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Interview: The second Gutenberg - II

By SAM VAKNIN, UPI Senior Business Correspondent   |   May 28, 2002 at 1:59 PM

SKOPJE, Macedonia, May 28 (UPI) -- Michael S. Hart is the founder of a now legendary project that publishes texts on the Internet for which the copyright has expired.

The ethos of the early Internet owes a lot to Hart, who as the father of e-publishing and e-books, created the first online library, Project Gutenberg.

A professor of electronic text at Benedictine University in Illinois, 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.

Part 1 of this two-part interview ran Monday.

Hart said, "I want to tell you the story of when I first realized that Project Gutenberg was going to work. It was about 10 years before we published our 2,000th e-text. We had only about a dozen e-books online. At the beginning of 1989 there were only 80,000 host computers in the entire Internet -- though by October that year the number had doubled.

"I was on the phone one day, with the executive director of Common Knowledge, a project to put the Library of Congress catalogs into public domain records. During the conversation, there was this huge noise.

"The woman was back in a minute, and laughing her head off, she told me her son had been playing around with her computer, and found this copy of Project Gutenberg's "Alice in Wonderland" and had started to read it. He mentioned this at school, and a few of the kids followed him home to see it. The next day even more kids followed. Eventually, the number of kids grew so great that they were hanging off this huge oak chair.

"Eventually this oak chair had so many kids all over it, reading "Alice in Wonderland", that it literally separated into all its parts and kids went tumbling in all directions. At that very moment, in 1989, I realized that e-books were going to succeed, no matter what any of a number of adults thought. To the next generation, this will be how they remember "Alice in Wonderland," just as my memory of it was a golden inscribed red leather edition my family used to read from together.

"Four years later, in 1993, there were still under 100 Project Gutenberg e-books. A neighbor dropped by to talk to me one day and in the course of the conversation mentioned he had read the Project Gutenberg "Alice in Wonderland." I had no idea his interests even included computers. He had found a few errors. I hurried home to correct them and to put the new edition online.

"At first I was in happy shock just because I could improve our edition, but then it occurred to me that perhaps the more important aspect was that someone I knew had downloaded Alice all on his own, then read the entire book from "cover to cover" on his computer.

"There are lots of stories like this: professors who tell me their students will not read paper textbooks (and) Texas preparing for all textbooks to be e-books."

Q. Project Gutenberg is a prime example of two phenomena characteristic to the early Internet: collaborative efforts and volunteering. With the crass commercialization of the Net -- will people continue to volunteer and collaborate -- or will corporate, brick and mortar, behemoths take over?

A. Well, the commercialization of the Web started in 1994, and that didn't wipe us out. It took us 30 years to do our first 5,000 e-books, and I'll bet you a pizza that it will only take 30 months to do our second 5,000! Then we will write up a schedule for 1,000,000!

Q. In other words: Project Gutenberg is the reification of the spirit of the Internet.

A. Definitely. So was "Ask Dr. Internet", another of my personas.

Q. Should the Internet change dramatically, what will happen to Project Gutenberg? Will you ever consider going commercial, for instance? If not, how do you plan to adapt?

A. Why should we go commercial? That just invites a downfall if the money goes away. Which they would love to happen -- and would probably encourage it. It's hard to kill off something that doesn't have a physical plant or a budget and cannot be bought. We will adapt by doing the entire public domain, including graphics, music, movies, sculpture, paintings, photographs, etc.

Q. Project Gutenberg makes obscure and inaccessible texts as well as seminal works easily and globally available. Doesn't this lead to an embarrassment of riches or to confusion? In other words: all Project Gutenberg e-texts are "equal". It is a "democratic" system. There is no "text rating", historical context, peer review, quality control or censorship.

A. This is because I am not a very bossy boss. I encourage our volunteers to choose their own favorites, not just what I think they should do. However, I am sure we will get all the warhorses done.

Q. The e-texts posted on Project Gutenberg are copyright free or with permission from their authors and publishers. How do you cope with the inordinately extended copyright period in the United States?

A. I just finished up years of working on an amicus brief for the Supreme Court in the hope of overturning the latest copyright extensions. As for coping, you just do the best you can with the cards you are dealt.

