NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] The Joy of Libraries, a Fireman's Flame, and the Google Books Settlement
The Joy of Libraries, a Fireman's Flame, and the Google Books Settlement
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000611.html
"Behind each of these books, there's a man."
- Montag (Oskar Werner) - "Fahrenheit 451" (1966)
Greetings. Enough words have been written and spoken about the
proposed Google Books settlement to -- well, not fill a library, but
certainly enough to overflow a bunch of bookshelves at the very least.
Most of this discussion has understandably concentrated on various
technical, political, privacy, competitive, and other of the myriad,
detailed complexities in play within this contentious arena.
But for a moment, I'd like to back away from the trees and look more
broadly at the forest, to consider why the bringing into the light of
so many out-of-print and orphan works, as envisioned by the
settlement, is so important.
I hope you'll forgive me if I wax a bit philosophically down memory
lane.
When I was at UCLA many years ago, I spent a great deal of my free
time (when I wasn't hacking Unix system code down in Boelter Hall's
basement ARPANET lab) in the various libraries scattered around
campus.
Directly upstairs a number of floors from the lab was the Engineering
library, and I approached it rather systematically, working my way
from first editions onward through the small in size (but dense in
content) Bell System Technical Journal and similar light reading.
But the real serendipity was in the other libraries -- the Powell
library for one. Directly across the Quad from celebrated Royce Hall,
Powell contained a maze of narrow stacks packed with seemingly endless
rows of books on every conceivable topic. It was in that very library
that a young Ray Bradbury, hammering away at a pay-by-the hour manual
typewriter, wrote the script for his classic novel "Fahrenheit 451."
Across campus was the much more modern and utilitarian "Research
Library," with its large room full of index cards still a primary
lookup technology at that time.
The Research Library, though far more modernistic than Powell, still
had its own charms. Avoiding the busy main elevators, I'd ride
upstairs in the almost totally deserted brushed aluminum-door rear
lifts, with their funky "way too rapid" acceleration and deceleration
curves approximating a cheap thrill ride at every visit.
Once upstairs, I'd find some quiet table in a back corner to designate
as home base, and I'd start to wander the massive stacks.
It didn't matter what the topics might be. I slowly walked the aisles
and pulled books as randomly as I could until I had a good pile, then
brought them back to my table.
I won't claim to have completely read all books that I selected, but I
tried to give them each a good shot at least. I plowed through new
books, somewhat old books, and remarkably old books, as the white
noise of the air conditioning vents in the ceiling provided a
comforting acoustic force field from the outside world.
Books on philosophy. Books on sociology. A detailed survey of UK
telephone switching systems as implemented by the Royal Post Office,
circa 1948. Timothy Leary's expansive expositions, where he
speculated on direct electrical brain stimulation as a mind expansion
technique. Houdini's steel restraint escape techniques (ya' never
know when those might come in handy). Book and books, and more books
still.
I felt like Burgess Meredith's character in the original "Twilight
Zone" episode "Time Enough at Last" -- when he stumbled onto a
treasure trove of library books in a post-apocalyptic bombed-out city.
More books than I could ever read in a thousand lifetimes.
But eventually I wasn't at UCLA any more, and getting back to those
libraries, especially given the realities of L.A. distances and
traffic, became increasingly problematic.
A realization for me early on in my library wandering days was that so
many wonderful books were available to so relatively few people. And
as Bradbury's Montag said in his chauvinistic way, there are human
beings behind every book in those libraries -- authors whose writing
efforts are wasted if their books for most intents and purposes can't
be found, can't be seen, and so can't be read for learning, for
enjoyment, or just to pass some quiet hours in contemplation of
literature.
This is especially true of out-of-print and orphan works, which in
many cases are as effectively inaccessible as if they didn't exist at
all, their authors' thoughts and sweat buried with them.
That so many of these books and other works have suffered this fate as
a byproduct of our existing copyright and publishing paradigms is more
than a loss, more than a tragedy really -- it borders on the criminal,
especially when technology and resources are now available to lift
these works back into the sunlight of wide availability.
For so many years these books have been like unwanted stepchildren,
largely ignored as unprofitable or not worth the effort to track down
rights holders, and so they have remained lost in the gloom as far as
most potential readers have been concerned.
So while I was initially skeptical of some rights-related reasoning
underpinning the earliest Google Book Search efforts, I consider the
proposed settlement to be a positive breakthrough that I heralded when
it was first announced and that I -- even granting its various
faults -- still strongly support.
I have previously written of some possible alterations to the
settlement that might make it more palatable to various detractors
( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000610.html ).
But ultimately, I want all possible books -- like those that I loved
at UCLA -- to be available to the world, and I consider the Google
Books settlement, with its various opt-out provisions and other
controls, to be a reasonable means to accomplish this goal.
The financial and technical resources necessary for such a task are
formidable. That Google would want to ultimately make a profit on
such a venture is not only acceptable, but completely appropriate as
well.
And while we can reasonably argue about the settlement's substantive
details, my sense is that there are some major forces in the
anti-settlement camp whose primary focus and interest in this case has
nothing whatever to do with the availability of books, and very much
to do with the playing out of business-related and other animosities
toward Google itself, overall public interests be damned.
In "Fahrenheit 451," a society banned and burned books to keep
them away from the population. But in our own society, books that are
essentially unavailable are almost as effectively nullified, to the
detriment of the global community at large -- and you don't even need
to use kerosene and matches.
Let's put out the fires. Please support the Google Books settlement.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition
for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein