On Lisa Rein's Radar: Internet Archive Bookmobile Archives

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April 21, 2003

Come See Me And The Internet Bookmobile At Emerging Technologies 2003

I will be presenting with Brewster Khale this Wednesday afternoon from 3:45-4:30 in the Lafayette/San Tomas/Lawrence room at Emerging Technologies Conference going on all week in Santa Clara.

Here's a short film I've just put together of the Internet Bookmobile's first stop of its first voyage.

This was shot on Monday, September 30, 2002, approximately two weeks before the Eldred Argument on October 11, 2002.

Bookmobile Launch (Low-res - 35 MB)
Bookmobile Launch (Hi-res - 72 MB)

Posted by Lisa at 07:11 AM

April 05, 2003

Internet Archive Bookmobile At Peace March Today

The Bookmobile and it's new crew will be at the Rally Today in downtown Oakland.

I'll be there filming the event too! See you there!

Posted by Lisa at 08:54 AM

October 20, 2002

More From Koman on the Internet Bookmobile

Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile
For Salon
Angered by a law that extends copyright terms for 20 years, a crusader named Brewster Kahle wants to use the Internet to make books available to everyone.

It's still four days until the big day at the Supreme Court. We still have books to make at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and schools in Baltimore and Washington. Many of us are exhausted from covering 2,000 miles in four days, but Brewster is even more invigorated than ever. He can't wait to stand beneath the stone-carved words "FREE FOR THE PEOPLE" that adorn the Carnegie and make books. The slogan, idealistic as it may be, fairly captures Brewster's wildest dreams for the Net. A massive library containing the full breadth of human knowledge and experience, freely and easily accessible to everyone on the planet. A library truly free to the people.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/09/bookmobile/index.html

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Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile | 1, 2, 3

Oct. 4, 2002, Great American Bookmobile Convention, Columbus, Ohio

Raj Reddy -- "god of computer science" is how Kahle describes him -- has trained generations of technologists at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He has laid down the gauntlet for "universal access to human knowledge" (the phrase is his). His vision is to put a million public-domain books online and he has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the effort. As the bookmobile travels the U.S., a ship carrying a container filled with Reddy's books is headed for China for a mass scanning effort. Even when scanning by the containerful, a million is a lot of books.

To grow from 20,000 to 1 million, the Million Book Project needs to change from the obsession of a few gifted computer scientists to a widespread, decentralized movement. Kahle wants people to bring their personal documents -- grandfather's book, letters found in an attic -- to him. The digital library needs librarians. We found them at the Great American Bookmobile Conference.

"We don't even know what treasures are out there in books that are out of print and still under copyright. Every book has some value even if it's just to the author and his descendents. We need to open our libraries so kids can learn from the full breadth of our knowledge," Kahle says.

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Michael Hart's line -- "The Internet brings the history of the world to your town and the history of your town to the world" -- strikes a chord with the librarians. One attendee of the conference is a clerk with a rural Pennsylvania library that prides itself on its genealogy collections. "People come from all over the world to research their ancestry," she says. "We're looking for a system to digitize our books. Some of them are quite rare, all of them are getting dog-eared. This answers everything we've been looking for."

Since Kahle is volunteering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, "we can scan all this stuff, put it on the Web, and people can view it without having to travel to us. Then if they want to see the originals, they can still come to the library."

Oct. 5, 2002, Pittsburgh

It's still four days until the big day at the Supreme Court. We still have books to make at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and schools in Baltimore and Washington. Many of us are exhausted from covering 2,000 miles in four days, but Brewster is even more invigorated than ever. He can't wait to stand beneath the stone-carved words "FREE FOR THE PEOPLE" that adorn the Carnegie and make books. The slogan, idealistic as it may be, fairly captures Brewster's wildest dreams for the Net. A massive library containing the full breadth of human knowledge and experience, freely and easily accessible to everyone on the planet. A library truly free to the people.

salon.com

Posted by Lisa at 04:58 PM

Richard Koman: What I Learned At Internet Bookmobile Camp

Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile

One of the government's main arguments in Eldred--since they couldn't argue that extending copyrights retroactively stimulates creativity--was that work is more likely to be disseminated if a publisher or a studio has a commercial interest in distributing it. This is false in theory: How many people have seen "Steamboat Willie," Mickey Mouse's first film, which would have gone into the public domain if Sonny Bono hadn't intervened? How many would see it if it were freely available to be digitized and downloaded from Kazaa?

Here is the complete text in case the link goes bad:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/18/bookmobile

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Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
by Richard Koman
10/18/2002

"Forget Mickey Mouse," Lawrence Lessig told an admiring crowd at a reception after the Supreme Court arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft. "The real opportunity is what Brewster is working on, what Eldred is working on. The opportunity is to take material and give it back to our culture."

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"Eldred," of course, is Eric Eldred, publisher of Eldritch Press and lead plaintiff in the case. "Brewster" is Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, and inventor of the Internet Bookmobile, a high-tech version of those buses with bookshelves that used to come visit your school in the second grade.

