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Title: A Brief History of the Internet
Author: Michael Hart
Posting Date: March 18, 2012 [EBook #250]
Release Date: March, 1995
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET ***
Produced by Michael Hart
A Brief History of the Internet
The Bright Side: The Dark Side
by Michael Hart with Max Fuller
(C)1995, Released on March 8th, 1995
Chapter 00 Preface
The Internet Conquers Space, Time, and Mass Production...
Michael Hart called it NeoMass Production [TM] in 1971...
and published the U.S. Declaration of Independence on the
and no one was listening...or were they?
???careful!!!!
If the governments, universities or colleges of the world
wanted people to be educated, they certainly could have a
copy of things like the Declaration of Independence where
everyone could get an electronic copy. After all, it has
been over 25 years since the Internet began as government
funded projects among our universities, and only 24 years
since the Declaration was posted, followed by the Bill of
Rights, Constitution, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.
Why do more people get their electronic books from others
than these institutions when they spend a TRILLION DOLLAR
BUDGET EVERY YEAR pretending their goal is some universal
form of education.
This is the story of the Bright Side and Dark Side of
the Internet. . .Bright Side first.
The Facts:
The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek
Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also
a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."
Communicator
The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth,
as long as they, too, are on the Internet.
Transporter
The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would
be able to get into your computer to any Netter.
Replicator
The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is
able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa"
to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer,"
and the library never closes, the books are always on
the shelves, never checked out, lost, in for binding,
and there is never an overdue fine because you never,
ever, have to take them back.
The Bright Side and the Dark Side
For the first time in the entire history of the Earth, we
have the ability for EVERYONE to get copies of EVERYTHING
as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of
the people on the Earth, via computers [and the devices a
person might need to make a PHYSICAL, rather than VIRTUAL
copy of whatever it might be. . .
Think about what you have just read for a moment, please,
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. . .
as long as the Information Superhighway is not taken over
by the INFORMATION RICH and denied access to others other
than for a fee they may not be able to pay, and shouldn't
have to pay. . .since the INFORMATION RICH have had rides
for free for the first 25 years of the Internet.]
From 1969 to 1994, most of the traffic on the Information
Superhighway was generated by individuals who did not pay
tolls to get on the ramps to the Information Superhighway
. . .in fact, ALL of the early users were paid to get on,
except one. . .they were paid. . .BY YOU!
Michael Hart may have been the first person who got on as
a private individual, not paid by any of the 23 nodes, or
the Internet/ARPANet system, for his work; but who at the
time of this publication might have given away 25 billion
worth of Etexts in return for his free network access.
[i.e. Mr. Hart was the first "normal" person to have this
access to the Internet, a first non-computer-professional
for social responsibility; "We should provide information
to all persons, without delay. . .simply because WE CAN!"
Just like climbing Mount Everest or going into space, and
this is so much cheaper and less dangerous.
[For those of you considering asking that his accesses be
revoked, he has received permission from CCSO management,
previously CSO as indicated in his email address, for the
posting of this document and has also received permission
from several other colleges and/or universities, at which
he has computer accounts and/or is affiliated.]
In the beginning, all the messages on the Net were either
hardware or software crash messages, people looking for a
helping hand in keeping their mainframes up and running--
and that was about it for the first 10-15 years of cyber-
space. . .cyber-space. . .mostly just space. . .there was
nothing really in it for anyone, but mainframe operators,
programmers, and a few computer consultants who worked in
multi-state regions because there weren't enough computer
installations in any single state, not even California or
Illinois, to keep a computer consultant in business.
The Bright Side
Mr. Hart had a vision in 1971 that the greatest purpose a
computer network would ever provide would be the storage,
transmission, and copying of the library of information a
whole planet of human beings would generate. These ideas
were remarkably ahead of their time, as attested to by an
Independent Plans of Study Degree in the subject of Human
Machine Interfaces from the University of Illinois, 1973.
This degree, and the publications of the first few Etexts
[Electronic Texts] on the Internet, began the process the
Internet now knows as Project Gutenberg, which has caught
fire and spread to all areas of the Internet, and spawned
several generations of "Information Providers," as we now
have come to call them.
It is hard to log in to the Internet without finding many
references to Project Gutenberg and Information Providers
these days, but you might be surprised just how much of a
plethora of information stored on the Internet is only on
line for LIMITED DISTRIBUTION even though the information
is actually in the PUBLIC DOMAIN and has been paid for in
money paid by your taxes, and by grants, which supposedly
are given for the betterments of the human race, not just
a favored few at the very top 1% of the INFORMATION RICH.
Many of you have seen the publicity announcements of such
grants in the news media, and an information professional
sees them all the time.
You may have seen grants totalling ONE BILLION DOLLARS to
create "Electronic Libraries;" what you haven't seen is a
single "Electronic Book" released into the Public Domain,
in any form for you to use, from any one of these.
The Dark Side
Why don't you see huge electronic libraries available for
download from the Internet?
Why are the most famous universities in the world working
on electronic libraries and you can't read the books?
If it costs $1,000 to create an electronic book through a
government or foundation grant, then $1,000,000,000 funds
for electronic libraries should easily create a 1,000,000
volume electronic library in no time at all.
After all, if someone paid YOU $1,000 to type, scan or to
otherwise get a public domain book onto the Internet, you
could do that in no time at all, and so could one million
other people, and they could probably do it in a week, if
they tried really hard, maybe in a month if they only did
it in their spare time. For $1,000 per book, I am sure a
few people would be turning out a book a week for as long
as it took to get all million books into electronic text.
There has been perhaps ONE BILLION DOLLARS granted for an
electronic library in a variety of places, manners, types
and all other diversities; IF THE COST IS ONE THOUSAND OF
THOSE DOLLARS TO CREATE A SINGLE ELECTRONIC BOOK, THEN WE
SHOULD HAVE ONE MILLION BOOKS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE TO USE.
HOW HAS THIS PROCESS BEEN STOPPED?
Anyone who wants to stop this process for a Public Domain
Library of information is probably suffering from several
of the Seven Deadly Sins:
Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, greed, envy, and sloth.
Merriam Webster Third International Unabridged Dictionary
[Above: Greed = Gluttony, and moved back one place]
[Below: my simple descriptions of the Seven Deadly Sins]
1. Pride: I have one and you don't.
2. Covetousness: Mine is worth more if you don't have a
copy or something similar. I want yours. I want the
one you have, even if I already have one or many.
3. Lust: I have to have it.
4. Anger: I will hurt you to ensure that I have it, and
and to ensure that you do not have one.
5. Envy: I hate that you have one.
6. Greed: There is no end to how much I want, or to how
little I want you to have in comparison.
7. Sloth: I am opposed to you moving up the ladder: it
means that I will have to move up the ladder, to keep
my position of lordship over you. If I have twice as
much as you do, and you gain a rung, that means I can
only regain my previous lordship by moving up two; it
is far easier to knock you back a rung, or to prevent
you from climbing at all.
Destruction is easier than construction.
This becomes even more obvious for the person who has
a goal of being 10 or 100 times further up the ladder
of success. . .given the old, and hopefully obsolete,
or soon to be obsolete, definitions of success.
"If I worked like a fiend all my life to ensure I had
a thousand dollars for every dollar you had, and then
someone came along and wanted to give everyone $1000,
then I would be forced to work like a fiend again, to
get another million dollars to retain my position."
Think about it: someone spends a lifetime achieving,
creating, or otherwise investing their life, building
a talent, an idea, or a physical manifestation of the
life they have led. . .the destruction of this is far
easier than the construction. . .just as the building
of a house is much more difficult, requires training,
discipline, knowledge of the laws of physics to get a
temperature and light balance suitable for latitudes,
etc., etc., etc.
But nearly anyone can burn down a building, or a pile
of books without a fraction of this kind of training.
People are used to lording it over others by building
and writing certain items that reflect their lordship
over themselves, their environments, and, last/least,
over other people. If they were not engaged in power
over themselves [self-discipline, education, etc,] or
over their environments [food, clothing and shelter],
then they have only other people to have control over
and that is the problem. They don't want other people
to have it easier than they did. "If _I_ did it with
the hard ways and tools of the past, then _YOU_ would
threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the
present has to offer, and _I_ don't want to learn the
new tools, since I have invested my whole life to the
mastery of the old tools." I have literally met very
highly placed souls in the system of higher education
who have told me they will quit the system on the day
they have to use email because it removes the control
they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls
and the paper mails. It is just too obvious if a big
wig is not answering your email, since email programs
can actually tell you the second it was delivered and
also the second the person "opened" it.
This is why SOME people fear the new Internet: other
people fear it NOT because they lose the kind of lord
position that comes with OWNERSHIP; rather they fear,
in a similar manner, they will lose the CONTROL which
they have used to achieve their position of lordship,
such as one kind of professor mentioned below.
*****As Hart's DOS prompt sometimes states:*****
"Money is how people with no talent keep score!"
"Control is how others with no money keep score!"
These Seven Deadly Sins, while named by various names and
by most civilizations, have nonetheless often been actual
laws; in that certain people were required, by law, to be
victims of the rest of their populations in that a person
might be legally denied ownership of any property, due to
racism or sexism, or denied the right to a contract, even
legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an
assortment of rights to vote, contract and own property--
there have even been laws that forbade any but the "upper
crust" to wear certain types of clothing, a "statement of
fashion" of a slightly different order than we see today,
but with similar ends.
