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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.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:02PM (3 children)
Release the works as copyright goes away. In the US it's authors life span + 70 years. In most sane parts of the world works published before 1947 is now public domain.
Now many mishaps could happen. Some experimental high density disk with Petabyte capacity could be stolen.. Or someone could simply have a lot of books scanned in a country with very lax laws.. Just saying! :-)
Before we had book burning. Today criminalize book access instead ;-)
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)
It makes more sense to lobby for shorter copyright terms.
We have this mess, at least in part, because Disney has successfully lobbied for copyright extensions every time Mickey Mouse was at risk of falling into the public domain. They even rub it in our faces by playing steamboat Willie at the beginning of some movies now.
I would not even object to Mickey Mouse evolving into a Trademark (which is allowed/intended to last indefinitely).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:15PM
Then let's hope there will be a torrent release that contains ALL Disney productions..
Btw, nice office they got...... ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:38PM
I guarantee you Trump will sign another copyright term extension act bumping it up to life+90 / 120 years since the last 20 year extension was almost 20 years ago. Gotta protect Steamboat Willie.