From September 30 until the big day on October 9, I traveled across the country with Brewster, his eight-year-old son Caslon and two other friends from San Francisco. Loaded in the back of the Bookmobile were an HP duplexing color printer, a couple of laptops, a desktop binding machine, and a paper cutter. On top was a MotoSat dish with Internet connection. We drove from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.--stopping at schools in East Palo Alto, California, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, and Washington; the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh; and the Great American Bookmobile Conference in Columbus, Ohio--taking ASCII text versions of public domain works available online and turning them into books. When the Bookmobile shows up at a school, kids get to operate the paper cutter to make books, each classroom gets a few books to keep, and everyone gets a lesson in the applications of the public domain.

While it wasn't always clear to the public what we were up to exactly--were we selling books? selling the equipment?--eventually the point crystallized: the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. It addresses the basic question: What good is the public domain?

Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 -- In his keynote address to a packed house at OSCON 2002, Lawrence Lessig challenges the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Read the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002.
Unlimited Possibilities

One of the government's main arguments in Eldred--since they couldn't argue that extending copyrights retroactively stimulates creativity--was that work is more likely to be disseminated if a publisher or a studio has a commercial interest in distributing it. This is false in theory: How many people have seen "Steamboat Willie," Mickey Mouse's first film, which would have gone into the public domain if Sonny Bono hadn't intervened? How many would see it if it were freely available to be digitized and downloaded from Kazaa?

But the Bookmobile shows that the proposition is false. In fact, the Bookmobile's message, in essence, is that these are books we can put in the hands of children, through schools, and we can do it at a very low cost. (The material cost for a black and white book with color cover is $1.) We can create large-print versions of these books and put them in the hands of senior citizens, and we can deliver them to their homes or to retirement centers. We can transform libraries into public-domain printing plants. And we can enable commercial publishers to create new products that attract new customers, both young and old.

Two things are required for these possibilities to be realized:

A rich public domain. Either the 1998 law must be overturned, or Congress must be convinced to repeal the law on its own. Failing a full-scale repeal, the retroactive clause (the part that extends Mickey Mouse's copyright, as opposed to the copyright on works not yet created) must be removed. This is not only because the current law outrageously denies hundreds of thousands of works to the public, but also because failure to overturn means that Congress is free to extend copyrights whenever it wants, and the words of the Constitution's framers--"limited terms"--are directly contradicted.
*

Putting the public domain online. Everything in the public domain must go on the Net. All of it. This is the single biggest action individuals can take. Find public domain materials, get them scanned and upload them to the Archive Web site. The Internet Archive is offering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for this purpose.

Who Gets It?

It's not at all clear that the Supreme Court will overturn. The case is "in trouble," Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at U.C. Berkeley opined at a post-hearing reception on Capitol Hill. The trouble largely stems from the question of the massive rewrite of the Copyright Act in 1976, which extended copyright terms to lifetime of the author plus 50 years. How can the 1998 law be unconstitutional but the 1976 law just fine? Speaking at the reception, sponsored by Public Knowledge, Lessig based his hopes on faith that the Court would be as "creative" in its logic here as they have been in the past.

Still, Lessig is confident about the case. "I am obviously extremely happy with where we are," he writes in his Weblog. "The Court is struggling with the right issue; they are motivated to get the right answer; they have a clear and simple way to give the right answer; the government has made it very hard to accept its answer. It is always hard to get the Court to strike a law of Congress, but this law is so universally flawed, and the case against it is so universally strong, that I continue to be confident that the Court could choose to strike the law."

Whatever happens in the case, Lessig claimed victory for the cause, since "four years ago people told me I was insane to bring this case, not because it was without merits but because no one got it--not the press, not the public, certainly not the politicians." What happened in the Supreme Court argument, Lessig said, was that the Court showed they "got it." As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "It is hard to understand how, if the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work, how some retroactive extension could possibly do that. One wonders what was in the minds of Congress."

The public gets it, too. As we traveled the country and talked to people about the public domain, no one--not one single person--disagreed with this premise that more, not fewer, books should be in the public domain, and sooner rather than later. Not one single person in Utah or Ohio, Washington or California, said, "You're wrong--it's important for artists to enrich their heirs for another 20 years." No one said, "I think publishers and studios should be able to make money forever on their creations." No one said, "I couldn't care less if thousands of works are kept out of students' hands, so long as Disney gets to keep control of its movies forever."

Even the press gets it. After the argument, The New York Times editorialized: "The purpose of the 1998 Congressional extension was not protecting artists, but enriching media companies that hold property rights in their creations, virtually in perpetuity. The founders did not envision copyright being put to this use, and the Supreme Court should not allow it." A Washington Post editorial doubted the Court could overturn the law with legitimacy, but agreed that the law is atrocious policy: "At some point, serial and retroactive extensions of "limited times" render copyright protection unlimited. And it seems wrong for Congress to be able to circumvent what would clearly be unconstitutional--granting indefinite copyright protection--by simply extending protection incrementally every few years."