You might want to look up laws that once divided this and
other countries by making it illegal to teach any persons
of certain races or genders reading, writing, arithmetic,
and others of the ways human beings learn to have a power
over their environments.
Power over oneself is the first kind of power...if you do
not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control
of anything.
Power over the environment is the second kind of power...
if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are
going to have a hard time controlling anything else.
Power over other human being is the third kind of power--
described above in the Seven Deadly Sins, a third raters'
kind of power. Those who cannot control anything else...
must, by definition, have others control things for them.
If they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation
of others, then they must find some way to control them.
We are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't BUILD
the Internet to control it, and the 40 million people who
are on it; people from the goverment to big business, who
feel "Freedom Is Slavery" or at least dangerous; and, who
feel the Internet is the "NEXT COMMERCIAL FRONTIER" where
customers are all ready to be inundated with advertising,
more cheaply than with junkmail. Fortunately some of the
other Internet pioneers have developed ways of preventing
this sort of thing from happening BUT I am sure we aren't
far from lawsuits by the cash rich and information rich,
complaining that they can't get their junkemail into "my"
emailbox. We will probably all be forced to join into an
assortment of "protectives" in which we subscribe to such
"killbots" as are required to let in the mail we want and
keep out the junkemail.
These same sorts of protectives were forming a century or
so before the Internet, in a similar response to the hard
monopolistic pricing policies of the railroads which went
transcontinental just 100 years before this Internet did.
I suggest you look up Grange in your encyclopedias, where
one of them says:
"The National Grange is the popular name
of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry,
the oldest general farm organization
in the United States. . .formed largely
through the efforts of Oliver Hudson Kelley,
a Minnesota farmer who was deeply affected
by the poverty and isolation of the farmers
he saw will inspecting farm areas in the South
for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1866.
In the 1870's the Grange was prominent in
the broader Granger movement, which campaigned
against extortionate charges by monopolistic
railroads and warehouses and helped bring
about laws regulating these charges. . . .
Although challenged, the constitutionality
of such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court
in Munn v. Illinois (1877).
[1994 Grolier Electronic Enyclcopedia]
***
The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production
The Internet is a primitive version of the "Star Trek
Communicator," the "Star Trek Transporter," and, also
a primitive version of the "Star Trek Replicator."
The Internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the Earth,
as long as they, too, are on the Internet.
The Internet "let's" you transport anything you would
be able to get into your computer to any Netter.
The Internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is
able to get into their computer, from "The Mona Lisa"
to "The Klein Bottle" if you use the right "printer."
Don't forget the "SneakerNet" is part of the Internet
and let's you get information to or from those who do
not have direct Internet connections. SneakerNet was
a term developed to describe the concept of sending a
file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the
person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the
disk down the street for you. From my experience, it
was incredibly obvious that SneakerNet traversed from
East to West and West to East around the world before
the Internet did, as I received letters from the East
and West as the Project Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland
Etext circled the globe long before the Internet did.
This is very important to know if you consider that a
possible future development might keep you from using
the Internet for this, due to socio-political motions
to turn the Internet into a "World Wide Mall" [WWM] a
term coined specifically to describe that moneymaking
philosophy that says "Even if it has been given away,
free of charge, to 90% of the users for 25 years, our
goal is to make sure we change it from an Information
Superhighway to an Information Supertollway.
I said "let's" you do the Star Trek Communicator, and
Transporter, and Replicator functions because it will
soon be obvious that those "Information Rich" who had
free access to the Internet for so long want to do an
Internet Monopoly thing to ensure that what was free,
to the Information Rich, will no longer be free for a
class of the Information Poor.
This is serious business, and if you consider that it
would cost the 40 million Netters about $25 per month
to "subscribe" to the Information Rich version of the
Internet, that means one thousand million dollars per
month going into the hands of the Information Rich at
the expense of the Information Poor; we would shortly
be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be
on the order of the one recently broken up in a major
anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand
of the telephone company.
Hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now,
but it will take far more power than _I_ have.
People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"--
but the fact is that while you may own your computer,
you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my
own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone
networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The
corporations that own the physical wires and cabling,
they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now
that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies,
and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are
being sold with them.
The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth,
which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do,
virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge
danger of becoming just another tool for those we are
becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books
might never get into the high schools: much less the
middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion
dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall
of every Congress of the United States isn't meant to
educate, it is meant for something else. After all--
if a Trillion dollars were really being spent on this
process of education every two years, should literacy
rates have plummeted to 53% and college level testing
scores fallen for many straight years?
[Oh yes, I heard yesterday's report the tests were up
for the first time in decades. . .but what I did NOT!
hear was ANY reference to the fact that the score was
"inflated" not only by the "normal" free 200 points a
person gets for just being able to sign their names--
but by an additional 22 points for math, 76 verbal.]
[Written February 5th, 1995]
This kind of "grade inflation" has been going on in a
similar, though less official manner, in our schools,
for decades. There are schools in which the averages
indicate more "A"s are given out than all other grade
points combined, not just more "A"s than "B"s or "B"s
than "C"s. Some of the most importanted studies were
never published, even though they were tax funded.
Watch out, the term "grade inflation" is "politically
incorrect" to such a degree that it does not appear a
single time in any of the encyclopedias I have tried,
although it does appear in my Random House Unabridged
and College Dictionaries, but not the Merriam-Webster
Ninth New College Dictionary, American Heritage or in
any other references I have searched. Please tell me
if you find it in any.
"The awarding of higher grades than students deserve
either to maintain a school's academic reputation or
as a result of diminished teacher expectations."
[1980-1985]
I can personally tell you this was a huge concern in
1970-1975 when the average grade at some colleges in
question had already passed the point mentioned just
above, yielding averages including all undergraduate
courses, including the grades of "flunk-outs," still
higher than a "B" which means more "A"s were given a
whole undergraduate student body than "B"s and "C"s.
[Actually it means worse than that, but point made.]
So, we reached the point at which large numbers of a
nation's high school graduates couldn't even read or
fill out a minimum wage job application form, while,
on paper, we were doing better than ever, excepting,
thank God, the fact that testing scores showed there
was something incredibly wrong, and businesses would
notice they were having to interview more people for
a job before they could find someone to fill it.
This is what happens when we separate a country into the
"Information Rich" and the "Information Poor."
Don't let it happen to the entire world.
For the first time in ALL history, we have the chance to
ensure that every person can put huge amounts of "Public
Domain" and other information into computers that should
be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. I
would like to ensure these people actually have material
to put in those computers when they get them.
Example:
Some Shakespeare professors believe that the way to be a
great Shakespeare professor is to know something about a
Shakespeare play or poem that no one else knows.
Therefore they never tell anyone, and that knowledge can
quite possibly die with them if it is never published in
a wide manner. Example: Damascus steel was famous, for
hundreds of years, but the knowledge of how to make this
steel was so narrowly known that all those who knew that
technique died without passing it on, and it was a truly
long time before computer simulations finally managed to
recreate Damascus steel after all those centuries when a
person had to buy an antique to get any.
Some other Shakespeare professors believe that the way a
person should act to be a great Shakespeare professor is
to teach as many people as possible about Shakespeare in
as complete a manner as they want to learn.
The Internet is balancing on this same dichotomy now....
Do we want Unlimited Distribution...
Or do we want to continue with Limited Distribution?
The French have just given us one of the great examples:
a month or so ago [I am writing this in early February.]
they found a cave containing the oldest known paintings,
twice as old as any previously discovered, and after the
initial month of photographing them in secret, placed an
electronic set of photographs on the Internet for all of
us to have. . .ALL!
This is in GREAT contradistinction to the way things had
been done around the time I was born, when the "Dead Sea
Scrolls" were discovered, and none of you ever saw them,
or any real description of them, until a few years ago--
in case you are wondering when, I was born in 1947; this
is being published on my 48th birthday when I officially
become "old." [As a mathematician, I don't cheat, and I
admit that if you divide a 72 year lifespan into equals,
you only get 24 years to be young, 24 years to be middle
aged, and 24 years to be old. . .after that you have the
odds beaten. If you divide the US into young and old, a
person has to be considered "old" at 34, since 33 is the
median age [meaning half the people are younger than 33,
and half the people are older. The median Internet age?
26. Median Web age 31. Some predictions indicate these
will decrease until the median Internet age is 15.
Who will rule the Internet?
Will it be the Internet Aristocrats...
or an Internet Everyman?
The difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording
it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar
who teaches as well and as many as possible. We SAY our
people should have and must have universal education yet
with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can
obvious that we have anything BUT a widest universalness
of primary and secondary education program in mind. Not
to leave out college education, which has been known for
the graduation of people who were totally illiterate.
For the first time we actually have an opportunity for a
whole world's population to share not only air or water,
but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music
and other sounds. . .anything that can be digitized.
Do you remember what the first protohumans did in "2001"
[the movie by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark] ?
They chased their neighbors away from the water hole.
Will let the Thought Police chase us away from this huge
watering hole, just so they can charge us admission, for
something our tax dollars have already paid for?
The Internet Conquers Space, Time and Mass Production...