Q. What are the effects of such legislation on public literacy?

A. The United States used to say we would send aid to the entire world, in the form of food, clothing, medical supplies, as much as we could afford. But now that literacy can be disseminated at no expense, we refuse to do it by pretty much stifling the public domain.

Q. Project Gutenberg has a mirror site in Australia where copyright law is less stringent.

A. Actually, they are a totally separate organization, using our name with permission, just as does the Gutenberg Projekt-DE in Germany.

Q. Are such "back doors" the solution? What about the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)?

A. I am so a-political that you could call me anti-political. I would prefer a copyright of 10 years or so. Only the biggest of the best sellers might make 10 percent more after 10 years, and they don't need it. Do we really want laws that support only the biggest and richest? I love "The Bridges of Madison County", but I don't think 95 years, or even 75 years, or even 56 years of corporations, family and other heirs should be supported by it. It then becomes the "Duchy of Madison County" and we are stuck with generations of "Dukes of Madison County."

What we will end up with under these copyright laws is a "landed gentry of the information age" who just keep inheriting. Copyright should expire soon enough that the authors, if they want to keep getting paid, have to come back to work again. After all, there is no other job in the world in which one piece of work can keep paying off for 95 years.

By the way, do you realize that Ted Turner made millions, probably hundreds of millions, from the copyright extension of just "Gone With The Wind", not counting the hundreds of other movies he owns, all from one vote of Congress. Congress should not be allowed to write laws that create windfall profits for 1 percent of the population and take away a million books from all the rest.

Q. What does Project Gutenberg intend to do about the legislative asymmetry between content producers and creators -- and content consumers? Lobby Congress? Testify? Protest? Organize petitions? Place "Gone with the Wind" on the Internet and wait for a show trial?

A. Project Gutenberg Australia already has done "Gone With The Wind," as their 50th e-book -- that's good enough for me at the moment. Eldred vs. Ashcroft was originally drafted as Hart vs. Reno, but the lawyers, Lessig and Co., wouldn't include one word of mine in the case, so I fired them.

Q. Gutenberg texts are sometimes used as freebies within a commercial (monolithic, Walnut Creek) or semi-commercial product (such as the Public Domain Reader). Is this acceptable? Why don't you charge them a license fee?

A. Walnut Creek Project Gutenberg CD's weren't free and they sent us nice donations. The commercial outfits have to pay for a license, the non-commercial ones usually don't. Each case is separately decided. While we don't do any ads on our sites, we don't insist that others don't.

Q. Technology is often considered the antonym of "culture". TV, for instance, is berated for its vulgar, low-brow, programming. Hollywood is often chastized for its indulgence in gratuitous violence and sex.

A. No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of their audience. As long as these are "commercial applications" that's what you will get. What else could you possibly expect? These are all examples of "capitalism gone awry". By the way, I'm not anti-capitalism, I really am an Ayn Rand freak, figure that out -- hee hee! I am doing Project Gutenberg for the most selfish of reasons -- because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it.

Q. E-books are equated with low-quality vanity publishing. Yet, Project Gutenberg seems to embody the conviction that technology can do wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy, civil society and so on.

A. E-books do wonders for the dissemination of culture, literacy, democracy, civil society and so on. You do realize that the Declaration of Independence is/was the first manmade item in all of history that everyone can have, in as many copies as they want. Do you realize that a 5 gigabyte section of a hard drive can hold a million copies of that file, uncompressed? Terabyte drive systems are already available for only around $2,500. Ten years from now 5-terabyte hard disk partitions will be able to hold a billion copies.

Q. Are you a romantic believer in the power of technology to bring progress?

A. Well, I'm certainly an incurable romantic, and I believe that technology can bring progress, but I don't know if they are, or have to be, related.

Q. And do you see any dangers in e-books and freely available e-texts (hate speech for example)?

A. Once you start censoring, you are playing with Pandora's Box. Just look at what they are doing with Little Black Sambo, who wasn't even black, and with Uncle Remus, who was? This is awful. "Song of the South" was required viewing when I was in school and now I can't even show this generation what we were required to study when I was a kid. 1984 really did arrive.

