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 a.s.sortment 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 inst.i.tutionalized 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 compet.i.tion-- 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s?
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 cla.s.srooms 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 cybers.p.a.ce can not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more than throwing a billion basketb.a.l.l.s 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 basketb.a.l.l.s, 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 compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion 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 cla.s.s to compete in some manner with the teacher, other than a bullfrog. The ma.s.sive 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 compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tors.
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 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 a.s.sortment 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 pa.s.sed into their hands from previous editions.
However, with a kind of infinitely reverse logic, most of the scholars dipping their toes into cybers.p.a.ce, 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 insure 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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sistance 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 cla.s.sic 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.
Ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 insure 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 knowhere 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, will 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 a.s.sistance 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.