Think of the time and effort people save simply by being
able to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia, thesaurus
or other reference book, a newspaper or magazine library
of vast proportions, or a library of a thousand books of
the greatest works of all history without even having to
get up and go to the bookcase.
Think of the simple increase in education just because a
person can and will look up more information, judgements
become sharper and more informed....
Unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed
population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a
difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions
and people want to limit this flow of information.
Yet a great number of our institutions, and even some of
the people who run them, are against this kind of easily
available information...they either want to control it--
or they want to maintain their "leadership" in fields of
endeavor by making sure we "have to do it the hard way,"
simply because they did it the hard way.
There is no longer any reason to "do it the hard way" as
you will see below, and on the Internet.
End of the Preface to "A Brief History of the Internet."
Chapter 0
Introduction
Michael Hart is trying to change Human Nature.
He says Human Nature is all that is stopping the Internet
from saving the world.
The Internet, he says, is a primitive combination of Star
Trek communicators, transporters and replicators; and can
and will bring nearly everything to nearly everyone.
"I type in Shakespeare and everyone, everywhere, and from
now until the end of history as we know it--everyone will
have a copy instantaneously, on request. Not only books,
but the pictures, paintings, music. . .anything that will
be digitized. . .which will eventually include it all. A
few years ago I wrote some articles about 3-D replication
[Stereographic Lithography] in which I told of processes,
in use today, that videotaped and played back fastforward
on a VCR, look just like something appearing in Star Trek
replicators. Last month I saw an article about a stove a
person could program from anyhere on the Internet. . .you
could literally `fax someone a pizza' or other meals, the
`faxing a pizza' being a standard joke among Internetters
for years, describing one way to tell when the future can
be said to have arrived."
For a billion or so people who own or borrow computers it
might be said "The Future Is Now" because they can get at
250 Project Gutenberg Electronic Library items, including
Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Neil Armstrong landing on the
Moon in the same year the Internet was born.
This is item #250, and we hope it will save the Internet,
and the world. . .and not be a futile, quixotic effort.
Let's face it, a country with an Adult Illiteracy Rate of
47% is not nearly as likely to develop a cure for AIDS as
a country with an Adult Literacy Rate of 99%.
However, Michael Hart says the Internet has changed a lot
in the last year, and not in the direction that will take
the Project Gutenberg Etexts into the homes of the 47% of
the adult population of the United States that is said to
be functionally illiterate by the 1994 US Report on Adult
Literacy. He has been trying to ensure that there is not
going to be an "Information Rich" and "Information Poor,"
as a result of a Feudal Dark Ages approach to this coming
"Age of Information". . .he has been trying since 1971, a
virtual "First Citizen" of the Internet since he might be
the first person on the Internet who was NOT paid to work
on the Internet/ARPANet or its member computers.
Flashback
In either case, he was probably one of the first 100 on a
fledgling Net and certainly the first to post information
of a general nature for others on the Net to download; it
was the United States' Declaration of Independence. This
was followed by the U.S. Bill of Rights, and then a whole
Etext of the U.S. Constitution, etc. You might consider,
just for the ten minutes the first two might require, the
reading of the first two of these documents that were put
on the Internet starting 24 years ago: and maybe reading
the beginning of the third.
The people who provided his Internet account thought this
whole concept was nuts, but the files didn't take a whole
lot of space, and the 200th Anniversary of the Revolution
[of the United States against England] was coming up, and
parchment replicas of all the Revolution's Documents were
found nearly everywhere at the time. The idea of putting
the Complete Works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the Q'uran,
and more on the Net was still pure Science Fiction to any
but Mr. Hart at the time. For the first 17 years of this
project, the only responses received were of the order of
"You want to put Shakespeare on a computer!? You must be
NUTS!" and that's where it stayed until the "Great Growth
Spurt" hit the Internet in 1987-88. All of a sudden, the
Internet hit "Critical Mass" and there were enough people
to start a conversation on nearly any subject, including,
of all things, electronic books, and, for the first time,
Project Gutenberg received a message saying the Etext for
everyone concept was a good idea.
That watershed event caused a ripple effect. With others
finally interested in Etext, a "Mass Marketing Approach,"
and such it was, was finally appropriate, and the release
of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan signalled beginnings
of a widespread production and consumption of Etexts. In
Appendix A you will find a listing of these 250, in order
of their release.
Volunteers began popping up, right on schedule, to assist
in the creation or distribution of what Project Gutenberg
hoped would be 10,000 items by the end of 2001, only just
30 years after the first Etext was posted on the Net.
Flash Forward
Today there are about 500 volunteers at Project Gutenberg
and they are spread all over the globe, from people doing
their favorite book then never being heard from again, to
PhD's, department heads, vice-presidents, and lawyers who
do reams of copyright research, and some who have done in
excess of 20 Etexts pretty much by themselves; appreciate
is too small a word for how Michael feel about these, and
tears would be the only appropriate gesture.
There are approximately 400 million computers today, with
the traditional 1% of them being on the Internet, and the
traditional ratio of about 10 users per Internet node has
continued, too, as there are about 40 million people on a
vast series of Internet gateways. Ratios like these have
been a virtual constant through Internet development.
If there is only an average of 2.5 people on each of 400M
computers, that is a billion people, just in 1995. There
will probably be a billion computers in the world by 2001
when Project Gutenberg hopes to have 10,000 items online.
If only 10% of those computers contain the average Etexts
from Project Gutenberg that will mean Project Gutenberg's
goal of giving away one trillion Etexts will be completed
at that time, not counting that more than one person will
be able to use any of these copies. If the average would
still be 2.5 people per computer, then only 4% of all the
computers would be required to have reached one trillion.
[10,000 Etexts to 100,000,000 people equals one trillion]
Hart's dream as adequately expressed by "Grolier's" CDROM
Electronic Encyclopedia has been his signature block with
permission, for years, but this idea is now threatened by
those who feel threatened by Unlimited Distribution:
=====================================================
| The trend of library policy is clearly toward
| the ideal of making all information available
| without delay to all people.
|
|The Software Toolworks Illustrated Encyclopedia (TM)
|(c) 1990, 1991 Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.
=============================================
Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
[email protected] and [email protected]
Internet User Number 100 [approximately] [TM]
Break Down the Bars of Ignorance & Illiteracy
On the Carnegie Libraries' 100th Anniversary!
Human Nature such as it is, has presented a great deal of
resistance to the free distribution of anything, even air
and water, over the millennia.
Hart hopes the Third Millennium A.D. can be different.
But it will require an evolution in human nature and even
perhaps a revolution in human nature.
So far, the history of humankind has been a history of an
ideal of monopoly: one tribe gets the lever, or a wheel,
or copper, iron or steel, and uses it to command, control
or otherwise lord it over another tribe. When there is a
big surplus, trade routes begin to open up, civilizations
begin to expand, and good times are had by all. When the
huge surplus is NOT present, the first three estates lord
it over the rest in virtually the same manner as historic
figures have done through the ages:
"I have got this and you don't." [Nyah nyah naa naa naa!]
***
***
Now that ownership of the basic library of human thoughts
is potentially available to every human being on Earth--I
have been watching the various attempts to keep this from
actually being available to everyone on the planet: this
is what I have seen:
1. Ridicule
Those who would prefer to think their worlds would be
destroyed by infinite availability of books such as:
Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables or the
Complete Works of Shakespeare, Milton or others, have
ridiculed the efforts of those who would give them to
all free of charge by arguing about whether it should
be: "To be or not to be" or "To be [,] or not to be"
or "To be [;] or not to be"/"To be [:] or not to be"
or whatever; and that whatever their choices are, for
this earthshaking matter, that no other choice should
be possible to anyone else. My choice of editions is
final because _I_ have a scholarly opinion.
1A. My response has been to refuse to discuss: "How
many angels can dance on the head of a pin," [or many
other matters of similar importance].
I know this was once considered of utmost importance,
BUT IN A COUNTRY WHERE HALF THE ADULTS COULD NOT EVEN
READ SHAKESPEARE IF IT WERE GIVEN TO THEM, I feel the
general literacy and literary requirements overtake a
decision such as theirs. If they honestly wanted the
best version of Shakespeare [in their estimations] to
be the default version on the Internet, they wouldn't
have refused to create just such an edition, wouldn't
have shot down my suggested plan to help them make it
. . .for so many years. . .nor, when they finally did
agree, they wouldn't have let an offer from a largest
wannabee Etext provider to provide them with discount
prices, and undermine their resolve to create a super
quality public domain edition of Shakespeare. It was
an incredible commentary on the educational system in
that the Shakespeare edition we finally did use for a
standard Internet Etext was donated by a commercial--
yes--commercial vendor, who sells it for a living.
In fact, I must state for the record, that education,
as an institution, has had very little to do with the
creation and distribution of Public Domain Etexts for
the public, and that contributions by the commercial,
capitalistic corporations has been the primary force,
by a large margin, that funds Project Gutenberg. The
500 volunteers we have come exclusively from smaller,
less renowned institutions of education, without any,
not one that I can think of, from any of the major or
near major educational institutions of the world.
It would appear that those Seven Deadly Sins listed a
few paragraphs previously have gone a long way to the
proof of the saying that "Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely."
Power certainly accrues to those who covet it and the
proof of the pudding is that all of the powerful club
we have approached have refused to assist in the very
new concept of truly Universal Education.
