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posted by on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that's ever been published. Books still in print you'd have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You'd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you'd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.

It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. "The universal library has been talked about for millennia," Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, has said. "It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution." In the spring of 2011, it seemed we'd amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.

"This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life," one eager observer wrote at the time.

On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century's worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an "international catastrophe." When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who'd had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:36PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:36PM (#500337)

    Leave the U.S.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:41PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 26 2017, @08:41PM (#500345) Journal

    Canada would build a wall. Sadly, I wouldn't blame them.

    If another country put a bumbling illiterate clown circus into power, would we want their citizens coming into our country?

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:38PM (6 children)

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:38PM (#500419) Journal

    You mean: leave the U.S. because of its heavy-handed copyright regime, right? I would think that you'd also want to avoid WIPO member states. That leaves several options:

    Non-members are the states of Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Solomon Islands, South Sudan and East Timor. The Palestinians have observer status.

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO [wikipedia.org]

    I'm assuming that states with limited recognition--the likes of Abkhazia, Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Somaliland--aren't in WIPO either, and of course there's terra nullius.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states [wikipedia.org]

    Were Google to set up shop in a small country in order to distributed works that are copyrighted elsewhere, that country might be pressured to strengthen its copyright laws.

    • (Score: 1) by butthurt on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:14AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:14AM (#500473) Journal

      *distribute, not distributed

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @11:58AM (4 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @11:58AM (#500611) Journal

      Put it on a submarine that travels the seas and transmit the works? or a satellite?
      In the latter case, anyone with a satellite receiver can get them..

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:35PM (3 children)

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:35PM (#500634) Journal

        I was thinking put it on the Moon and then every moon rise you can get the sum total of human knowledge beamed back at you. Also doubles as a timeless memorial of human civilization that will likely end soon.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:57PM (2 children)

          by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:57PM (#500646) Journal

          Micro satellite, solar panels and a laser perhaps could make it work?

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 27 2017, @01:07PM (1 child)

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday April 27 2017, @01:07PM (#500658) Journal

            It sounds like an excellent candidate for a crowd-sourcing project: "Help archive human knowledge in a timeless repository on the Moon."

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.
            • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:59PM

              by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:59PM (#500710) Journal

              Next problem is how one gets 60 PB of data broadcasted to many people on the ground in reasonable time.

  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday April 27 2017, @06:11PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday April 27 2017, @06:11PM (#500819) Homepage Journal

    The problem is, ALL countries now have hyper-restrictive copyright laws. The US was the last holdout; the British started excessive copyright terms, and was quickly followed by the rest or Europe, then the world.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org