Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Human Knowledge Presented at Web 2.0, 10/6/04, San Francisco Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- This text is dedicated to the public domain, using a Creative Commons public domain dedication: > Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law) > > The person or persons who have associated their work with this > document (the "Dedicator") hereby dedicate the entire copyright > in the work of authorship identified below (the "Work") to the > public domain. > > Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at > large and to the detriment of Dedicator's heirs and successors. > Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of > relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights > under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. > Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights > includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit > or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work. > > Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the > Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, > modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any > purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including > by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived. -- Universal access to all knowledge is possible, and it's not a non-profit goal. Index the whole damn thing -- it's a business for AMZN (let's sell all the books, let's sell everything), Altavista, (let's index all the web), etc. 26MM books in the Library of Congress -- more than 50% out of copyright, most out of print, a tiny sliver in print. A digitized ASCII book is about 1MB, so this is about 26TB, which costs about $60K and takes up one bookshelf. Google announced that it will digitize in-print material and out-of-copyright works (like AMZN's thing). It costs $10/book to scan -- they're digitizing all the books in the Library of Alexandria, and they're going this in China, too. A group in Toronto is doing a robot-scanner that will bring the cost in the industrial world -- where labor is more expensive -- to scan books for $10. At $10 per, that $260 Million to scan all the books. Brewster is scanning all the books that are out of copyright, and is trying to get at all the stuff that's out of print but still in copyright -- the orphans. It's 8MM books, most of the 20th Century. We're suing Ashcroft in the Supreme Court for the right to bring out-of-print, in-copyright books to the net. We can print a book for a dollar -- it costs Harvard Library $2 to loan a book. We've got book mobiles in India, Egypt, Uganda elsewhere printing books for a dollar each. Scan a book for $10, put it on the net, download it and bind it for $1. -- How much audio is there? 2-3MM discs (78s, LPs, CDs) produced in the history of the world. Lots of people aren't well-served by music publishers. Some rock bands sell records but allow tape-trading of their live performance. We've got 700 bands' live performances online -- including all of the Grateful Dead. Online record-labels need help: we offer unlimited storage/bandwidth forever for free to anyone releasing material under a CC license. There should be no penalty to giving stuff away. Classical music: we need a good classical music collection. If you know anyone in a symphony we're looking to digitize their stuff at hi-rez. -- Moving images 100-200K theatrically released films in the history of the world, half are Indian. 600 films in the US are not in copyright -- we've got 300 on the web to download, watch, cut up, do what you will. Thousands of non-theatrical films (educational films, etc) in the Prelinger Archive. We're recording 20 channels of TV 24h/day at full rez. We've got a petabyte of TV from Russia, UK, Arab world, etc. -- We've got a DMCA exemption that allows us to digitize and rip software. It's a disgrace that the software industry opposed this. We've got a web-archive going back to 1996. This is growing at one Library of Congress per month. -- Preservation and access We've got copies of this in SF (on the San Andreas fault), with mirrors in Egypt and Amsterdam. We're adding cool search stuff, like Recall. -- Will we do this? Dunno -- lots of business oppos here. 4 companies have already spun out. This requires coop between govt, nonprofit and for-profit entities. -- UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE CAN BE OUR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT. ==