Members of those top educational institutions managed
to subscribe to our free newsletter often enough, but
not one of them ever volunteered to do a book or even
to donate a dollar for what they have received: even
send in lists of errors they say they have noticed.
Not one. [There is a word for the act of complaining
about something without [literally] lifting a finger]
The entire body of freely available Etexts has been a
product of the "little people."
2. Cost Inflation
When Etexts were first coming it, estimates were sent
around the Internet that it took $10,000 to create an
Etexts, and that therefore it would take $100,000,000
to create the proposed Project Gutenberg Library.
$500,000,000 was supposedly donated to create Etexts,
by one famous foundation, duly reported by the media,
but these Etexts have not found their way into hands,
or minds, of the public, nor will they very soon I am
afraid, though I would love to be put out of business
[so to say] by the act of these institutions' release
of the thousands of Etexts some of them already have,
and that others have been talking about for years.
My response was, has been, and will be, simply to get
the Etexts out there, on time, and with no budget. A
simple proof that the problem does not exist. If the
team of Project Gutenberg volunteers can produce this
number of Etexts and provide it to the entire world's
computerized population, then the zillions of dollars
you hear being donated to the creations of electronic
libraries by various government and private donations
should be used to keep the Information Superhighway a
free and productive place for all, not just for those
1% of computers that have already found a home there.
3. Graphics and Markup versus Plain Vanilla ASCII
The one thing you will see in common with ALL of such
graphics and markup proposals is LIMITED DISTRIBUTION
as a way of life. The purpose of each one of these is
and always has been to keep knowledge in the hands of
the few and away from the minds of the many.
I predict that in the not-too-distant-future that all
materials will either be circulating on the Internet,
or that they will be jealously guarded by owners whom
I described with the Seven Deadly Sins.
If there is ever such a thing as the "Tri-corder," of
Star Trek fame, I am sure there simultaneously has to
be developed a "safe" in which those who don't want a
whole population to have what they have will "lock" a
valuable object to ensure its uniqueness; the concept
of which I am speaking is illustrated by this story:
"A butler announces a delivery, by very distinguished
members of a very famous auction house. The master--
for he IS master--beckons him to his study desk where
the butler deposits his silver tray, containing a big
triangular stamp, then turns to go.
What some of these projects with tens of millions for
their "Electronic Libraries" are doing to ensure this
is for THEM and not for everyone is to prepare Etexts
in a manner in which no normal person would either be
willing or able to read them.
Shakespeare's Hamlet is a tiny file in PVASCII, small
enough for half a dozen copies to fit [uncompressed!]
on a $.23 floppy disk that fits in your pocket. But,
if it is preserved as a PICTURE of each page, then it
will take so much space that it would be difficult to
carry around even a single copy in that pocket unless
it were on a floppy sized optical disk, and even then
I don't think it would fit.
Another way to ensure no normal person would read it,
to mark it up so blatantly that the human eyes should
have difficulty in scansion, stuttering around pages,
rather than sliding easily over them; the information
contained in this "markup" is deemed crucial by those
esoteric scholars who think it is of vital importance
that a coffee cup stain appears at the lower right of
a certain page, and that "Act I" be followed by [] to ensure everyone knows this is actually where
this is where an act or scene or whatever starts.
You probably would not believe how much money has had
the honor of being spent on these kinds of projects a
normal person is intentionlly deprived of through the
mixture is just plain HIDING the files, to making the
files so BIG you can't download them, to making them
so WEIRD you wouldn't read them if you got them. The
concept of requiring all documents to be formatted in
a certain manner such that only a certain program can
read them has been proposed more often then you might
ever want to imagine, for the TWIN PURPOSES OF PROFIT
AND LIMITED DISTRIBUTION in a medium which requires a
virtue of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION to keep it growing.
Every day I read articles, proposals, proceedings for
various conferences that promote LIMITED DISTRIBUTION
on the Nets. . .simply to raise the prestige or money
to keep some small oligarchy in power.
This is truly a time of POWER TO THE PEOPLE as people
say in the United States.
What we have here is a conflict between the concepts that
everything SHOULD be in LIMITED DISTRIBUTION, and that of
the opposing concept of UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION.
If you look over the table of contents on the next pages,
you will see that each of these item stresses the greater
and greater differences between an history which has been
dedicated to the preservation of Limited Distribution and
something so new it has no history longer than 25 years--
***
Contents
Chapter 00
Preface
Chapter 0
Introduction
Saving Time and Effort
The New Scholarship
Chapter 1
General Comments
Plain Vanilla ASCII Versus Proprietary Markups
Chapter 2
Copyright
Chapter 3
Luddites
Chapter 4
Internet As Chandelier
[The Famous Chandelier Diatribe of 1990]
Chapter 5
The Rush To The Top
Chapter 6
Those Who Would Be King
Gopher, WWW, Mosaic, Netscape
Chapter 7
Listowners vs List Moderators
Those Who Would Be King, Part I
Chapter 8
Lurkers
Those Who Would Be King, Part II
Chapter 9
"Lurking Is Good. . .Remember. . .Lurking Is Good"
Those Who Would Be King, Part III
The Netiquetters
Chapter 10
TPC, The Phone Company
Those Who Would Be King, Part IV
******
Chapter 1
Plain Vanilla ASCII Versus Proprietary Markups
Chapter 2
Copyright
Chapter 3
Luddites
Chapter 4
Internet As Chandelier
[The Infamous Chandelier Diatribe of 1990]
[chandel2/wp]
-------------------ORIGINAL MESSAGE--------------------------
Hart undoubtedly saw academia as a series of dark brown dream
shapes, disorganized, nightmarish, each with its set of rules
for nearly everything: style of writing, footnoting, limited
subject matter, and each with little reference to each other.
-------------------------REPLY----------------------------------
What he wanted to see was knowledge in the form of a chandelier,
with each subject area powered by the full intensity of the flow
of information, and each sending sparks of light to other areas,
which would then incorporate and reflect them to others, a never
ending flexion and reflection, an illumination of the mind, soul
and heart of Wo/Mankind as could not be rivalled by a diamond of
the brightest and purest clarity.
Instead, he saw petty feudal tyrants, living in dark poorly lit,
poorly heated, well defended castles: living on a limited diet,
a diet of old food, stored away for long periods of time, salted
or pickled or rotted or fermented. Light from the outside isn't
allowed in, for with it could come the spears and arrows of life
and the purpose of the castle was to keep the noble life in, and
all other forms of life out. Thus the nobility would continue a
program of inbreeding which would inevitably be outclassed by an
entirely random reflexion of the world's gene pool.
A chandelier sends light in every direction, light of all colors
and intensities. No matter where you stand, there are sparkles,
some of which are aimed at you, and you alone, some of which are
also seen by others: yet, there is no spot of darkness, neither
are there spots of overwhelming intensity, as one might expect a
sparkling source of lights to give off. Instead, the area is an
evenly lit paradise, with direct and indirect light for all, and
at least a few sparkles for everyone, some of which arrive, pass
and stand still as we watch.
But the system is designed to eliminate sparkles, reflections or
any but the most general lighting. Scholars are encouraged to a
style and location of writing which guarantee that 99 and 44 one
hundredths of the people who read their work will be colleagues,
already a part of that inbred nobility of their fields.
We are already aware that most of our great innovations are made
from leaps from field to field, that the great thinkers apply an
item here in this field which was gleaned from that field: thus
are created the leaps which create new fields which widen fields
of human endeavor in general.
Yet, our petty nobles, cased away in their casements, encased in
their tradition, always reject the founding of these new fields,
fearing their own fields can only be dimmed by comparison. This
is true, but only by their own self-design. If their field were
open to light from the outside, then the new field would be part
of their field, but by walling up the space around themselves, a
once new and shining group of enterprising revolutionaries could
only condemn themselves to awaiting the ravages of time, tarnish
and ignorance as they become ignorant of the outside world while
the outside world becomes ignorant of them.
So, I plead with you, for your sake, my sake, for everyone's, to
open windows in your mind, in your field, in your writing and in
your thinking; to let illumination both in and out, to come from
underneath and from behind the bastions of your defenses, and to
embrace the light and the air, to see and to breathe, to be seen
and to be breathed by the rest of Wo/Mankind.
Let your light reflect and be reflected by the other jewels in a
crown of achievement more radiant than anything we have ever had
the chance to see or to be before. Join the world!
[chandel2.txt]
A Re-Visitation to the Chandelier by Michael S. Hart
Every so often I get a note from a scholar with questions and
comments about the Project Gutenberg Edition of this or that.
Most of the time this appears to be either idle speculation--
since there is never any further feedback about passages this
or that edition does better in the eye of particular scholars
or the feedback is of the "holier than thou" variety in which
the scholar claims to have found errors in our edition, which
the scholar then refuses to enumerate.
As for the first, there can certainly be little interest in a
note that appears, even after follow-up queries, of that idle
brand of inquiry.
As to the second, we are always glad to receive a correction,
that is one of the great powers of etext, that corrections be
made easily and quickly when compared to paper editions, with
the corrections being made available to those who already had
the previous editions, at no extra charge.