Q. In some ways, you "compete" directly with other bastions of education -- libraries and universities. How do you get along? What about other repositories of knowledge such as Project Bartleby? Governments?

A. Actually, we cooperate with them, not compete with them. We make all our files available to them and encourage them to make the texts available to everyone. Some of them view this as competition, but we don't. Some prefer to control distribution to be a gate that they can open and close at will. We prefer the doors always to be open. Have you ever considered why, with the hundred millions of dollars granted to found e-libraries at the major universities some 10 years ago, and undoubtedly hundreds of millions more donated since then, why you are doing an interview with someone sitting at a basement, running computer hardware and software that is 10 and 20 years old? If any college, or company, much less university, city, county, state or country was willing to do this, you would have never heard of me.

Q. What has been the personal cost? In retrospect: Are you happy with it? Would you have done it again?

A. I can't think of anything more rewarding to do as a career than Project Gutenberg. It is something that will reach more people than any other project in all of history. It is as powerful as "the bomb," but everyone can benefit from it. And it doesn't make a decent weapon. It doesn't cost anyone anything and it is the very first, though obviously primitive, example of The neo-Industrial Revolution, when everyone can have everything -- though they are sure to pass a law against it.

I said this in 1971, in the very first week of Project Gutenberg, that by the end of my lifetime you would be able to carry every word in the Library of Congress in one hand -- but they will pass a law against it. I realized they would never let us have that much access to so much information. I never heard that they passed the copyright extension five years later. It was pretty much a secret, just as is the current one, unless the Supreme Court strikes it down. Only then will it make the news. Congress passed that copyright law together with impeachment proceedings of President Clinton, just to make sure it never made the news.

As far as the cost, the happiness, the frustration -- I am a natural-born workaholic and idealist, so I overcome the technical frustrations. It's the social frustrations that are the hardest to deal with, the people who want permanent copyright, even though the extensions are already bringing about "The Landed Gentry of the Information Age."

Q. Any thought about the future?

A. Precedents set by the Sonny Bono copyright law could well have an enormous unpredicted effect on computer applications of the future. One such application is the "printing" of solid three dimensional objects, often referred to as rapid prototyping. These printers have been with us since the 1980s and now are in a price range of the 5-megabyte hard drives on the first computer to house Project Gutenberg in 1971. If you count the inflation factor, they obviously are much more affordable.

In addition to cost reductions, these 3-D printers now can print on a variety of materials. The list of printable substances should expand over the years until we can eventually print out actual working items, rather than the models we print out today. Given that very inexpensive printers today can print in millions of colors, and that color computer printers were pretty much non-existent 30 years ago, we should at least consider the possibility that printers 30 years from now might be able to "print" on an extremely wide variety of materials, and that some day we will be able to "print out" a car and drive it away. This copyright law covers 95 years. Let's look back to 95 years and see the "copyright" to what things we may want to print out would have just now expired:

1. The Wright-Brothers' airplane and blueprints.

2. A dozen brands of early automobiles.

3. Everything Edison invented until he was nearly 60.

Obviously there are many more.

The point here is that under current intellectual property law, it would be difficult to print out anything invented today that reached the market in two years -- until 2100, a time when these items would no longer have any use. When the Star Trek replicators become a reality, will it be illegal to actually use them? Will all food items be genetically manipulated organisms so that it will be impossible to find natural foods that could be copied?

When I grew up in Washington state, there were plenty of wild blackberries, raspberries, apple trees, pear trees, plum trees, grapes. I never even considered buying any of these at a store. But today there has been a serious effort to discourage free food supplies, and not only in Washington, but also in most other states.

Last night at dinner, one of our volunteers remarked that he expected that by the end of his lifetime he might be eating a dinner of replicated food. I pointed out that by that time -- "they" would make it very difficult to find any kind of food not protected against replication by intellectual property laws and that that was one of the major reasons for extending copyright, so that when it would be possible for everyone to be well-read and well-fed, they will have made it illegal to do so. The trend is that everything should cost something. In some places there are even machines that dispense a breath of fresh air for a price.

Do we really want to create a civilization in which everything has a price, when there are machines that could copy anything?


Comments to: svaknin@upi.com

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