Liberate and disseminate
Free information freely available is the rallying cry of Erik Ringmar, who wants others to join in putting restricted documents on the web
The The Internet Archive is an amazing place. Most famous for maintaining the net's largest repository of old web pages - some 2 petabytes of data - it also collects many other kinds of material: old movies, radio and television shows, books. The Americans have put entire libraries online, one scanned volume after the other. It's all for free and you don't need any particular credentials to get access. A search for "China" provides 1,628 titles (mainly 19th-century books); a search for "Tocqueville" gives you 67 hits (lots of rare secondary sources). Although the past may be a foreign country, the friendly border guards at the Internet Archive hand out free visas to all travellers.
A neat feature of the site is that it allows uploads. As a result, you can treat the Internet Archive like an academic version of YouTube, a place where you can share material and promote your work. Remember your book on the transformation of Spanish political parties in the 1990s? The one that didn't sell that well? Why not deposit it online so that someone may actually read it? And why not be generous to fellow scholars and upload your source material once you've finished your research? Scholarship is all about collaboration, after all. And think of colleagues in less well-resourced locations who don't have easy access to fancy research libraries.
Not uncharacteristically, British research institutions are far behind the Americans when it comes to public online access to material. The contents of Hansard, which publishes the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament, are available online only from 1988. If you want access to older debates, bizarrely you have to visit a website at the University of Florida. Meanwhile American Congressional records dating back to 1774 are, naturally, available for easy browsing at the Library of Congress.
However, other British parliamentary papers are available online. All reports produced by the House of Commons have, for example, been scanned by a company called ProQuest. Its site is great - pages are searchable backwards and forwards. The only problem is that access is restricted and comes with a charge. Each downloaded parliamentary report bears a little inscription: "Copyright © 2006, ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved."
Think about this for a second. Here is a company that lays exclusive claim to material produced by the elected representatives of the people. A company whose business idea it is to restrict access to our common heritage. This is upsetting first of all because it goes against the rights of citizens in a democracy to have the documents produced by their parliament freely available. Second, ProQuest is claiming copyright to material whose copyright has long expired. And finally it makes academic research far more difficult. Unless you belong to a university that's prepared to pay for the stuff, you won't get to read it.
So, I've taken it upon myself to start an organisation called MLOP, the "Movement for the Liberation of Old Papers". What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens. Yes, it does take a bit of time, but it's a very worthy cause (and I have a hardworking research assistant to help me).
I feel strongly about this, and I'm prepared to live with the legal consequences of my actions. This, after all, is the new frontier of civil rights - the right of access to information. How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? I'd go to prison for the old parliamentary papers if I had to. Ever after I would proudly brag about having liberated an old House of Commons report from the clutches of market capitalism.
Why not join me in my revolution? It's easy and fun. If you have a university affiliation, you have access to all kinds of restricted material that easily can be redirected to an open-access website. Do it! If you have a scanner, you can even raid your university library and share the loot with the rest of us. Serve the common good and liberate an old document today!
Postscript:
Erik Ringmar is professor of social and cultural studies at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. His books are available at the Internet Archive.
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Readers' comments (11)
15 Apr 2008 12:51pm
More Power To You!
- though if everyone follows up on your invitation to download everything, there's going to be one very crowded data-site. I hope the indexing is good.
best of luck, Ted
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15 Apr 2008 4:29pm
My advice: automate the procedure with some kind of script or app. Make the script/app open source and release it so others can help you out.
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15 Apr 2008 7:14pm
Thank you for helping build the Internet Archive. Where I do not report to understand copyright law (boy is it confusing), it is certainly true that we at the Internet Archive are trying to get public domain materials out to a very broad public is our aim.
We are now scanning lots of PD books from great libraries-- please think about what would be useful to you and your teaching collegues as it pretty easy to scan physical materials at this point.
onward.
-brewster
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15 Apr 2008 8:36pm
"How else can corruption be stopped and falsehoods exposed? How else can people in power be held accountable? "
This argument is better suited to FOI than to the free release of digital versions of historical printed sources.
"I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive"
By doing so you are breaching their Terms and Conditions since you do not hold the rights to the material in its digital form.
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15 Apr 2008 9:44pm
But did you actually try to use this database, sir?
It's not so easy, I'm afraid.....
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16 Apr 2008 3:41am
As a relatively young American it can be easy for me to assume that the world of the Internet is as free as one might imagine it should be, however this is not always the case. I'm glad that one such as yourself is expanding that ideal to include our distant past and heritage.
This endeavor is truly worth the risk in my estimation! Good Luck, and happy de-copyrighting!
~Ian
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16 Apr 2008 5:00am
Erik, I'm also a professor, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I'm totally in favor of open source publication of materials if the author wants them to be generally available. My lecture notes are available to anyone who wants them.
Most of my income, though, comes from writing fiction, and that income is derived from a percentage of the cover price when a person thinks my book is worth buying. You may be "prepared to live with the legal consequences of your actions," but that gives me no comfort when someone reads my work for free.
The simple-minded notion that you can white-out the copyright of a stolen document and therefore make it legally available to anyone is indefensible. You really should restrict your activism to documents that ought to be public property.
You are breaking my rice bowl and pretending to benefit me. I hope you have read modern history closely enough to appreciate the company you are keeping.
Joe Haldeman
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16 Apr 2008 8:28am
Don't rely on the Internet Archive to keep these things available. They willingly remove items from access at the request of anyone who claims to have the rights.
And it's a bit naive to broadcast the fact that you're using your institutional access to do this, when it is quite possible (with Taiwan being a bureaucracy-friendly type of a place) that so-called "rights holders" could pressure your institution to restrict your access, leading you to have to find a new job and visa sponsor.
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18 Apr 2008 12:48pm
ProQuest undertook the expense of scanning the 19th and 20th century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers to make them available through its online publications. Most (but not all) of these Parliamentary Papers are indeed in the public domain and are therefore open to anyone who so wishes to undertake the same project. By omitting the word “online” when quoting ProQuest’s copyright notice on the products, Professor Ringmar misapprehends it as a claim to the underlying work. While the historical content is in the public domain, ProQuest’s electronic representation of it is not. Just as a modern publisher of any older work, e.g. Shakespeare’s plays, includes a notice that the product the reader is viewing is proprietary, so does ProQuest. I appreciate the opportunity to clear up any confusion that may have existed on this point.
ProQuest was able to invest in bringing these papers online only with a business model of providing access for a fee. Until public funds are available to digitize and host all important records, commercial publishers continue to play a vital role in putting them into the hands of researchers. Because of our efforts, materials that had previously been available at only one location, or languished in hard-to-share formats, are now accessible to scholars and researchers in every corner of the globe twenty-four hours a day. Widespread hacking and intellectual property nullification would end private investment in digitizing our history, and companies hosting already-digitized resources would lose the ability to continue. The readers of THE would not mount an assault to “liberate” the books locked away in libraries because they know that those collections are vital to education. Digitization by commercial publishers also supports the dissemination of knowledge, so calls to steal their resources should similarly be disregarded.
ProQuest will continue to collaborate with libraries and researchers to ensure that the most important resources are being selected and that they are being preserved and presented in ways that will benefit the community the most.
Dan Burnstone
Cambridge, England
Publishing Director for Chadwyck-Healey, ProQuest
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21 Apr 2008 11:07pm
Dan Burnstone's response does not, in my view, clarify the issue, but adds further confusion. It seems to me that Chadwick-Healey could validly claim rights in the database that they have created of the Parliamentary Papers. However, I am not clear on what basis they can claim a right to `the electronic representation' of individual documents.
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