However, when someone is an expert scholar in a field they do
have a certain responsibility to have their inquiries be some
reasonable variety, with a reasonable input, in order to have
a reasonable output. To complain that there is a problem w/o
pointing out the problem has a rich and powerful vocabulary I
do not feel is appropriate for this occasion. We have put an
entirely out-of-proportion cash reward on these errors at one
time or another and still have not received any indications a
scholar has actually ever found them, which would not be more
difficult than finding errors in any other etexts, especially
ones not claiming an beginning accuracy of only 99.9%.
However, if these corrections WERE forthcoming, then the 99.9
would soon approach 99.95, which is the reference error level
referred to several times in the Library of Congress Workshop
on Electronic Text Proceedings.
On the other hand, just as the Project Gutenberg's efficiency
would drop dramatically if we insisted our first edition of a
book were over 99.5% accurate, so too, should efficiency drop
dramatically if we were ever to involve ourselves in any type
of discussion resembling "How many angels can dance on a pin-
head." The fact is, that our editions are NOT targeted to an
audience specifically interested in whether Shakespeare would
have said:
"To be or not to be"
"To be, or not to be"
"To be; or not to be"
"To be: or not to be"
"To be--or not to be"
This kind of conversation is and should be limited to the few
dozen to few hundred scholars who are properly interested. A
book designed for access by hundreds of millions cannot spend
that amount of time on an issue that is of minimal relevance,
at least minimal to 99.9% of the potential readers. However,
we DO intend to distribute a wide variety of Shakespeare, and
the contributions of such scholars would be much appreciated,
were it ever given, just as we have released several editions
of the Bible, Paradise Lost and even Aesop's Fables.
In the end, when we have 30 different editions of Shakespeare
on line simulateously, this will probably not even be worthy,
as it hardly is today, of a footnote. . .I only answer out of
respect for the process of creating these editions as soon as
possible, to improve the literacy and education of the masses
as soon as possible.
For those who would prefer to see that literacy and education
continue to wallow in the mire, I can only say that a silence
on your part creates its just reward. Your expertise dies an
awful death when it is smothered by hiding your light under a
bushel, as someone whom is celebrated today once said:
Matthew 5:15
Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on
a
candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
Mark 4:21
And he said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a
bushel,
or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?
Luke 8:16
No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel,
or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that
they which enter in may see the light.
Luke 11:33
No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret
place,
neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which
come
in may see the light.
Chapter 5
The Rush To The Top
Chapter 6
Those Who Would Be King
Gopher, WWW, Mosaic, Netscape
This chapter discusses why URLs aren't U,
Why Universal Resource Locators Are Not Universal
When I first tried the experimental Gopher sites, I asked
the inventors of Gopher if their system could be oriented
to also support FTP, should a person be more inclined for
going after something one already had researched: rather
than the "browsing" that was being done so often on those
Gopher servers.
The answer was technically "yes," but realistically "no,"
in that while Gophers COULD be configured such that every
file would be accessible by BOTH Gopher and FTP, the real
intent of Gopher was to bypass FTP and eventually replace
it as the primary method of surfing the Internet.
I tried to explain to them that "surfing" the Internet is
much more time consuming as well as wasteful of bandwidth
[this at a time when all bandwidth was still free, and we
were only trying to make things run faster, as opposed to
actually saving money.
Chapter 7
Listowners vs List Moderators
Those Who Would Be King, Part I
Chapter 8
Lurkers
Those Who Would Be King, Part II
Chapter 9
"Lurking Is Good. . .Remember. . .Lurking Is Good"
Those Who Would Be King, Part III
The Netiquetters
"We Are Surrounded By An Insurmountable Opportunity."
"It Is Like Drinking From A Firehose."
"Be Sure To Have YOUR Messages `Netiquette Approved.'"
These sentiments reflect a portion of the Internet who
have terrified thoughts and feelings about a wonderful
set of opportunties made available by the Internet and
other networks.
They are afraid of too much opportunity and would like
to make sure no one else takes advantage of such great
opportunities because it will make themselves look and
feel very small by comparison.
They want to make sure YOU don't cross the boundaries,
simply because THEY ARE AFRAID to cross them.
Their thinking is sociological rather than logical, as
follows:
1: They are obviously afraid of so much opportunity.
2: They want to reduce the pressure of so much highly
available opportunity.
3. This is because they are afraid someone else would
make good use of this opportunity and leave them a
footnote in their own fields as opportunity shifts
into hyper-drive and nothing will ever be quite as
sedate, staid, prim, proper, stiff and reserved as
it was previous in a paper dominated room, full of
stuffed shirts and Robert's Rules Of Order: which
THEY used to keep YOU from upsetting Apple and IBM
carts with more horsepower than THEY were willing,
and able, to use.
History is full of examples of those in position of an
older variety of power using their power to deny, defy
and otherwise stultify anything new, and therefore out
of their own immediate forms of control.
It is also full of examples of the "Powers-That-Be" so
vaingloriously squashing any potential rival powers in
much the same manner as a queen bee stings other queen
bees to death before they are even born.
In such a manner are the ideas of the new refused in a
world dominated by the old.
Of course what comes to mind is Napoleon III's "Salon-
des-Refuses" in which works of the [now!] greatest and
most famous painters in the world finally had a day to
have their works shown to the public after years of an
autocratic denial by the Academic Francaise's official
Salon, originally begun in the Louvre, and where great
examples of these works hang today, in defiance of the
greatest "powers-that-be" that ever were, who failed--
as all such attempts should fail.
"The Academie Francaise (French Academy)
is the most renouned and oldest of the
five learned socities that make up the
Insititue de France, established by
Cardinal Richelieu.
[Grolier's 1994 Electronic Encyclopedia]
The encyclopedia goes on to state that
"`unification, and purification'" were
among the prime "`development'" goals.
The most famous recounting of Cardinal Richelieu's
attempts to take over France and to remold it in a
reflection of his own conservative power structure
are detailed in Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers.
Please...take time to "Read More About It."
The encyclopedia article continues on to describe the
intense conservatism these Institutes maintain even a
few centuries later even though at least this "oldest
and most powerful" of them, "the Salon gradually lost
its position as the sole official exibition of French
painting," sculpture, etc., which also stood against
the Eiffel Tower, as well as everything else new.
JUST SAY NO
When they come to YOUR electronic door, enlisting YOUR
support for their views of how to run the Internet you
can "just say no" and feel no obligation to make THEIR
rules of order be YOUR rules of order:
1. Don't bother with their requests for "conservation
of bandwidth" because their idea of bandwidth is a
sociological "inversion, diversion and perversion"
of the term "bandwidth."
They would have you believe that a dozen short message
files sent through THEIR listservers are a "bandwidth-
preserver" rather than one message containing what you
had to say all at once.
A. This is just so much sociological barnyard matter.
They just want to keep you from having your say in
an uninterrupted manner. . .it is ONLY this manner
in which anyone CAN BE INTERRUPTED on the Internet
and it requires YOU TO INTERRUPT YOURSELF, because
THEY CAN'T DO INTERRUPT YOU THEMSELVES: THEY HAVE
TO TALK YOU INTO THE CUTTING YOUR OWN THROAT.
B. The logical rather than sociological truth is that
short messages are 50% made up of header materials
that are not part of the message you are sending--
but rather header and packet identifiers for these
messages. Thus your series of a dozen messages of
the short variety is going to be 50% wasteful of a
bandwidth it uses, in comparison to sending the 12
thoughts you might want to express as one, single,
uninterrupted message.
*** Insert header here
Here is an example of the kind of header attached to a
normal Internet message. Some VERY wasteful emailers,
Netiquetters included, have much longer headers due to
their refusal to take the time to delete the addresses
when they send the same message to hundreds of people.
I have received messages in which the header literally
contained hundreds of extra lines beyond this.
**Header Starts Below** [Margins were shortened.
This header contains 1054 characters, which would
take 3 512 byte packets, each packet of which has
to have its own header normal users never see. A
mailer can be set not to show most of the header,
but it is all there, and taking up bandwidth.]
Received: from UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu
(ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu [128.205.2.1])
by mtshasta.snowcrest.net (8.6.5/8.6.5)
with SMTP id FAA24025; Thu, 2 Feb 1995
05:53:11 -0800
Message-Id: <199502021353.FAA24025@
mtshasta.snowcrest.net>
Received: from UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
by UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2)
with BSMTP id 0354; Thu, 02 Feb 95 08:43:10 EST
Received: from UICBIT.UIC.EDU
(NJE origin VMMAIL@PPLCATS) by
UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a)
with BSMTP id 3521; Wed,
1 Feb 1995 19:45:18 -0500
Received: from UICBIT.BITNET
(NJE origin LISTSERV@UICBIT) by UICBIT.UIC.EDU
(LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5650;
Wed, 1 Feb 1995 18:44:26 -0600
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 18:22:10 CST
Reply-To: Project Gutenberg Email List
Sender: Project Gutenberg Email List
From: "Michael S. Hart"
Subject: March Gutenberg Etexts
To: Multiple recipients of list GUTNBERG
**Header Ends Here**
Another Demonstration of Socio-Logical Argumentation
I have a signature block that contains the usual in a
name, position, and disclaimer along with information
of how long you should wait for a reply to a message,
who to contact for further information and it has one
line about how long I have been on the Internet.
