September 8, 2002

Every age has its own battles. As the corporate globalization threatens to take almost everything — from traditional crops to something as essential for human life as water — away from the common man’s access, those resisting this mad, frightening, onslaught are in need of quickly learning ways to counter it that are as global as the menace itself. They also need to learn where exactly the battle lines are drawn. Knowledge is included in the resources that the commercial interests are striving to deprive human beings of, and the governments come to help these interests with their ever-stringent copyright laws.

“In the USA, no copyrights will expire from now to 2019! It is even much worse in many other countries, where they actually removed 20 years from the public domain,” says Michael Hart, the founder of a now legendary project that publishes texts on the Internet for which the copyright has expired. “Books that had been legal to publish all of a sudden were not. Friends told me that in Italy, for example, all the great Italian operas that had entered the public domain are no longer there.

“Same goes for the United Kingdom. Germany increased its copyright term to more than 70 years back in the 1960s. It is a domino effect. Australia is the only country I know of that has officially stated they will not extend the copyright term by 20 years to more than 70.”

In Pakistan, as far as is generally known, the copyright term for a text stands at 50 years after the death of its author. It must be recorded that the matter of extending it to 100 years came under serious consideration in 1988 when it was about to be fifty years since the death of Iqbal. The son of the great Urdu and Persian poet is reported to have tried his best to persuade the government to double the copyright term, but his efforts failed. As a result, you can find the collections of Iqbal’s verse in a variety of formats in the bookshops.

A professor of electronic text at Benedictine University in Illinois, Michael Hart launched a mass movement of volunteers who scan, proofread and upload dozens of new e-texts every week, all in the most common, most easily accessible format. The official website of what is most aptly called the “Project Gutenberg” can be accessed at the following address: http://promo.net/pg/

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials research Lab at the University of Illinois. Hart decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing”, that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given. . .so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: “anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely”, what Hart termed ‘Replicator Technology’. The concept of replicator technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer.

The original copyright term in the USA, according to the introductory text provided at the PG website, was 14 years, which allowed one to reasonably predict that a text under copyright would be available in the public domain while it could be used. The copyright term was then extended to 28 years, and then 50 years. Under the new law it is impossible to predict the length of a copyright, and the likelihood of a new book entering the Public Domain during the lifetime of the average reader is minimal. For this reason, the texts so far made available by the volunteers spread all over the globe are those that belong to pre-1923 era. There are exceptions, of course, where permission to store the work has been granted by authors and publishers or other copyright holders.

As copyrights expire, thousands of works are added monthly to the public domain, where they can be freely replicated and distributed. Most of these books are out of print and saved only by the project from obscurity and ultimate oblivion.

The recurrent extension of copyright terms by Congress hampers Hart’s work by restricting the growth of the public domain or even by removing texts from it. It benefits, Hart says, very few copyright holders at the expense of universal access to literature and knowledge. The cynical and avaricious establishment will sacrifice anything to secure the diminishing returns of a few more copies sold. This protectionism, Hart believes, hinders the spread of literacy, deprives the masses of much needed knowledge, discriminates against the poor, and, ultimately, undermines democracy. Three decades of constant battle ended in partial victory, but Hart is as energetic as ever, straining at the next, seemingly implausible target: “A million books to a billion people in all corners of the globe,” Hart says.

Asked by Sam Vaknin, UPI Senior Business Correspondent, as to what made him choose the title “Project Gutenberg” for his venture, Hart replied: “When I chose the name, the major factor in mind was that publishing e-books would change the map of literacy and education as much as did the Gutenberg press, which reduced the price of books to 1/400th of their previous price tag... Another way our project compares to Gutenberg’s revolution is that copyright laws were created to stop both.

“When we only had a dozen e-books online, the price of putting one on a computer was about 1/400th the price of a paperback. But obviously with 100 gigabyte drives coming down to $100, the price of putting e-books on computers has fallen so low as to be literally ‘too cheap to metre.’ Those who like to metre everything on the cash scale are incredibly upset about Project Gutenberg.

“Project Gutenberg is the first example of a paradigm shift from ‘limited distribution’ to ‘unlimited distribution’, now touted as ‘the information age’. However, you should be aware that this is the fourth such information age. Each such phase has been stifled by making it illegal to use new technologies to copy texts. In 1710, the Statute of Anne copyright made it illegal for any but members of the ancient Stationers’ Guild to use a Gutenberg press. Then, in 1909, the United States doubled the term of all copyrights to eliminate ‘reprint houses’ who were using the new steam and electric powered presses to compete with the old-boy publishing network.

“The third information age came in 1976 when the United States increased the copyright term to 75 years and eliminated the requirement to file copyright renewals, to stifle changes brought on by Xerox machines. In 1998, the United States extended the copyright term yet again, to 95 years, to eliminate publication via the Internet.”

At the huge archives maintained by the Project Gutenberg, one will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favourites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others. These books are chosen by the PG volunteers. Simply, a volunteer decides that a certain book should be in the archives, obtains the book and does the work necessary to turn it into an e-text.

Hart says: “What allowed me to think of this particular use for computers so long before anyone else did is the same thing that allows every other inventor to create their inventions: being at the right place, at the right time, with the right background. As Lermontov said in The red shoes: ‘Not even the greatest magician in the world can pull a rabbit out of a hat if there isn’t already a rabbit in it.’... You have to remember that the Internet had just gone transcontinental and this was one of the very first computers on it. Somehow I had envisioned the Net in my mind very much as it would become 30 years later.”

Between 1971 and 1993 PG produced 100 e-texts. And then, in less than nine years, an additional few thousands. Hart explains how: “People rarely understand the power of doubling something ever so often. In 1991, we were doing one e-book per month. This was totally revolutionary at the time. People kept predicting that we couldn’t continue, but we were planning on doubling production every year, which we did for most years. We are now adding 200 e-texts a month.... So far we have English, Latin, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Welsh, Portuguese, Old Dutch, Bulgarian, Dutch/ Flemish, Greek, Hebrew. We have texts in Old French, Polish, Russian, Romanian, and Farsi in progress.”

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)