Slashdot Mirror
Proposal: Put Library of Congress' Contents Online
Mark_Uplanguage writes "The idea to scan in all materials available at the U.S. Library of Congress was presented at the Web 2.0 conference this week (as just one of many ideas presented). The proposed cost of $260 million would create a huge benefit to society (well, at least to those who can read English)."
Pardon me for sounding like an eegnoramoose, but isn't at least some of the material in the Library of Congress copyrighted material? Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.
Can't have that, now can we?
This would violate the publishers' god-given right to milk their "creations" until the heat-death of the Universe.
How data much storage would this require? Could someone give it to me in laymen's terms?
Since Congress and the President can so easily pull out a hundred billion dollars to bomb the hell out of another country, I see no reason we can't come up with a whimpy $260 million for something as worthwhile as this.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The government has proposed recently. I would also suggest that they put in place requirements that all future material that is to be copyrighted present appropriate copies in machine readable form so this will be cheaper in the future.
Finally, Slashdot can establish that for official purposes:
1 Library of Congress = $260M
And the 2004 US Federal budget can be spec'd at 0.000243754522 LoC:s (Libraries of Congress per second).
--
make install -not war
From Wikipedia:
[T]he Library assumed a role as a legal repository to guarantee copyright protection. All authors seeking American copyright had to submit two copies of the work to the Library. This requirement is no longer enforced, but copies of many books published in the US still arrive at the Library regularly.
Damn trolls.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
In a traditional library it's not really easy to...
...all within 30 minutes.
1. walk in and pick up a book
2. strike the author's name from it and replace it with your own
3. replace the copyright notice with your own
4. Make one thousand perfect copies
5. Offer it for sale, start taking orders, and PROFIT!
I could easily do that on the internet.
I might inherit a portion of his farm. But that's a result of money that he saved at the time. I do not collect royalties on the *work* that he did 70 years ago.
If an author or musician wants to leave an inheritance, then they should save the money they make during a reasonable copyright term, and give that to their children. They can leave their typewriters, musical instruments, and other tools of the trade (analagous to a farm) as well.
They might have to actually forego a blowing everything they earn on cocaine and refrain from signing away most of their income on bad contracts to actually achieve this, but then so do the rest of us.
Work for who? I think you are still confused from the dotcom era still. You must be thinking that "change society and business" means that scanning the entire LoC can make someone money (advertising??)
The important part in this case is the changing society part of the statement, which is what the vast potential of the net is capable of doing. It won't help you make money based on a bad idea (in fact, it may only help you lose money faster!) but it does have the potential to change the way a society views and deals with information.
Right now there is a vast amount of knowledge in the LoC that is effectively out of the ordinary citizen's hands. That is not how it should be. If knowledge is power, there is a storehouse of power waiting to be unleashsed by giving everyone access to what is being stockpiled. It won't happen over night, or in a few years, but eventually it will have a ripple effect. Historians lament the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria, but what difference would it have made if only a few could actually use the information that was contained?
As an author, I wonder how much of your valued craft was honed by reading the work of others for education and inspiration. How many books did you buy in elementary school, or high school? Yet that's where you learned your precious language skills you now market.
Knowledge, even the limited knowledge of an author, does not exist in a vacuum. You read, you learn, you practice, then you create. You could not have done this without the beneficence of others who aren't making a dime off the education they provided you.
To unleash the vast amounts of knowledge stored up in the LOC to the world would be one of the single best things this country could do for mankind. One book, one reader my hairy ass. Why not open the floodgates so everyone can benefit?
I understand the motivation of monetary incentives, but I also know a lot of great authors who died penniless. And they were at least brave enough to sign their names to their ideas.
Of course this instantly deteriorates into a discussion about the shameful state of IP and copyright laws, the need to pool all human knowledge, and how crappy the US budget deficit is.
If you go to the LOC's site, you'll notice American Memory on the front page.
American Memory is where you can get a good portion of the public domain stuff (books, letters from immigrants to their families back home, photos of civil war enlistees, audio, Edison-era short movies) for free in a low-quality format. Archival quality copies and custom scans/recordings are available for $$$. Almost any work in the LOC can be scanned on request (3 week waiting time or so); this is how they manage to continue adding scans to their collection without requiring public or private funding. It's underfunded as it is and needs more bandwidth.
This idiot in the article's proposal is completely unrealistic. Books can contain 100,000 to 5,000,000 characters. That's 100k-5Mb per book, times 26,000,000 books. That's not including the images and illustrations in some of these works. Many of the texts have value beyond the words they contain. We may be talking about image scanning the pages to preserve the look of the type, paper, and images. Archival TIFFs, since that's what the LOC uses.
The article also mentions $60 thousand to 'store' this data (per month?, per year?, just once???, what about access?, searching?, redundant backups?). Another unrealistic number, even working off of the 1TB estimate.
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.