Hans was also there and Microsoft were talking about their installer and their updater and so on and Phil Hans put up his hand and said I don't care how well you think you're doing you're never going to have a package management system that is universal or as good as the Debian project and the Microsoft guy kind of laughed and said never say never you how can you predict the future and what the Microsoft guy was miss misunderstanding and how he was missing the point is that it isn't that Microsoft couldn't do it technically it's that Microsoft's own business model prohibits it from doing it because to be able to have a system that basically upgrades coherently is kept up to sync with from the smallest package to the largest application that software has to be free software and we all know this even people who like macOS they know that they Apple updater will update its little unixi bits it'll update a bit of the GUI but you're not going to find that say your applications are going to be updated at the same level because of course they can't be Photoshop wants you to buy a new version when it updates it doesn't want to be updated seamlessly with the rest of the operating system if you're running Microsoft software maybe some of their software will update but because there'll be other software on that machine which is not allowed to be updated so we have here walls constantly put up that prevent the system and the software and by consequence the business from operating at its most efficient and most competitive way now at the moment not enough people know about this but I can tell you and I've seen enough people in these 10 years who start with the proprietary mindset and after they've used our services and people like our services and suddenly realize what you can achieve they begin to realize what it is that they've been missing all this time those little niggles and frustrations and that feeling of disempowerment they thought were just part of being a computer user and they suddenly realize it's not actually be a part of being a computer user it's part of being somebody who relies on proprietary systems and as somebody told me the other day one of our customers he says you know I've come to realize because it's quite an irony that originally he said he was a great kind of Microsoft fan he says you know I've come to realize he says you know there are a number of these laws and we all know we all know the laws and the corollaries and so on that people talk about Moore's law and so on he says basically my little law I won't say who he is because he's part of some organization he probably be fired for saying such dissident things as if if you mess about with proprietary systems eventually they are going to bite you in the backside and he says that is basically as night follows day a truth that he has now discovered more and more people in more and more high-flying parts of the world are discovering this and it's thanks to organizations and projects like the Debian project that they're able to find themselves a new bounty to replace some of the older bounties that are now being depleted so I'd like to thank everybody from my company because we couldn't have done it for ten years without everybody who's helped and we try to give help back in certain ways by distributing patches by sponsoring things and God help us hosting Richard Storman's website but there's nothing that we could do that would quite be able to thank you enough for all that you've provided us so thanks everybody I'm not sure if there'll be any questions but if there are I'm happy to ask answer them I yes I was curious I couldn't quite understand if you were suggesting that you think copyright law is a mistake I was I was it's not so much that copyright law per se is a mistake there are perhaps pragmatic arguments to be made for it and there is a discussion to be had what seems to be a mistake is to assume that the status quo is pretty much all there is and we can sort of tinker and build with that what I was trying to show at these quotations is that a lot of people have put a lot of thought over the centuries into what exactly it this so-called notion of intellectual property is and especially now that we have computing and networks that are able to replicate information at effectively zero cost there are huge new questions opening and they're being answered by very old answers stale answers effectively the music industry for example until very recently has wanted pretty much to use the law to protect its corporeal way of doing business and it hasn't actually adapted its business to the new technology one of the geniuses that's supposed to be the geniuses of capitalism is that it's not sentimental basically if it were a proper and true free market when the record and music industry found itself under attack it should have adapted or died it should have found a way to use these new creative ways of doing things or frankly it should have gone out of business that industry should have died that's what capitalism is supposed to do when the printing press arrived the scribes didn't suddenly find a big lobby which was able to cripple the printing press the scribes suddenly realized that either they get a new job they adapt to the situation or they'll find themselves out of work completely now one might say that that's a bit unfair or cruel to the scribes but that's the way the free market works when I find interesting and ironic is that those organizations that supposedly represent the biggest forms and representations of capitalism are constantly trying to opt out of the free market they're trying to find ways to stop competition to give themselves monopolies to prevent copying to prevent things from entering into the tumult of the market so my answer to you is no of course we can't just say let's have an anarchic free for all the answer is let's actually kind of press the reset switch and find something that's more adaptable to the world we find ourselves in because heaven knows the mess of IP regulation that we have at the moment is not doing a particularly good job for anybody at the moment certainly not protecting artists it's not protecting musicians and our software patents become more and more invidious it's not protecting software authors either so my answer is we need to kind of re dig the earth you mentioned software patents what's your opinion about the validity of software patents my opinion about the validity and it's only a pin an opinion is that there is something peculiar and peculiarly unnecessary peculiarly anti-democratic and very anti the whole human spirit about software patents because what effectively they do is something that patents were never supposed to do they don't just say this particular instantiation of something corporeal I've got a very good idea about and for a small period of time while I get into market I'm going to try and make the best I can out of this invention after which and the very important crawler is after which of course the free market kicks in again what software patents are doing is we're very good mammals that have kind of evolved away from the dinosaurs while the dinosaurs were lumbering about we were flitting about and finding all sorts of clever things to do effectively it's saying stop being clever mammals and be dinosaurs again you know don't once once you if you have an idea even if it's pretty obvious screw you somebody else has had it already it's partitioned once you start partitioning ideas it's no better frankly then attacking the freedom of speech and in a very real sense I think software patents are an attack on the freedom of speech really because they stop people from discussing implementing and hacking on important ideas it's nothing to do with inventions in the true sense of the word it's to do with everything that makes our species what it is inventiveness and