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.
Category Archives: Internet Archive
Can You Sing All Three Verses of Gilligan’s Island?
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Brewster Khale of Wayback Machine and Internet Archive was quoted by the NY Times today when asked to comment on all of the “junk” he must be archiving along with all of the “worthwhile stuff.”
See the article by John Schwartz:
From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web’s Real Money Is in the Gutter
Brewster Kahle, who has created a large Internet archive he calls the Wayback Machine, which contains several times the amount of information in the Library of Congress, said that the number of questionable sites is beside the point so long as search engines do their job.
“We don’t worry about how many pages that I don’t care about are in the Internet archive,” he said. “What you do care about is, `Does it have the pages that I want?’ ”
He acknowledged, however, that “we haven’t done a very good job of putting the good stuff up there” on the Internet to dilute the bad, and that as a result today’s leaders “are shortchanging the next generation.”
…To Mr. Kahle, the Internet’s diversity, good and bad, means that people will find the information they want, as narrowly and as deeply as they care to explore it. While he, too, would like some method to control the spam that flows into his e-mailbox, he said he preferred a complex ecosystem to a monoculture as bland and regular as a suburban lawn.
“I grew up where almost everybody could sing all three verses of the `Gilligan’s Island’ theme song,” he said. “I don’t want my children to grow up like that.”
First Creative Commons Interview: Rick Prelinger
Our first Creative Commons’ interview is up on the website:
Rick Prelinger.
(Keeper of the Prelinger Archives, which have just been accepted into the Library of Congress.
Through our partnership with the Internet Archive, my images are just going out all over the world. They are achieving a level of spread and penetration I could never do on my own. And therefore, I think that giving things away ends up benefiting me. You know, these images don’t get used up. They don’t get yellow around the edges. They don’t become less valuable from being shown and repeated. Ubiquity equals value. That’s how I think you can make money by giving things away.