How Much Would It Cost To Store All US Phone Calls Made In A Year?

An early criticism of Snowden's leak about NSA spying activity was that the $20 million annual cost for PRISM -- whatever that turns out to be -- was simply too low to be credible. One person who knows more about storage costs than practically anyone -- well, outside the NSA, at least -- is Brewster Kahle, who set up the Internet Archive, essentially a backup for the entire Web plus a wonderfully rich store of many other materials. He's carried out a fascinating back-of-the envelope calculation of how much it would cost annually to record every phone call made in the US and store it in the cloud: 

On Techdirt.

Why Digital Texts Need A New Library Of Alexandria -- With Physical Books

Amidst the growing enthusiasm for digital texts -- ebooks and scans of illustrated books -- it's easy to overlook some important drawbacks. First, that you don't really own ebooks, as various unhappy experiences with Amazon's Kindle have brought home. Secondly, that a scan of an illustrated book is only as good as the scanning technology that is available when it is made: there's no way to upgrade a scan to higher quality images without rescanning the whole thing. 

On Techdirt.

Open Content Alliance - Good, but not New....

Nice story in the New York Times about libraries choosing to go with the Open Content Alliance rather than that nice Mr. Google or Mr. Microsoft:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

That's all jolly well and good, but what I can't understand is that the blogosphere is going nuts about this "new" initiative:

The Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history, has created a new project: the Open Content Alliance.

Well, no, not as such:

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.

So founded in 2005; and as its press archive shows, it's hardly been dormant since then....

Update: More details from Da Man himself, Brewster Kahle, here.

Chalk One Up for Larry & Co.

Nice little victory here for Larry Lessig and friends in their fight to defend the shrinking public domain in the US:

The 10th Circuit decided our appeal in Golan v. Gonzales today. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that the "traditional contours of copyright protection" described in Eldred as the trigger for First Amendment review extend beyond the two "traditional First Amendment safeguards" mentioned by the Court in that case. It thus remanded the case to the District Court to evaluate section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“URAA”) under the First Amendment, which removed material from the public domain.

This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress's change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a "traditional contour of copyright protection." Under the 10th Circuit's rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.

Pebble on the cairn. Good luck with the next one.

The Open Library Opens Its Doors

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

Fine words, but turning them into reality is a monstrous undertaking. Not because any of the required technologies are that difficult to develop or implement, but simply because the current hypertrophied copyright system makes it impossible.

At best, the Open Library will provide us with a bunch of public domain texts like Project Gutenberg, but prettified, plus what looks like a wikified catalogue with tantalising info about all the other books we can't read online.

That's all great to have, and kudos is due to all those behind the project, but is but a pale imitation of what we could - should - have if copyright did its job of encouraging new creation, and got out of the way of such laudable projects.

Remembrance of Sims Past

There's a fascinating post over on 3pointD.com, which exhumes some screenshots of sims as they were three years ago, and contrasts them with their present form. It's impressive to see how far Second Life has come in that time - and exciting to consider how far it might go in the next three years.

But seeing these old sims made me wonder whether we are in danger of losing our virtual past, since these screenshots are the exception, rather than the rule. When the history of virtual worlds comes to be written, vital data about how things looked in those days - nowadays, too - will have gone for ever.

Clearly, what we need is a kind of Internet Archive for virtual worlds that preserves not just the screenshots, but maybe the actual data files for "historic" and representative sims - a Virtual World Archive. Brewster Kahle, are you listening?

Have Pity on the Orphans

Oh dear, Larry's still having no luck rolling back US copyright law:

In a move that's a blow to the U.S. movement to reform copyright law, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, in his lawsuit to allow orphaned works into the public domain.

Rejecting the argument of Larry Lessig, the court decided the case was too close to Lessig's Eldred copyright suit of 2002, and that's settled business

Half the Web 2.0 Story

Here's a clever idea: put together a list of the top 1000 or so Web 2.0 sites, ordered by traffic rank. What's included?

For our purposes, my definition is that most of these companies are, as the wikipedia says, sites that "let people collaborate and share information online in a new way." So, Google doesn't make the cut, because most of their traffic comes to their search engine. eBay is an "old" company, but the many-to-many nature of the site means that they do.

Sounds reasonable.

But what about the ranking the site uses? Well, that's according to Alexa traffic rank. Now, I'm a huge fan of Alexa, and even more of Mr. Alexa, Brewster Kahle.

But.

There's a big problem with Alexa's figures, in that they draw on the Alexa Toolbar, and the toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer (Alexa offers some alternatives for Firefox users, but they are not real substitutes). This means that the rankings are seriously skewed towards what the more conservative part of the online world does - precisely the last people you would ask about Web 2.0.

Only half the Web 2.0 story, then, but I suppose it's a start.