It takes up about this much space:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
which is about 318 characters and receives complaints
from those who accept signature blocks that look like:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
x x
x x
x x
x Your Message Here x
x x
x x
x x
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
which takes over 718 characters because all the blank spaces are real spaces.
I have pointed out this discrepancy in logic, but the people readily reply the
space they are talking about is in the human mind, and not in the computers.
To which _I_ reply "Barnyard Material!"
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT OUT TO SAVE "BUZZWORD BANDWIDTH". . .
THEY ARE OUT TO CONTROL YOU. . .DON'T LET THEM.
"Netiquette" is something THEY have invented TO CONTROL YOU!
All you have to do is remind them that each individual has a
most powerful protection against anything they don't want to
see. . .THE DELETE KEY!
You will probably also have to remind them, sometimes in the
manner of using a different platform to speak from, if their
response is not to post your messages, that:
"SINCE EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN DELETE KEY,
THERE IS NO NEED TO DELETE THIS FOR THEM!
Chapter 10
TPC, The Phone Company
Those Who Would Be King, Part IV
My apologies for using the United States as an example so
many times, but...most of my experience has been in the US.
Asychnronous Availability of Information
One of the major advantages of electronic information is
that you don't have to schedule yourself to match others
in their schedules.
This is very important. Just this very week I have been
waiting for a power supply for one of my computers, just
because the schedule of the person who has it was not in
sync with the schedule of the person picking it up. The
waste has been enormous, and trips all the way across an
entire town are wasted, while the computer lies unused.
The same things happens with libraries and stores of all
kinds around the world. How many times have you tried a
phone call, a meeting, a purchase, a repair, a return or
a variety of other things, and ended up not making these
connections?
No longer, with things that are available electronically
over the Nets. You don't have to wait until the door of
the library swings open to get that book you want for an
urgent piece of research; you don't have to wait until a
person is available to send them an instant message; you
don't have to wait for the evening news on tv....
This is called Asyncronous Communication...meaning those
schedules don't have to match exactly any more to have a
meaningful and quick conversation. A minute here, there
or wherever can be saved instead of wasted and the whole
communication still travels at near instantaneous speed,
without the cost of ten telegrams, ten phone calls, etc.
You can be watching television and jump up and put a few
minutes into sending, or answering, your email and would
not miss anything but the commercials.
"Commercials" bring to mind another form of asynchronous
communication...taping a tv or radio show and watching a
show in 40 minutes instead of an hour because you do not
have to sit through 1 minute of "not-show" per 2 minutes
of show. No only to you not have to be home on Thursday
night to watch your favorite TV show any more, but those
pesky commercials can be edited out, allowing you to see
three shows in the time it used to take to watch two.
This kind of efficiency can have a huge effect on you or
your children. . .unless you WANT them to see 40 ads per
hour on television, or spend hours copying notes from an
assortment of library books carried miles from, and back
to, the libraries. Gone are the piles of 3x5 cards past
students and scholars have heaped before time in efforts
to organize mid-term papers for 9, 12, 16 or 20 years of
institutionalized education. Whole rainforests of trees
can be saved, not to mention the billions of hours of an
entire population's educated scribbling that should have
been spent between the ears instead of between paper and
hand, cramping the thought and style of generations upon
generations of those of us without photographic memories
to take the place of the written word.
Now we all can have photographic memories, we can quote,
with total accuracy, millions of 3x5 cards worth of huge
encyclopedias of information, all without getting up for
any reason other than eating, drinking and stretching.
Research in this area indicates that 90% of the time the
previous generations spent for research papers was spent
traipsing through the halls, stairways and bookstacks of
libraries; searching through 10 to 100 books for each of
the ones selected for further research; and searching on
10-100 pages for each quote worthy of making it into the
sacred piles of 3x5 cards; then searching the card piles
for those fit for the even more sacred sheets of paper a
first draft was written on. Even counting the fanatical
dedication of those who go through several drafts before
a presentation draft is finally achieved the researchers
agree that 90% of this kind of work is spent in "hunting
and gathering" the information and only 10% of this time
is spent "digesting" the information.
If you understand that civilization was based on the new
invention called "the plow," which changed the habits of
"hunting and gathering" peoples into civilized cities...
then you might be able to understand the the changes the
computer and computer networks are making to those using
them instead of the primitive hunting and gathering jobs
we used to spend 90% of our time on.
In mid-19th Century the United States was over 90% in an
agrarian economy, spending nearly all of its efforts for
raising food to feed an empty belly. Mid-20th Century's
advances reversed that ratio, so that only 10% was being
used for the belly, 90% for civilization.
The same thing will be said for feeding the mind, if our
civilization ever gets around deciding that spending the
majority of our research time in a physical, rather than
mental, portion of the educational process.
Think of it this way, if it takes only 10% as long to do
the work to write a research paper, we are likely to get
either 10 times as many research papers, or papers which
are 10 times as good, or some combination...just like we
ended up with 10 times as much food for the body when we
turned from hunting and gathering food to agriculture at
the beginnings of civilization...then we would excpect a
similar transition to a civilization of the future.
***
If mankind is defined as the animal who thinks; thinking
more and better increases the degree to which we are the
human species. Decreasing our ability to think is going
to decrease our humanity...and yet I am living in what a
large number of people define as the prime example of an
advanced country...where half the adult population can't
read at a functional level. [From the US Adult Literacy
Report of 1994]
***
"Now that cloning geniuses, along with all other humans,
has been outlawed, only outlaws will clone geniuses, and
the rest of mankind will be `unarmed' in a battle of the
mind between themselves and the geniuses."
"Have you ever noticed that the only workers in history,
all of history; never to have a guild or a union are the
inventors who live by the effort of the mind?"
We have workers who live by the efforts of their bodies,
whether dock workers or professional athletes who have a
set of established unions, pay dues, have gone on strike
from time to time, and all the related works of unions--
but we have never had a union of those who change worlds
from Old World to New World****
Appendix 1
The Growth of the Internet
Date Hosts
----- ---------
05/69 4
10/69 5
04/71 23
06/74 62
03/77 111
08/81 213
05/82 235
08/83 562
10/84 1,024
10/85 1,961
02/86 2,308
11/86 5,089
12/87 28,174
07/88 33,000
10/88 56,000
01/89 80,000
07/89 130,000
10/89 159,000
10/90 313,000
01/91 376,000
07/91 535,000
07/91 535,000
10/91 617,000
01/92 727,000
04/92 890,000
07/92 992,000
10/92 1,136,000
01/93 1,313,000
04/93 1,486,000
07/93 1,776,000
10/93 2,056,000
01/94 2,217,000
03/95 ~4,000,000
[Multiply hosts by 100 to get approximate numbers of
computers in the world at the time. For instance we
should be approaching about 400 million computers in
the world at the time of this first edition.]
[Multiply Hosts by 10 to get an approximation of the
total number of people. Early on, this was probably
a smaller multiplier, as there were only 7 people on
the UIUC login list at the time: half of these were
not logging in on a regular basis. Thus my estimate
that I was about the 100th person on the Internet as
I presume our site was not the first nor the last of
the 18 new sites in 1971, so approximating 9th, plus
the 5 already there, we were probably around 14th or
so, though they tell me we were actually earlier, to
facilitate transcontinental traffic.
Sticking with the conservative estimate of 14th, and
with the same numbers of people on each of the other
nodes, that would have made me the 99th user.]
Television versus Education: Who Is Winning?
[As If You Had To Ask]
Basketball, Football, Baseball, Hockey and Golf
[Live and Video Games]
versus
Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Verne and Hugo
You would think that some operation that spends a hundred
times more than another would not fear much competition--
especially when the deck is stacked in their favor as the
following examples demonstrate:
1.
There is always great battle between Macbeth and Macduff;
Macbeth never gets blown out in the first quarter and the
author never jacks you up for higher royalties.
2.
Shakespeare was DESIGNED to be entertaining, so you don't
have to change the rules every season to make things more
exciting. Of course, if you WANT to, you can always turn
Romeo and Juliet into a story about New York City warfare
between street gangs instead of noble families of Verona.
If the US actually spends a trillion dollars on education
every year or two, and major sports franchising spends in
the neighborhood of 1/100th of that amount, and the video
game businesses spend even less, then why is it that your
exposure to Michael Jordan was a given, and his paychecks
were higher than any other college graduate in his class?
Ten to fifteen year old basketball shoes are nearly all a
forgotten item, rotting away in landfills while computers
the same age are still available for studying Shakespeare
more efficiently than any paper copy can ever provide and
less expensively.
Those computers are more than fast enough for the kind of
studying most kids do in school, and they cost no more on
today's market than a pair of basketball shoes.
Why is the centuries old blackboard still the default for
classrooms around the world, when they cost much more and
do much less than computers one tenth their age?
Why do we have physical Olympics and no mental Olympics?
Why do trivia games shows thrive on the market, and shows
featuring our brightest students die on the vine and then
get relegated to local programming on Sunday morning?
Outfitting a kid with a decade old computer costs no more
than outfitting that kid with basketball shows, much less
a basketball and a hoop, and the kid doesn't outgrow that
computer every year or wear it out, and regulation height
of the monitor doesn't change and make all the older ones
obsolete just due to some rule change.
Throwing billions of Etexts out there into cyberspace can
not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more
than throwing a billion basketballs out there should be a
guarantee that there will be another Michael Jordan: nor
will it guarantee a new Einstein, Edison, Shakespeare, or
any other great person. . .