Regardless of the Court's decision, or public or press opinion on the matter, there still exists a public domain and it is effectively available to the public only to the degree that it is online. As Brewster says: "Never mind about the stuff that's still under copyright. If we can't get the public domain online, we don't deserve to get the other stuff." The Bookmobile was Brewster's attempt to show some of the public domain is online and to demonstrate an application of what can be done with it. But it is only a demo. The real payoff comes when mature institutions in critical positions take the public domain and run with it. Let's look at libraries, schools, and the commercial sector. In conclusion, we'll talk about what the government's responsibility is here.

Pages: 1, 2

Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
Pages: 1, 2
Libraries

The bookmobile metaphor is designed to address the library world. To librarians, it says, you can do better. At the bookmobile conference in Columbus, vendors showed off $300,000 bookmobiles with fine oak bookshelves, computer stations, even mobile satellite dishes. Parked far from these budget-breakers, the Internet Bookmobile costs $15,000 tops, plus the cost of a minivan (the Aerostar was bought from a used car lot for under $4,000). To librarians, the Internet Bookmobile says, with a rich public domain, the Net, and inexpensive desktop equipment, you can wildly improve the quality of the services you offer. You can change libraries from expensive buildings with huge storage and retrieval costs, to a place where books are stored online and printed as desired. Libraries can become a place where books are custom-made.

Even more radically, the Bookmobile says, why should libraries buy copies of public-domain works from publishers when they should be freely available online, and paperback copies can be created for $1. In point of fact, why should libraries lend public domain works at all, when they can just give them away?

Beyond all this, librarians can use the Net as a storage facility for special collections, which are not necessarily in book form. A librarian I met in Columbus, for example, explained that her library in rural Pennsylvania is well known for its genealogy collection, with patrons from around the world coming to research their families. A few days before we talked, someone had come in with several boxes of Grange records found in an attic. With such a collection digitized and online, the library improves preservation, increases access, decreases storage and maintenance costs, and frees librarians from spending time retrieving papers.

Even so, not all librarians are embracing the Internet wholeheartedly. The Library of Congress has received $100 million for digital preservation but few works have been digitized. And Michael Hart, creator of Project Gutenberg, tells a story about a meeting he had scheduled with a local librarian to give him a CD of Gutenberg texts. The librarian wasn't available so his assistant met Hart. When Michael told her, "I'm just dropping these books off for him," and handed her the CD, "She went completely ashen. Her eyes had the look of a deer caught in headlights. That's a look I had never seen before and I've never seen since."

Libraries have the budgets and they have the mission to support the digital future, but do they have the will?
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Schools

The opportunities at schools are huge. Schools are strapped by budget constraints and dependent on school districts and state boards to provide one-size-fits-all texts. Public schools could benefit immensely from being able to create books for their students.

Consider what happens when Digital Village put laptops in the hands of fourth to eighth graders at the Belle Haven School in East Palo Alto, California. According to the Digital Village project coordinator, computers in the homes result in increased parent-child interaction, increased focus in the classroom, more time spent reading (on screen), increased computer literacy among parents, and a sense among children of their place in larger world, as opposed to their local community.

What impact would putting books as well as computers into students' homes have? One can imagine increased literacy for both kids and adults (adults in inner-city Baltimore read at the fifth-grade level), more parent-child interaction as kids and parents read to each other, and of course, more success in schools as kids more willingly read their own books rather than assigned textbooks or library books they must return--if they can even find books they want to read in the under-financed schools and public libraries (a teacher in Salt Lake who previously worked in poor Chicago neighborhoods told me the public libraries' shelves there were simply bare; the high school we visited in Washington D.C. didn't even have a library).

Technology is cool, but books are not, right? Yet, when the Bookmobile pulled into the school playground, all the kids wanted books, wanted the low-tech thrill of pulling a paper cutter blade, and were thrilled by the simple activity of folding a piece of paper into a little eight-fold booklet. They were thrilled to have the same books that were no doubt gathering dust in the school library.

Schools can implement this technology for a small upfront investment and incidental costs. And the process of creating books can itself be turned into an educational experience for older children. Schools--especially underfunded inner-city schools--are miserably failing our children. They are growing up illiterate, unaware of their potential and their possibilities. Actively exploiting the public domain in the ways the Bookmobile suggests can radically change this.
Commercial

A few presses, such as Dover Books (the clip-art publisher) and Modern Library, have for many years made strong publishing businesses from the public domain. (O'Reilly's signature book covers of animal woodcuts originally came from Dover Books.) But what commercial opportunities does the Bookmobile concept present?

How about packaging the equipment Brewster culled together into a print-on-demand solution? Consider the words of one participant on the Archive's forums: "I would put out the money in a heartbeat, but don't really have a lot of time to spend learning how to set this all up. I live in a small town in Tennessee, and think it would be a wonderful community service."

