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