. . .BUT. . .it will increase the odds.
Someone still has to pick up the books, just as there has
to be someone to pick up the basketballs, for both remain
dead until someone brings them to life.
Television, on the other hand, natters on into the night,
long after you have fallen asleep.
Education has all the advantages in competition with ball
games and video games, not only those listed above, but a
whole world insists on education, forces edcuation, which
just might have caused some of the problem.
Perhaps education has too many advantages. . .so many, in
fact, that education has never realized it is competition
bound with other messages.
A hundred years ago there were no industries vying for an
audience of kids, life outside the schoolhouse was boring
and there was very little to bring to class to compete in
some manner with the teacher, other than a bullfrog. The
massive variety of things kids have competing for them is
something educational systems have not taken into account
and they still rely on the threat of truant officers, not
on earning the attention of the students.
The competition is not nearly so sound asleep. . . .
TV shows spend billions of their dollars figuring out how
to get you to stay tuned in for that last few seconds and
billions more watching overnight ratings results to check
their performances and those of their competitors.
When TV ratings go down, the shows are changed, sometimes
so drastically you wouldn't recognize them, and are often
cancelled altogether, sometimes only two weeks into a new
season. I once saw a show featured on one of the morning
talk shows to promote that evening's performance, but the
show was cancelled during the intervening hours.
When school ratings go down, the ratings are changed; the
show remains essentially the same, and it is often a best
teacher award winner who gets cancelled while more boring
teachers go on year after year to bore the children of an
assortment of former students.
The Preservation of Errors
With the advent of electronic text there is no longer any
reason but the Seven Deadly Sins [enumerated above] for a
person not to share information. . .except. . .some value
added work to make the texts better than what passed into
their hands from previous editions.
However, with a kind of infinitely reverse logic, most of
the scholars dipping their toes into cyberspace, have the
espoused idea that no Etexts should vary by one character
from some exact paper predecessor, and that these Etexts,
new that they are, should be absolutely identified with a
particular paper edition which cannot be improved upon.
Somehow this reminds me of the Dark Ages, that 1500 years
during which no weighty tome of the past could be updated
because that would be the same thing as challenging those
revered authorities of the Golden Age of Greece, which we
all know can never be improved upon.
Their tomes were copied, over, and over, and over again--
with the inevitable degradation that comes with telephone
games [in which you whisper a secret message through ears
after ears in a circle, until completely distorted babble
returns from the other side]. Even xeroxing has this bad
result if you do it over and over.
Therefore scholars developed a habit of searching for any
differences between editions, and referring back to older
editions to resolve differences, because the more copying
the more chances for the addition of errors, comments and
other possibly spurious information.
This was probably ok for the environment they lived in...
but a serious failing caused the Dark Ages which lasted a
VERY LONG TIME by anyone's standards, and served to warn,
in a manner we should NOT ignore, that this should not be
the way things should be done in the future.
[The most minimized estimates of the length of the period
approximate about 400 years from the latest possible date
of the fall of the Roman Empire sometime in the 400's AD,
to Charlemagne in the 800's. Of course, most believe the
fall of the Roman Empire was much earlier, as the empire,
such as it was, was "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor Empire"
for a long time before 400 AD and things tended to return
to the way they had been before Charlemagne after he died
with estimates of the end of Dark Ages ranging as late as
the Renaissance in the 1400's. Thus the longest estimate
would be no more than 1500 years from the birth of Caesar
until the Renaissance was truly underway, with a shortest
possible estimate being somewhat under 500 years. Thus a
medium estimate of 1000 years would be sure to antagonize
both end of the spectrum, and is therefore certainly more
accurate than either.]
It would appear that the effort to reproduce books with a
perfection that refuses the corrections of errors because
of a misplaced loyalty to previous editions, looms again,
this time over the electronic libraries of the future, in
that a significant number of Etext creators are insisting
on continuing the practices, policies and precepts of the
Dark Ages in that they insist on the following:
1. Copies must be exact, no corrections can be made.
2. Any differences between copies must be decided in an
ethic that honors the oldest over the newest.
3. The authoritative copies must be held in sacred trust
in the sepulchres of the oldest institutions, and not
let out into the hands of the public.
Of course, these are totally belied by the facts:
1. Digitial ASCII reproductions ARE exact by nature, and
thus no errors can creep in.
2. Any differences that DO creep in can be found in just
a single second with programs such as comp, diff, cf,
and the like. Even a change as unnoticeable as blank
space added to the end of a sentence or file is found
and precisely located without effort.
3. Holding books in sacred trust in this manner does not
allow them to do their work. A book that is not read
is a book that is dead. Books are written for people
to read, to hear, to see performed on stage, not so a
sort of intellectual GESTAPO/GEheimnis STadt POlizei/
Home State Police could come to power by holding book
power in secret.
***
On March 8, 1995, Project Gutenberg completed its 250th offering
to the Internet Public Library, as many have come to call it.
A great number of changes have come to the Internet since we got
the Complete Works of Shakespeare out as out 100th publication--
some of them extraordinarily good, some of the of more moderated
goodness, and some on the other end of the spectrum
Probably the most exciting two recent events are the 20,000 year
old cave paintings discovered in France in January, released for
the news media in February, and posted as #249 on March 8th with
several versions of each painting having been collected, in both
.GIF and .JPG formats.
This is particularly exciting when you realize that the Dead Sea
Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and that no one outside a select
few ever even saw them or pictures of them until just a few were
smuggled out on Macintosh disks a couple years ago; four decades
went by without the public getting any view of them.
The French Ministry of Culture has been very swift in getting an
extraordinary event such as this covered by the general media on
a worldwide basis only one month after their discovery, and also
has taken only a week or two to grant Project Gutenberg a permit
to post these wonderful paintings on the Internet.
On the other hand, the future of the Internet Public Library may
be in serious danger if we do not ensure that information may be
continually forthcoming to the public. As many of you know, the
Project Gutenberg Etexts are 90% from the Public Domain with 10%
reproduced by permission. However, there is a movement to cease
the introduction of materials into the Public Domain in Congress
[of the United States] which would effectively stop the entry of
this kind of information into general Internet circulation. 200
years ago the US copyright was established at 14 years according
to the speeches of Senator Orrin Hatch, sponsoring one bill, and
then extended another 14, then another 28, then extended to life
of the author plus another 50 years after, and 75 years for that
kind of copyright which is created by a corporation.
This means that if you took your 5 year old kid to see "The Lion
King" when it came out, the kid would have to be 80 years old to
have lived long enough to have a copy that was not licensed by a
commercial venture. The fact that the average person will never
reach the age of 80 effectively creates a permanent copyright to
deny public access during the expected lifetimes of any of us.
However, this is not enough. . .the new bill is designed to kill
off ANY chance that even 1% of the youngest of us will ever have
our own rights to an unlicensed copy of any material produced in
our lifetimes because if these bills are passed, our young kid a
paragraph above will have to reach the age of 100 to have rights
to the materials published today, while the rights of inventors,
protected by patent law, will still expire in 17 years.
Why is it more important that we all can buy Public Domain legal
copies of the latest supersonic toaster less than two decades of
production after the original, but it is not as important for us
to be well read, well informed and well educated?
***
FREE WINNIE-THE-POOH
We hope with your assistance we can mount a successful effort to
free Winnie-the Pooh, imprisoned by various copyright laws since
his birth in 1926.
At the beginning of Project Gutenberg, one of our first projects
was going to be the children's classic Winnie-the-Pooh: written
in 1926, and therefore up for copyright renewal in 1954, and the
copyright renewal would have then expired in 1982, and thus been
a perfect candidate for Project Gutenberg's Children's Library.
However, this was not allowed to happen.
Instead, the copyright on Winnie-the-Pooh was extended, for a 75
year total, meaning we would have to wait until 2001 for the new
copyright term to expire, effectively keeping Winnie-the-Pooh in
jail for another two decades or so.
However, two new bills have been introduced into the Senate, and
the House of Representatives of the United States to extend this
term of imprisonment yet again, for an additional 20 years.
The last copyright extension in the United States was in 1975 as
I recall. If we extend the copyright 20 years every 20 years we
will destroy the very concept of Public Domain, as we have known
it since the beginning of copyright.
Copyright only began when people other than those extremely rich
few who could afford a price of a family farm for every book had
their places as the only owners of books destroyed by Gutenberg,
the inventor of the moveable type printing press.
Mass availability of books was just something that should not be
tolerated. . .therefore the printers' guilds lobbied for a right
to decide not only who could print any book but whether the book
would be printed at all. This was a very strong monopoly put on
an industry that had been a free-for-all since Gutenberg.
This copyright remained virtually the same length, 28 years, for
quite a while, and the first United States copyright was for two
14 year periods, the second automatically given on request.
When books once again became too popular at the turn of the last
century, and many publishers began selling inexpensive sets of a
variety of extensive subjects, the copyrights were doubled again
so that the 14 years plus 14 year extension became 28 years with
a 28 year extension, which was done around 1909.
Then, in the last half of this century, books once again were to
become too widely spread, this time with the advent of the xerox
machine. Not only were new laws made to curb copying, but those
old laws were extended from that 28+28=56 years to 75 years, and
this was done in 1975 or so.