Imagine not only schools and libraries buying such a solution but also Kinko's and Barnes & Noble. A few people we talked to were so turned on by the idea of creating their own books, they were talking about buying their own printer/binder/cutter setups. Imagine being able to go into Kinko's to print and bind your book, or finding an old gem in a bookstore and scanning, printing, and binding it as a gift for friends. Imagine B&N turning its own imprint of the classics into a print-on-demand service.

Strange to think about, when the debate is often positioned as Silicon Valley versus Hollywood, but Hollywood can be one of the greatest promoters of the public domain by turning public-domain properties into valuable commercial properties. Since The Secret Garden enter the public domain in 1986, more than a dozen properties have been created, including TV movies, books, audio books, and plays, according to Arizona State law professor Dennis Karjala.
Government

Obviously, government is part of the problem, since it was Congress that passed the 1998 law that locked so many works out of the public domain. But there are many aspects of government. The National Science Foundation has given Carnegie Mellon $500,000 for its Million Book Project. They could give many more grants, not only for the MBP, but also to library science programs, to the study of improvements in OCR technology, and so forth.

The Library of Congress can put the digitizing of public-domain works on the fast track.

The Education Department and state Boards of Education can buy the Bookmobile's print-on-demand system and place it in schools, much as what happened with putting the Internet in the schools.

The Archive is donating unlimited storage space for the digital public-domain library. Surely the government can at least match that commitment.

I'm sure other government employees and those who follow government closer than I do can think of additional government programs that could help speed up the digitization of the public domain.
Conclusion

As I've said here, the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. Traveling "on the bus" has brought to my mind a few ideas for other demonstrable applications. It has also made clear that it is critical to get from "demo" to "shipping product." We should turn not only minivans but also schools, libraries, homes, print shops, and bookstores into book publishing and book scanning operations. In this way the value of the public domain becomes tangible and improved. The more that people actually use public domain works, the more likely they are to contribute to it, and to fight for it.

Richard Koman is a freelance writer and editor. He is a regular contributor to New Architect magazine and the O'Reilly Network.

Posted by Lisa at 04:43 PM

October 08, 2002

Eldred and Internet Bookmobile in NY Times

Court to Review Copyright Law
By Amy Harmon.

Here is the entire text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/business/media/07ARGU.html

Court to Review Copyright Law
By AMY HARMON

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments this week over the constitutionality of a 1998 law that extended copyright protection by 20 years. Experts on both sides of the closely watched case say that its outcome could reshape the way cultural products are consumed and how their profits are divided.
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The court's decision will determine whether a host of material — including early Mickey Mouse movies, Cole Porter songs and Robert Frost poems — will become available for free to the public or remain in the control of their copyright holders.

Since the court agreed to hear the case in February, it has become a touchstone in an increasingly acrimonious debate over how to balance the rights of consumers with those of big media companies at a time when digital technology is threatening both.

Under the 1998 law, material whose copyright formerly would have lapsed 50 years after its creator's death became protected for an additional 20 years. Copyrights held by corporations, meanwhile, were extended to 95 years, from 75 previously.

Over the long term, supporters of the law say, it will promote creative work by offering a bigger economic payoff to those who invest in it.

The 1998 law also aligns the United States' copyright terms with those of European countries.

But detractors say the statute inhibits creativity by making it harder and more expensive for other people to obtain and build upon existing works. The 1998 law, these critics argue, mainly benefits powerful corporate copyright holders like the Walt Disney Company, whose intensive lobbying helped pass the legislation.

The law's challengers say that it disregards the public's side of the balance that the Constitution sought to strike when it authorized Congress to issue copyrights "for limited times" to "promoted the progress of science and useful arts." The initial Copyright Act, in 1790, set a maximum term of only 28 years.

Opponents of the 1998 law say that by issuing a series of 11 extensions over the last 40 years — the latest being by far the longest — Congress has exceeded its powers by, in effect, giving copyright holders a permanent monopoly over the use of their material.

Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who has spearheaded the case since its inception almost four years ago, says that the rise of the Internet makes the copyright issue all the more urgent, because works that fall into the public domain would for the first time be easily accessible via the Internet for millions of people to enjoy and to incorporate into new digital works of their own.

"Imagine you want to do something with the New Deal, and you get images and songs and stories and put it together on the Internet for everyone to see," Mr. Lessig said last week in a telephone interview from a Washington hotel room, where he was preparing for this Wednesday's oral argument. "Just at a point where technology is making all of this available, the law ought not to get in the way for no good reason."

Mr. Lessig said that he planned to argue that throughout the last century, copyrights primarily governed only commercial entities — companies with the printing presses, movie studios or broadcast stations capable of widely distributing information and entertainment. But now, Mr. Lessig said, copyright law touches everyone who has an Internet connection, which makes it more important than ever to adhere to the limits the Constitution intended to place on the duration of copyrights.

The government, to be represented on Wednesday by Theodore B. Olson, the solicitor general, is expected to argue that no one, including the Supreme Court, can impose an arbitrary definition of "limited times." In its filings on the case, the government has argued that the Constitution leaves such definitions up to Congress.

