A "law" formulated by Columbia University professor and general counsel for the FSF Eben Moglen in his famous essay: Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright, given as a better explanation for human creative activity, as opposed to economic incentive that is one of the main justifications for the present system of copyrights, patents and, intellectual property in general. It is very similar to Faraday's Laws and the principle of electromagnetic induction, explaining in an analogous way a lot of what happens on the Internet and probably much of what occurs right here on Everything2. Basically stated: "If you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network." As Moglen puts it:
The dwarf's basic problem is that "incentives" is merely a metaphor, and as a metaphor to describe human creative activity it's pretty crummy. I have said this before, but the better metaphor arose on the day Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet. Current flows in such a wire, but we don't ask what the incentive is for the electrons to leave home. We say that the current results from an emergent property of the system, which we call induction. The question we ask is "what's the resistance of the wire?" 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, software 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.
| 