Now with the advent of truly UNLIMITED DISTRIBUTION available to
the world via computer files, books are once again getting to be
too widely spread, and further restriction is in the works, this
time only 20 years after the last extension, which was for about
20 years. Work is already underway for a permanent copyright to
keep us from putting "the Library of Congress" on our disks.
I have said for years that by the time computers get as far into
the future as they have come from the past, that we will be able
to hold all of the Library of Congress in one hand, but I added,
"They probably won't let us do it."
Let me explain that for a minute; back in 1979 Project Gutenberg
bought its first hard drive for about $1500 dollars, for Apple's
new Personal Computer. Not counting inflation we can buy drives
that will hold 1,000 times as much data for the same price. The
true cost, counting inflation, would be that our $1500 would buy
closer to 10,000 times as much space because our $1500 from 1979
is equivalent to about $5,000 today, if we get the new "magneto-
resistive" drive from IBM. This is NOT counting ZIP compression
or other compression programs. If you count them, you would get
about 5,000 times as much data for your money today as in 1979.
5 million bytes = $1500 in 1979 = one copy of Shakespeare
12 billion bytes = $4500 in 1995 [inflation has tripled plus]
25 billion bytes . . .with compression programs.
This is 5,000 copies of the Complete Shakespeare on one disk, or
less then $1 per copy. This upsets those who think there should
not be unlimited numbers of books in the world, so definition of
copyright and consequently the definition of public domain is in
danger of being changed, as they have been every time in history
that the public got too much information.
If the trend listed above continues for only 15 more years, 2010
will see drives containing 25 million copies of Shakespeare, for
the same price as the drive that could only hold one copy thirty
years earlier, and the price per copy will be so low that it may
take more money to run the calculation to figure the prices than
the prices actually are.
This is the real reason copyright gets extended, history repeats
itself, over and over again, and "those who do not study history
are condemned to repeat it." What they want is to ensure you do
not study history, so they can do the same things over and over,
because that is the easiest way for them to make money. Change,
especially the kinds that are happening in the computers' world,
is what scares them. When changes comes along, they try as hard
as they can to keep things the way they were, and nowhere is it
more obvious than now. Most copyrighted materials are gone, out
of print forever, in only five years, maybe 75% in ten years, in
15 years probably 87% are out of print, 20 years at that rate is
93%, 25 years is 96%, 30 years is 98% and 35 years would be well
over 99%. . .and that doesn't even take into account the shorter
term runs of newspapers, magazines, TV show, movies, records and
all those things that most people don't even expect to last more
than year in the public eye. The fact is that probably only .1%
or less of anything published in the 1920s is still in print for
the original edition. . .that is only one item out of 1,000, and
that estimate is probably quite high. The point is that can our
copyright laws support the withholding of 1,000 books for 1 that
is actually available. . .we don't make our driving laws for the
1 out of 1,000 that could be race car drivers, that would be one
of the silliest laws on record. We have to make our laws so the
law applies well to everyone, not just to make the rich richer--
or in this case the Information Rich richer.
Much of this new effort not to let anything out of copyright was
made by the music industry, which just had the best year of all,
ever, shipping over a billion CD's, tapes, records and videos.
Why, with all this success, they want to keep copyrights on 1920
items that are 99% out of print. . .is a question worth asking--
the answer is the copyright has always been extended when books,
or other forms of information, have become too plentiful; we SAY
we want everyone to be well read and well informed, and then the
law makes it more difficult. Just look as what has happened for
literacy in the United States during the period that a copyright
law demanded that nothing become Public Domain coming up to 1975
. . .is keeping Hemingway or Winnie-the-Pooh from becoming parts
of the Public Domain going to improve the US literacy rate?
We hope with your assistance we can mount a successful effort to
free Winnie-the Pooh, imprisoned by various copyright laws since
his birth in 1926. . .all copyright laws referred to were United
States copyright laws in effect at various times Winnie-the-Pooh
has been incarcerated. Other countries have different copyright
laws, and Winnie-the-Pooh was written in England, so a variation
in the US laws cannot be said to have affects other copyrights.
However, the above example is pretty valid for any book that was
published in the US during the 1920s or 1930's.
***
Ladies and Gentlemen. . .Start Your Engines!
The Race to the Information Age Has Begun.
It began in a much more quiet manner than the Golden Spike
which joined the two halves of a Transcontinental Railroad
exactly 100 years earlier. . .so much more quietly that we
never knew it was happening, and we were all left standing
there at the starting gate, gawking at Men on the Moon.
It all happened about 25 years ago, in 1969, but the media
never put the word "Internet" on the front page of a major
newspaper until the Wall Street Journal did it, on October
29, 1991. . .yet even so, most of you probably never heard
or saw the word Internet in the media until 1994, with the
25th Anniversay hardly ever mentioned, as the idea was for
everyone to think the Internet is the newest thing around,
and to get us all to buy tickets for $20-$25 a month.
What is the "First Rule of Reporting a Story?". . .oh yes:
Follow The Money
Right now there are 40-50 million people on the Internet--
and if someone could figure out how to make them all pay a
$20-$25 fee. . .that would be $100 million a month or over
a billion dollars a year.
Wow. . .if they can do that to an Information Superhighway
that had been running free of charge since the 60's, might
be they will figure out how to do it with those Interstate
Superhighways made of concrete, too, most of them have not
been running any longer than that.
The NSFNet [National Science Foundation Network] was being
cussed and discussed by the powers that be in the hopes it
could be dismantled at the same time most of us were first
hearing about the Internet, and none of us would notice it
when we were all asked to pay that billion dollars a year,
for something that had been as free as the highway systems
to the Information Rich/Etite for all those years.
Let's Follow The Money Some More
The first hard drives anyone used on the Internet were not
very big in terms of how much information they would hold,
but they were HUGE compared to any other hard drives every
computer has used for over 15 years. . .they were the size
of washing machines, and could not hold information as big
as the Bible or Shakespeare.
Today, for 1% of the price you can get 1,000 times as much
storage space. . .2,000 times as much, if you use a modern
compression program when storing your information.
The point I am trying to make here is that the price of an
electronic storage device has fallen literally closer to 0
than to 1% of the price it was when the Internet started--
and this is scheduled to continue for the next few decades,
which means we will all be able to affort drives that will
be able to hold the entire Library of Congress. . . .if it
is allowed.
But it won't be.
There's the rub.
The point I am trying to make is that just because we will
finally have the box capable of storing the entire Library
of Congress. . .they will make sure we don't get to, ever,
for we will be dead by the time anything we see today gets
old enough for the copyright to expire.
Let's Follow The Money Some More
Just a few months ago, the music industry completed record
sales figures for any year in history, moving 1 billion of
a combination of CDs, tapes, records and music videos, for
a staggering $12 billion dollars.
The response to this success, a few weeks ago, was for the
music industry to propose, not a rebate to their customers
but just the opposite, an additional 20 years during which
the music industry could have a continued monopoly on that
music, and. . .purely incidentally. . .this monopoly would
also be extended to books, television, movies, video games
and everything else that could be copyrighted.
I think the only way to understand this is to put it in an
elementary perspective such as this:
Right now, you take your kid to see a movie, any movie the
producers are releasing right now. Let's say your kid has
been alive 5 years, under current law, that kid has to get
to 80 years old before s/he can own a copy of that movie--
without the permission of the copyright holder. . .and the
average age such kids can be expected to live is less than
80 years. . .thus making the copyright permanent for us or
the kids we take to the movies.
The same is true for all current copyrighted materials and
the music industry is trying to add another 20 years to an
already "life sentence". . .and this when their sales have
just broken all records in history, if you will pardon the
pun. . . .
Since the founding of the United States when copyrights or
patents were proposed by Thomas Jefferson for 17 years the
period was lengthened to 28 years, plus another 28 years--
and most recently to 75 years for corporate copyrights and
"life plus 50 years" for individual copyrights.
That means that "Zen and the Art of the Internet," written
by a 20 year old, who will be expected to live for another
55 years or so, will still be under copyright sentencing a
century from now, and will be totally out of date and will
be totally useless other than as a historical footnote.
If this is the response of an industry that has just had a
huge record bashing year of sales, a response not to lower
prices but to raise them, then we are doing something in a
backwards manner in the case of copyright.
When car makers have really good years, or really bad ones
for that matter, they work very hard to attract customers,
with new innovations, more car for the money, financing on
better terms, or whatever, and when they have record years
they give their workers huge bonuses, which I am sure most
of you have heard about recently, and they also compete in
an aggressive manner to keep sales up.
Copyright and patents are what allow people NOT to compete
in the marketplace, as least for the first decade or two a
new item is in the marketplace. . .only now copyrights are
being extended to include the entire lifetime, not only of
the copyright holder, but of the audience as well.
Something is wrong.
The Information Age Is Being Ruled By The Information Rich
As Surely as the Transcontinental Railroads Were Ruled For
Decades By The Robber Barons.
The Information Rich had a free ride on the Superhighways,
about 25 years worth of free ride, and now the Information
Poor want a ride so the Information Rich are shutting down
the free rides and are selling tickets. . .selling tickets
to something which until this year was so inexpensive that
it it hardly paid to figure out what to charge any person,
much less any institution.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Brief History of the Internet, by Michael Hart
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