But the law's opponents argue that any law limiting speech must satisfy a compelling state interest in the least restrictive way possible. The copyright term extension, they say, should be tested under the First Amendment to see whether it is overly restrictive of the free-speech rights of would-be users of copyrighted material that previously would have been in the public domain.

Courts have traditionally rejected that position. It is also rebutted in the government's filings and in a brief by Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer. Mr. Abrams argues that free speech is protected under the extension because of the fair-use provisions built into copyright law, which enable scholars, critics and other individuals to make some use of copyrighted material in their own work. What is more, he argues, the copyright law protects only the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.

Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that, in practice, a longer copyright term would serve the Constitution's goal of harnessing copyright for the public good. Private ownership is the necessary incentive to make material widely available, he said.

"Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" Mr. Valenti said. "To digitize a movie costs a huge amount of money. Who would spend the money if they didn't own it? If you didn't own your house would you spend a lot of money to bring it up to snuff?"

The entertainment industry is particularly sensitive to copyright issues these days. File-swapping services like KaZaA are enabling Internet users to easily exchange free digital copies of copyrighted music. And the impending transition to digital television raises copyright concerns about viewers' ability to trade high-quality digital copies of movies and television shows over the Internet.

The case has attracted 38 friend-of-the-court briefs from prominent intellectuals, artists, elected officials and advocates in numerous fields — who in some instances seem to defy traditional political lines. Fifteen economists from across the political spectrum, including the Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Kenneth Arrow, for instance, wrote a brief in support of the challenge, arguing that it is "highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension" outweigh the additional costs.

The conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly, who is the founder of the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, also submitted a brief in support of overturning the law, as did the Intel Corporation, besides more predictable partisans like the Free Software Foundation and several library associations.

Mr. Lessig filed the suit on behalf of Eric Eldred, a New Hampshire computer administrator who had published dozens of public-domain books online as a hobby until the copyright extension act prevented him from posting a selection of Robert Frost poems in 1998.

In an elaborate demonstration of what it means to have a public domain, Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, is driving across the country in a van that has an Internet-linked satellite antenna on top and a laser printer inside.

Last week Mr. Kahle made several stops at schools and libraries, as well as a bookmobile conference, to distribute "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Heart of Darkness" and other books in the public domain that have been scanned and are available free online. He plans to park outside the Supreme Court and do the same on Wednesday.

Lined up on the government's side are Mr. Abrams; Dr. Seuss Enterprises; Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican; several members of the House Judiciary Committee, and virtually all of the major copyright holder trade associations.

It will fall to Mr. Lessig, who is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and who has become a kind of rock star for the digital liberties set, to convince the justices to accept the unconventional analysis.

If they do, the decision could be a turning point in redefining a balance between copyright consumers and producers — and the technology companies that are often in the middle.

Among the points Mr. Lessig likes to make is that extending copyright terms for works of great artists who are deceased, like George Gershwin, cannot promote the creation of new works because the original artists themselves can no longer create.

Only about 2 percent of works protected by copyright produce continuing revenue for their owners, Mr. Lessig says. But no one can use the rest without hunting down the owners and negotiating licenses.

Disney faced no such restrictions, he says, when the company drew on Victor Hugo's work to produce the animated film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm to make "Cinderella" and "Snow White."

Posted by Lisa at 03:37 PM

Pictures from Last Week's Bookmobile Send Off

Day 1

You can find other photos and things on the Internet Bookmobile website.

Posted by Lisa at 01:50 PM

October 04, 2002

Internet Archive Bookmobile in Slashdot!

Public Domain Bookmobile Hits the Road

Posted by Lisa at 01:57 PM

October 03, 2002

Internet Archive Bookmobile in Pubspace

1,000,000 Books on Board
By Gregg Williams.

Here's the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.pubspace.com/publishing/bookmobile.html

September 30, 2002

Yesterday, the Internet Archive Bookmobile was on view in San Francisco in preparation for its cross-country trip to Washington D.C.. Along the way, it will be printing out public-domain books on demand and giving them to people at schools, libraries, shopping malls, senior citizens centers, and other venues (including the Great American Bookmobile Conference in Columbus OH). The purpose of the trip is to publicize the value of works in the public domain, as well as the practicality of printing books on demand. The bookmobile will arrive in Washington D.C. on October 9, the same day that the Supreme Court will be deciding the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit challenging the further extension of United States copyright laws.
The bookmobile is one project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to "offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format."

The bookmobile has conductivity to the Internet through the MotoSAT satellite dish (similar to those used by your local television crew) mounted on its roof.

Not counting the satellite dish, it doesn't take that much to print your own books: a laptop computer (below left), a thermal binding machine (a Fastback machine, center), an industrial-strength paper cutter (the kind used by bookmakers, right), and a double-sided laserprinter (not shown). According to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive (and pictured below), the setup he is taking on the road costs about $5000, although less expensive equipment performing the same functions costs around $3000.

