---
title: Notes from Doctorow, September 2020
author: Gustav Eek
date: 12 dec 2020
---

As preparation for Christmas party. Listen to Cory Doctorow, 'We used
to have cake, now all that's left is icing', Stanford Online,
September 2020.


 * EFF, [Cory Doctorow at the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction
   Seminar](https://www.eff.org/event/cory-doctorow-stanford-human-computer-interaction-seminar),
   September 2020. A free public talk by EFF Special Advisor Cory
   Doctorow for Stanford's Human-Computer Interaction Seminar. Watch
   it here.

 * [The talk](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMyupDF2O00r19JsmolyXdD)

01:00

Free software licences, Stallman, etc. 1983.

03:00

Open source as alternative, 1988,

Free software born before software patents and api patents.

05:00

Cake and icing world in the 80:es.

Applying GPL on the source code was the icing on top of the generally
spread software freedom which was the cake.

(*listen again to get it right*)

07:00

Now world is a different place. Any attempt to iteract with existing
software is effective

08:00

Interoperability thanks to standardisation. Benefits. In physical
societies.

12:00

Ease of entering, hard to leave → By Facebook, interoperability is
utilised to make entrance easy.

14:00

Leaving Facebook is possible, but not easy.

"Leaving Facebook in the 21'st century is like leaving Sovjet for US in
the 40'es. You can go, sure, but your friends and your loved ones are
all held hostage behind Zuclebergs iron curtains."

16:00

Couple interoperability with democracy.

18:00

"Intellectual property" is a recent concept for grouping (a)
copyright, (b) patents, and (c) trademarks. Historically referred to
separately or by "author's monopoly".

Critique on patents.  Trademarks are not property at all.  Now "IP"
means any way for companies to control others, employees, customers,
etc. "A way to control the customers to force customers to arrange
their affairs to benefit the manufacturer." A way to transfer risk and
uncertenity from the manufacturer side of the balance sheet to the
customer side.

DRM

"Conjure up a doctuorum we can call felony controlled business models".

Goldman Sacks copyright protect their logo font with the purpose of
controlling criticism.

26:00

How "author's monopoly" became "intellectual property".

b29:00

Authors' monopolies accumulates to market power monopolies.
Monopolies in culture sector, entertainment monopolies, from movie
theatres to book sellers.

33:20

Software is eating the world, or has already eaten the world.

There is no software freedom there is only freedom. Software rights
had become human rights.

The combination of software and IP in basically every device.

35:10

Level of control beyond the wildest dreams of the history's most
sociopathic monopolists

Compare coal bosses controlling workers. Noninteroperable
mony. Software enforcing system

36:20

Ending

"Once we had cake, today we have icing, and the icing is disappearing
fast. There are no digital rights, only human rights, and today there
is no software freedom, there is only freedom."

36:45