The movement also makes an example of Pfizer, by destroying a disgraceful patent that was supposed to secure the company seven years of unjust monopoly rents worth more than $80 billion. Pfizer’s performance staggers and its CEO is thrown out; patients and their insurers recover gains through expanded competition in the cholesterol reduction market. The movement threatens patent disaster for the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation unless it changes its policy and stops trying to tax human stem cell research. WARF surrenders. The movement obliterates the patents used by Monsanto to sue farmers who have had the audacity to replant seed from their own crops, or who have had seeds blown into their fields by wind from a neighbor’s farm. (Call it the You Shall Not Press Down Upon Our Brow this Case of the Thorns Case.) Foundation boards around the US philanthropy sector are strengthened by pro-patent business emissaries to assure that capitalism’s charities aren’t committing ideological crime by funding further attack on strategic high-fraudacity patents. The movement secures enhanced capitalist funding for destruction of the patent system.
Within thirty years of the movement’s foundation, every significant supplier or consumer of technology in the world—including the now-failing software monopoly itself—is dependent on the movement’s technologies. The effect of a system unable to banish software that does what individual human beings want—rather than what their putative controllers want—begins to be widely felt: Journalism around the world is transformed, and the powers of the media oligopoly must reconfigure in order to retain their challenged sway. The music industry collapses and is reborn in a completely new set of forms, much more favorable to musicians than anything seen before. Television as previously known is challenged by frictionless distribution, making possible new democratic video media. “Social networks” alter the patterns of basic human communication away from the forms favored by the immensely powerful telephone and newly-endangered telecommunications oligopolies. Political power begins to shift in consequence.
Societies comprised of the majority of humankind adopt formal policies favoring the movement’s technologies, thus accelerating the political power shift in the direction of the movement’s ideological program. In the world’s most populous democracy, one State, of 31 million people, the only one with a literacy rate approaching that of the United States, not only adopts exclusively free software technology for public administration and education, but teaches the philosophy of the movement in its schools beginning in the fifth grade.