The bookmaking process is simple. First, you browse the Internet Archive site for books that have already been formatted for distribution. You download the desired book, print it on sheets of 11-by-17 inch paper (two book pages per sheet of paper), cut the sheets in half, and join the two halves to make the body of the book. You wrap a special cover (printed on an inkjet printer) around the book body, bind the pages with the binding machine, and use the paper cutter to trim the edges of the book. Kahle says he can print a copy of Alice in Wonderland in about 10 minutes, for a materials cost of about $1.

Posted by Lisa at 03:36 PM

October 01, 2002

Internet Archive Bookmobile Hits The Road

Brewster and his Internet Bookmobile hit the road yesterday.

The first stop was Belle Haven Elementary School, in Menlo Park.

I've got quotes and pictures and video going up soon. And I'll be calling the gang (Brewster, Caslon, Art, Michael and Richard) on the road to get reports.

Oh yeah - the "Richard" above is Richard Koman who is coming along to write a piece for Magazine X! (I forgot if I can say this or not, so I better confirm one way or the other.)

Posted by Lisa at 10:03 AM

September 28, 2002

Hal Plotkin on the Eldred Case and Brewster's Bookmobile

Hal Plotkin writes about Eldred in his latest column:

Free Mickey Stanford Law Professor seeks to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act

To heighten public awareness of the importance of the case an Internet bookmobile is set to depart San Francisco next Monday on a trip that will bring it to the steps of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., before arguments wrap up. The van, which will be stopping at schools, libraries and senior centers along the way, is equipped to provide free high-speed access to thousands of literary and artistic works that are already in the public domain.

Tens of thousands of additional books would have come into the public domain (meaning their copyrights would have expired) over the next few years, but now they won't thanks to the Sonny Bono law.

The U.S. Constitution states:

"The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

So when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, what turned out to be the latest of 11 consecutive extensions to the length of copyrights, it raised a very important question: Exactly what does the phrase "for limited times" mean?

Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/09/26/bonoact.DTL

Free Mickey
Stanford Law Professor seeks to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act

Hal Plotkin, Special to SF Gate Thursday, September 26, 2002

Opening arguments are set to begin early next month in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that will decide the future of copyright law, including how and when artists and writers can build upon the work of others.

At issue is the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which was enacted in 1998 with strong support from Hollywood's politically powerful studios. The law extended the length of copyrights for an additional 20 years (or more in certain cases) and gave new protections to corporations that own copyrights.

Opponents -- which include dozens of the nation's leading law professors, several library groups, 17 prominent economists, and a coalition of both liberal and conservative political action groups -- say it serves no legitimate public purpose, violates the clear intentions of our nation's founders regarding copyrights and is unconstitutional.

To heighten public awareness of the importance of the case an Internet bookmobile is set to depart San Francisco next Monday on a trip that will bring it to the steps of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., before arguments wrap up. The van, which will be stopping at schools, libraries and senior centers along the way, is equipped to provide free high-speed access to thousands of literary and artistic works that are already in the public domain.

Tens of thousands of additional books would have come into the public domain (meaning their copyrights would have expired) over the next few years, but now they won't thanks to the Sonny Bono law.

The U.S. Constitution states:

"The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

So when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, what turned out to be the latest of 11 consecutive extensions to the length of copyrights, it raised a very important question: Exactly what does the phrase "for limited times" mean?

It's this long overdue question that is about to get a hearing before the high court, with Stanford Law School's professor Larry Lessig, co-founder of Creative Commons and author of "The Future of Ideas," representing the lead plaintiff in the case, Eric Eldred.

Eldred operates the Eldritch Press, which offers free online access to a staggering array of published material already in the public domain. Visitors to his site, which include students from around the world, can download everything from English translations of works by Russian writer Anton Chekhov to an early "Introduction to Zoology" written by the father of science in Great Britain, T. H. Huxley. Eldred is suing the federal government to obtain access to the material that would have come into the public domain were it not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act.

The public derives obvious benefits from sites such as Eldred's. Further extending copyrights, on the other hand, enriches copyright owners but offers no discernable benefits to the rest of us. That lack of symmetry forms the heart of the case. The U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits Congress from limiting freedom of speech unless doing so serves a clear and important public purpose (preventing pranksters from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is the classic example).

To be sure, writers and artists need and deserve continued copyright protection. But Eldred's legions of backers maintain that the framers of our constitution never intended to extend that protection to the grandchildren of writers and artists. They add that it's also pretty unlikely that struggling artists would decide not to create something today because their heirs 100 or more years in the future won't be able to keep selling it.

What's really happened, they say, is that corporations that outlive artists and creators have won legal protections that are hurting everyone else.

The original decision made more than 200 years ago to limit the length of copyrights was deliberate and carefully considered. The goal, which was expressed at the time in letters written by Thomas Jefferson and others, was to allow newcomers to build on and improve works produced by others, but only after the original creators of those works were compensated fairly for their efforts. The reason: Human progress builds upon itself.

