Ravi A Giri

We are living through a Gutenberg moment. Before the printing press, books were rare and expensive. Gutenberg showed how to make them far cheaper. It took decades, but books became widely available in Europe. Then came the scientific revolution. Today it is fashionable to treat science as a closed institution run by an elite. The scientific revolution was not that. It let ordinary people raise ideas and objections. Newton’s father was an illiterate farmer. Galileo came from a modest family; his father was a musician. Many lost out to the printing press. Kings, queens, and later wealthy publishers fought to control what could be printed. The Statute of Anne in 1710 introduced modern copyright. It took another two centuries to spread across the world. Software followed a similar path. Early software was freely copied. People treated it more like mathematical techniques or fashion: if you saw something you liked, you could reproduce it. Bill Gates and others stopped that. Software became like books. You could still copy it for friends, but it was wrong. Businesses could not, because they could be sued. People like to share and copy. “You can’t just copy this piece of code” is a legal construction, not human nature. Open source was a hack on a relatively recent copyright system (1710 is not ancient). It took decades, but it became a massive success. Even Microsoft is deep into open source now. AI changes the world again. It is another Gutenberg press: it makes copying cheap. I can take any book and have an AI rewrite it to sidestep copyright. This need not be done with bad intent. I still write books (two are in preparation), but anyone can now “write” a book with little effort. Mine will remain better, at least until the models improve further. Anyone can also clone, port, or adapt the thousands of pieces of software I have published over the last two decades. The reputation economics shift. You can invest months in a beautiful library only to see it copied, emulated, and ported hundreds of times the minute it is released, often without credit. At first glance this looks bad for the little guy. That is how copyright has always been sold: “it protects the little guy.” What is at stake is different. Power is shifting. Just as with the printing press, the technology may favour ordinary people more than is obvious. A single person today can take software that a large corporation uses as a barrier and produce their own version with the engineering resources of one individual. This is not theory. It is happening now. If I were a powerful but stagnant organization, I would be worried about what the common man can now do.