there's a very big difference between the two so I think they're ludicrous and they were only they only came about because of a little frankly a bit of a mistake that happened in America and that mistake has now spread like like the most pernicious weed I've ever known. I'm Knewtoring from Norway we have the best copyright law in the world and we are PTU from Great Britain and US trying to rewrite the law copyright law because you don't risk people in these two countries and that's just two countries my sister was a was a state secretary of Norway in trade and commerce telling that it was actually just five people five countries that pushed the copyright law in the wrong direction in all of the world and that's US and some banana republic she said and she's a top politician so kind of that's the northern Europe view on how well let's say it's bluntly corporate America try to change the world the good part is that they are now losing one part of losing is the apple case when the Norwegian consumer office consumer ombudsman just says that you need to be able to pray play your MP3 files your music whatever on any device of choice the Norwegian government in the parliament saying that it's totally doable making digital restriction management we call it the movie digital movie ticket as free software you are explicitly allowed to do that we had the DVD John and this guy you know it's not the problem is in just to say to when I said all that all this is that what we do wrong in free software is that we're telling about what the US doing wrong as it is applied in everywhere where else then when we are actually helping people to believe that that is the court situation is not we should tell about the good countries we should tell about Norway Sweden Denmark and other countries that don't do the stupid things they do in US well yeah I agree and in a sense the US had better watch out because I'll actually take one of the last one of the last one of the last quotes from Lord Camden actually and he says about these people who try to restrict things in his time he says when once the bird is out of the cage Island Scotland America will afford her shelter and what then becomes of your action now of course today it's not sadly Island Scotland or America but indeed there will be other countries you know the some of the northern European countries some of course the Far East countries who will say fine spend all your time fighting with each other about patterns all you want you know let the Sun set on your empire in this kind of ridiculous decadent squabble because look what we're doing and the biggest irony is that the corporate America will be its own downfall if they carry on like this so but that's always the case I kind of I said in a little piece I wrote that one of the things I want to see is I want to see digital restrictions management get ridiculously tough I want people on the streets to become very annoyed by it I want them everybody to kind of I want these corporate owners to get their way and to get to have all their dreams won because frankly when they do the whole thing will come collapsing down we all know what the worst thing for the temperance movement in America was and that was that they actually got prohibition passed because you know that's what caused everything once everybody suddenly realized what prohibition meant you know the whole thing fell apart very quickly so I kind of want almost want that to happen I want the worst to happen and then the whole thing will just collapse very quickly so in a sense you're right but in a sense I kind of I kind of want the worst to happen I kind of keep my fingers crossed that they try their best because the harder they try the harder they'll fall do I do I have time okay touching on the international nature of this now that everything's global like everything is global doesn't it make copyright law and intellectual property and all that pretty much irrelevant now because it can't be defended globally so it you know what's the point why bother now because everybody can have anything and do whatever they want pretty much well again I mean the point I the point I just read out there and you know they kind of realized that 250 years ago it seems some people still don't quite realize that and if that if that was true 250 years ago how much more true is it now that we actually have global networks is not that some some is that book is disappearing and then reappearing in another country we have global networks of course what people are trying to do is they're trying they think that DRM is going to protect that global DRM network of DRM well we all know that that's pretty much mathematically if nothing else impossible it's not going to work and it's interesting to see the initial signs with Steve Jobs and his small capitulation and so on that already before I even thought it would happen it's already it's so tarnished I think some media companies and I was saying can we call it something else rather than DRM can we call it lovely fluffy bunny protection or something like that they're desperately trying to find a new way to rebrand it so kind of the things that needed to happen it to aid its collapse are already happening and you know every time the RIA prosecutes another child or bring some single mother up there you know that's that's that's plus one on the score you know I rejoice every time that happens because we all know what that means you know people are not convinced by such actions and people are also not convinced by some of the things that Microsoft are doing effectively every time you turn on your computer it checks to see whether it thinks you're a criminal or not and you know if it does this subtly that's all very well but you know Vista and other programs are doing it ever ever less subtly and it's beginning to annoy people and it's beginning to annoy important people who run very big networks and I think that as you say yes it's a global issue now it's an issue about information that can go anywhere over the world for at the at the speed of light and frankly I antiquated laws that were established in the 18th century are not really going to stop that just one small comment more because you're saying let's get it let's get it worse before we're going to get it better that's just a strategy yeah well it's it's a kind of if it has to get worse I wanted to get very much worse very quickly yeah yeah it's kind of to be practical I'm a practical guy and what the thing is that you it's a hard job to fight in the political space because we are engineers you just hate it because it's all kinds of deliberation we need to be there and that's just my point that is actually better to have it to take the political fight to them that's better than making things worse it's better to say to the parliament politicians say the consequences that you will not be able to compete in the digital arena or what actually has happened is that the US and Great Britain and some other countries has given a waiter technology leadership economically to the northern Europe and we I'm traveling all over the world and thank them because they have done so because we can earn fucking more money on their behalf so please help us doing that yeah and I'm pretty much finished I'll end on one last quote because I think he you know go go and look look the subtype Lord Camden online and copyright and find it because you know just reading through his findings are wonderful and he basically talks about the continent is and he says instead of salesman the booksellers of late years have forstalled the market and become engrosses this perpetuity now contended for is as odious and a selfish as any other it deserves as much reprobation and will become as intolerable knowledge and science are not things to be bound in such cobweb chains and I think I pretty much agree with him that thanks