Take, for example, the invention of the wheel. It led to countless other innovations: gears, flywheels, wheelbarrows, bicycles and cars, to name just a few. Although the wheel was an invention, copyrighted literary and artistic works hold the same potential for creating derivative works that benefit the public. In the time since Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's book "The Secret Garden" entered the public domain in 1986, for example, it has, among other products, spawned a movie, a musical, a cabaret adaptation, a made-for-TV movie, a cookbook, a CD-ROM, a second musical adaptation, a stage play, a radio program, a reader's guide and a video, according to a list compiled by Arizona State University law professor Dennis Karjala. And that's just one public domain property.

Little if any of the creative and economic activity those productions unleashed would have taken place if artists, writers and producers were not free to use, embellish and improve upon the original.

So then, if the public domain is such a good thing, what led to the latest extension in the length of copyrights?

In two words: Mickey Mouse.

In the late 1990s The Disney Corporation was panicked because the copyright on its famous rodent was about to expire. So Disney assembled a group of heavy hitters in the entertainment industry, including Time Warner, DreamWorks SKG, the Recording Industry Association of America and Sony Corporation, which poured more than $6 million into congressional campaign coffers. Congress returned the favor by passing the new law, which it absurdly named after the pop-singer ex-Cher-partner-turned-politician who had just died after crashing into a tree while skiing stoned on Vicodin and Valium.

What makes this sorry tale even more ironic is that the Disney Corporation's fortune was itself built largely from commercially successful animated reproductions of free public domain works from the 19th century, including Alice in Wonderland, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Cinderella, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Jungle Book. So what we have is a company that got rich off the works of others that now doesn't want to let anyone else play by those same rules.

Unfortunately, when it comes to copyrights, changing the rules is par for the course.

In 1790, when copyrights were first enacted, they lasted 14 years and could be extended for 14 more if the writer was still living. The latest extension, in 1998, boosted that term by 20 additional years for works copyrighted after January 1, 1923, while works produced by individuals after 1978 got copyrights for the life of the author plus 70 years (up from the previous 50). Meanwhile, intellectual properties made by or for corporations were given 95 years of protection.

Based on actuarial tables, that means a new work produced today by a 25-year-old would not fall into the public domain until about 2127 (80-year life expectancy, plus an additional 70 years).

What's even more mind-boggling is to think about what might have happened if this same law had been in effect during the last century. How many good ideas that we now take for granted would not have been developed, how many shows would never have opened, how much recent social, artistic, literary and scientific progress would not have occurred?

To take it a step further, just imagine if the idea was extended to patents as well, as some have suggested. Humanity would have had to wait an additional century or longer for the advent of commercial television because it was based, in part, on ideas originally developed for radio. Likewise, airplanes might still be on the drawing board, held back in development because some inventor's grandchild tied up access to an essential component they had no role in creating.

The argument that professor Lessig will be making next month is that what is at risk is nothing less than society's right, embodied in our constitution, to continue to develop and grow by building upon the works of previous generations.

Regrettably, Congress has repeatedly shown that it is willing to erode those rights in exchange for campaign contributions.

Now, it's up to the Supreme Court. Let's hope that at least five of the justices have taken time to read the constitution they are sworn to uphold.

Hal Plotkin
Veteran Silicon Valley writer and broadcaster Hal Plotkin is also a contributing writer at Harvard Business School Press. Readers can get more information on Eldred vs. Ashcroft here.
hplotkin@sfgate.com

Posted by Lisa at 02:26 PM

Internet Archive Bookmobile in Wall Street Journal

Nice.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1032988956841142113,00.html

Here's the full text of the Internet Archive Bookmobile part of the WSJ story:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1032988956841142113,00.html

Book Mobile

Think of it as a Good Humor truck for books.

But instead of selling ice cream, the Digital Bookmobile gives away books. Brewster Kahle, founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, is driving cross-country next week with his eight-year-old son in a Ford Aerostar van with a satellite dish mounted on top and high-speed printers and book-binding equipment inside. They're starting in East Palo Alto, a pocket of poverty in the heart of Silicon Valley, and will stop at schools, retirement villages, a bookmobile convention in Columbus, Ohio, and a Carnegie library in Pittsburgh, where the motto "Free to the People" is engraved above the door.

At each stop, they will download books from the Internet, print them out and bind them, all at no charge. "There's a lot of hand-wringing about the dot-com implosion," says Mr. Kahle. "But we're missing the bigger picture of how great the Internet is as a library."

But all is not rosy, he says. A new law extending copyright protection for 20 additional years means that in the next two decades, no new books will enter the public domain. Mr. Kahle plans to pull up in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9, when the court is scheduled to hear a challenge to the copyright law in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft.

"The public domain is on trial," Mr. Kahle says. "The bookmobile is a tangible manifestation of the usefulness of the public domain."

--Compiled by Ann Grimes, with contributions from Julia Angwin, Allyce Bess and David Bank.

Updated September 26, 2002

Posted by Lisa at 10:47 AM

September 21, 2002

Internet Archive Bookmobile in SF Bay Guardian!

