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<!-- pubdate: 20071019 -->
<!-- author: V. Sasi Kumar -->
# The Spectre of Free Information - Interview with Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History - FRONTLINE
Prof. Eben Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal History at the
Columbia University Law School, Founder Director of the Software
Freedom Law Centre and General Counsel for the Free Software
Foundation, Boston. Free Software is software that gives users the
freedom to use on any number of computers, to share with others, to
study and modify and to redistribute the modified
version. Prof. Moglen was involved in developing version 3 of the GNU
General Public Licene (the licence with which most Free Software is
distributed), along with Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free
Software Movement. He has had a rather unusual career. At 16, he
helped write the first networked email system. He later worked on
designing programming languages at IBM, but left the company
in 1984. He did a history degree and then a law degree, and ended up
teaching and writing about the roots of intellectual property law.
A friendly and jovial person, Prof. Moglen has very interesting ideas
that he has expressed through his numerous lectures across the world
and in his writings. During his public speech at Thiruvananthapuram on
Free Software and Free Culture, he said that all patent laws,
including the ones in the US, are archaic. Speaking in New Delhi in
2006, he remarked: "Anything that is worth copying is worth sharing."
He has devised what he calls the Correlative Corollary to Faraday's
Law: take the community, wind the net around it and spin the world,
and you get information flowing through the network. Another
interesting work from him is the dotCommunist Manifesto about which
also he speaks in this interview which was done when Prof. Moglen was
in India in June 2007. He speaks about Free Software, Free Culture and
their economic and political impact in this excerpt from the
interview.
**Question**: The Free Software movement started in United
States. What is the status of FS there? How popular is FS there?
**Prof. Moglen**: Well, popular, I think, is a little hard to judge
for two reasons. First because we have people who are using it and
don't know that they are using it. It's inside their enterprises
and/or it's inside their appliances. And they are not aware of
it. Second, we have the people who know that they are using it and who
have purchased the product or downloaded the product without
necessarily accounting for all their copies. So what we can say is
that Free Software is far more popular in the United States than what
the United States is aware. [Read More (archived)][artcl].
[artcl]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071027165534/http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2420/stories/20071019507610000.htm
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