Project Gutenberg

A couple of days ago I came across a few words strung together in an order which made them seem huge and full of portent: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn . Yes, I know...it's the title of a Pink Floyd album. But it seemed too... I dunno... magnificent for a mere album title (my initial reaction was that I had it wrong, and that it was actually Jethro Tull).

Maybe, perhaps, the title of a poem or painting by William Blake? The Piper At the Gates of Dawn could have come from the same mystically animistic mind that brought us The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

So I did a little digging. After several pages of Pink Floyd I came across an eBook of The Wind in the Willows ; a book of which I have been aware for many years, but have not read. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the title of Chapter VII.

I read for a little while before noticing where I was: The Project Gutenberg site . Well, back in the day, I spent a lot of time there . Back in the day.

Some time in the last year, the PG people have got themselves a new domain, re-structured their site, and done a major re-design. The result is a fantastic place where whole days can be lost (and by lost I mean spent blissfully ) browsing, researching, and reading.

On a related note, The new semester at Kendall will be starting in a couple of weeks. Last semester I had my students create portfolio sites for their final projects. This year, I think they will take Project Gutenberg eTexts and turn them into online books.

I may have to do the same thing myself. Again.

I updated the Project Gutenberg section and added two new texts: Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol. Before you go a'clickin' on those links I should warn you that Tom Sawyer is just over 400k, and Dead Souls is just over 800k.

In the interest of laziness open-ness I have linked those files in before completing the XSL and CSS stylesheets. Both will continue to evolve as I mark up more texts, and need to account for more variation.

So I see that the Eldred case didn't pass, and that means that copyrights on currently copyrighted materials can be extended ad infinitum . So now, essentially, once a book/movie/song goes out of print, it will be gone for good. When it is no longer a money-maker for its owner - who 99 percent of the time is the publisher and NOT the creator - it will be "archive" and never again see the light of day.

If this kind of thing had been going on a hundred years ago no-one born since 1960 would have ever had the chance to read Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Lovecraft, Whitman, Dickenson, or any of the foreign works which were translated by Americans. They would all be shelved. Project Gutenberg would not exist. Neither would the Open Source movement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation would be a troup of qixotic mimes.

I do not begrudge authors and publishers the opportunity to make money, or many opportunities to make a lot of money. But the rights to a piece of creativity which is no longer making any money should be given to the public - under the understanding that anyone who is willing to pay for a copy of the thing, already has.

General consensus in the online community suggests that 20 years sounds fair.

Think about it: listening to orchestral music we say "Hey: That's that song Beethoven wrote", not "Hey! That's the piece the Austrian nobility commissioned!"

All is not necessarily lost, however. Lawrence Lessig is working on a proposal which would simultaneously extend the length of copyright and move a great many works into the public domain. Eldred.cc is collecting news articles and legal material relating to this issue.

I have to admit that the snob in me occasional throws out a "So What?" Think about it: 90 percent of everything produced (and by extension copyrighted) is worthless and a blight on modern culture. The fact that the creators bother to copyright Britney and that whole crowd of music androids is rather pathetic. As if having that crap is worth the real estate value of the sectors on my hard drive. The RIAA blames music pirates for the decline in music sales when it should be blaming the producers and artists for creating crap. Michael Eisner is fellating Congress with glee now that he gets to keep the Mouse for another twenty years. Twenty years of Cambodian sweat-shops pumping out cheap plastic Donald Duck bidet spouts.

Frankly I couldn't care less if Disney goes out of business tomorrow, or every member of the RIAA winds up in an oil drum in the Okeefenokee swamp. In 2050 I want to be able to download the complete works of Jim Harrison, surf to a Tom Waits feedsite, and tuck into a plate of Soyent Green. For free.

So that 90% of crap which is created by jacking in to a mixer and jacking off on a microphone can stay copyrighted forever. No-one will care. But those few gems should be available for free, forever.