Annalee Newitz has mentioned the Internet Archive Bookmobile project in a column about the Public Domain:

techsploitation - the public domain

The Internet Archive volunteers have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site, and now they're driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read. And yes, it's all free. The Internet Archive bookmobile will make its first visit to an East Palo Alto school Sept. 30 and will stop at numerous other schools, libraries, and nursing homes during its cross-country trek...

Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.sfbg.com/36/51/x_techsploitation.html

techsploitation
by annalee newitz

Public domain

THERE WAS SOMETHING so relentlessly cartoony about the television coverage this Sept. 11. Each cable channel put its own targeted spin on the thing, with satirical terrorist specials on Comedy Central and patriotic collectibles being hawked on QVC and various crappy insta-documentaries on the History Channel and A&E. I couldn't tell if Sept. 11 was being treated as some kind of demented celebration or maybe a collective historical reenactment like one of those fake Civil War battles they do every year in Virginia. I flipped on CNN only to see a legend at the side of the screen that read, "Terror alert: high." Some hack in the graphics department had tweaked the weather alert icon to reflect Our National Day of Terrorist Consciousness.

So, in a symbolic act possibly as useless and doomed as the symbolic acts it was intended to critique, I turned off my TV and celebrated freedom.

I began by talking with Lauren Gelman about a new project she's working on with the Internet Archive (www.archive.org). The Internet Archive volunteers have put about 9,000 public domain books on its site, and now they're driving around the United States in a high-tech bookmobile where people can link to the archive via satellite, download the book of their choice, print it out, and take it home to read. And yes, it's all free. The Internet Archive bookmobile will make its first visit to an East Palo Alto school Sept. 30 and will stop at numerous other schools, libraries, and nursing homes during its cross-country trek. "We want to remind people that when things like books enter the public domain, they become a major public good and a public utility," Gelman says.

More to the point, the bookmobile plans to motor into Washington, D.C., Oct. 8, the day before the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a crucial copyright case that Gelman says will decide how many books are part of the bookmobile's digital library. Gelman explains that although the founders of the United States originally mandated that copyright protection should last only 15 years, with a possible renewal for an additional 15, copyright today is for the author's entire life plus 70 years. Eldred v. Ashcroft is "a challenge to a law that extended copyright by another 20 years [to 70 from 50]," she says.

The fate of the bookmobile's collection reminds us that people in the United States still need to fight to preserve the public domain, where anyone can access ideas for free. "Copyright should last long enough that authors are compensated and people's creativity is encouraged," Gelman says. "But with current copyright laws, ideas are too easily locked down." The public domain is a place for artists, writers, and other copyright holders to give back to the public after the public has compensated them for their work. If you don't catch the bookmobile, you can download the books from the Internet Archive or from other public domain book sites such as Project Gutenberg (www.promo.net/pg) or the English Server (www.eserver.org).

If you want to contribute to the domain of public knowledge and can't wait another minute, you can spend hours, weeks, or years participating in the fast-growing Wikipedia community (www.wikipedia.com). Wikipedia is a group of thousands of people who use WikiWiki, software that allows visitors at a Web site to update it dynamically to build and edit a giant online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia site contains information on everything from algebra to the history of homosexuality, and anyone can add to or revise entries to make it better. Amazingly, this has resulted in one of the most brain-enriching documents I've ever used on the Web. The contributors have worked to maintain a genuinely high standard of accurate information, although there are occasional jokes or bits of absurdity.

And if you want a taste of what the public sphere in the United States could become if we let corporations limit our access to knowledge in the name of profit, check out an interesting site prepared by Ben Edelman, who works at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

He's been following up on reports that when Chinese citizens type "google" into their browsers, the Great Firewall of China redirects them to a different site whose search results are deemed appropriate. He's detailed how this works, including some weird screenshots at cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/google-replacements. Many U.S. citizens think that this kind of censorship-via-redirection only happens in strongly state-controlled countries like China. But it's likely that the corporate ownership of broadband in the United States will result in a similar situation. AT&T might make a deal with Bob's Search Engine in which anyone typing "google" into their browser would be redirected to Bob's. Or someone looking for Powell's Books might get redirected to Barnes and Noble. Ah, the joys of unchecked capitalism. Almost as good as unchecked state power.

Annalee Newitz (punting@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who needs to see more explosions. Her column also appears in Metro, Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.

Posted by Lisa at 05:17 PM

Introducing the Internet Archive Bookmobile I've been working with Brewster Khale over the past few weeks setting up an Internet Bookmobile. What is an Internet Bookmobile, you may ask? It's a Ford Aerostar with a satellite dish on top and a wireless network, laptops, a printer and a book binder inside of it that will be bringing 10,000 public domain books to the world-at-large. Once a public domain book is selected, it can be printed and bound and taken home. Brewster and his family will be driving across country the first week of October on their way to the Eldred argument in front of the Supreme Court on October 9th. The goal is to demonstrate the value of the public domain in action. The Public Domain is on Trial! Here's the official website where you can find out more information. There's also a kick-off party happening this Friday evening in San Francisco that you might want to attend.

Posted by Lisa at 05:09 PM