British Library Encloses the Public Domain

There's considerable excitement about an announcement from the British Library and Google detailing a wonderful gift to the world:

The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.

Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk) and the British Library’s website (www.bl.uk). Google will cover all digitisation costs.

Isn't that just swell? Vast quantities of fascinating books in the public domain are being made "available to all", as the press release trumpets:

This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

Freely available, too... But, er, exactly *how* freely available?

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.

Fab, and....?

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause).

In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without.

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The Library as Knowledge Commons

When the going gets tough, the tough...go to the library:

Fewer people bought books, CD’s, and DVD’s in 2008 than in the year before. The number of moviegoers and concertgoers shrank last year, too, though rising ticket prices in both cases offset declining sales. Theater attendance, overall, is also down.

We usually hear about these declines in isolation. But taken together, they seem to suggest that cultural pursuits across the board are on the decline. Indeed, if nobody seems to be out buying books, movies, and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead?

Apparently: going to the library. The Boston Globe reports that public libraries around the country are posting double-digit percentage increases in circulation and new library-card application

This highlights the *increased* importance of intellectual commons like libraries during times of financial hardship, when people can't afford to own so much stuff. It also suggests why we need support libraries through thick and thin.

Why We Need a Knowledge Commons

Here's a neat device:

With Exbiblio, you have seamless, direct access to digital information and the world of the Internet. Imagine once again that you are reading your newspaper, but instead of tearing out an ad or article, writing a reminder or recording a voice message, you use your portable, hand-held scanner to capture just a snippet from the article or ad, swiping it across the text as if using a highlighter.

When you connect your Exbiblio scanner to the digital world -- for example, by wirelessly connecting to the "smart" phone or PDA you are carrying -- the Exbiblio solution instantly searches for the information you have captured, and digital versions of the paper document are found and stored.

Sounds cool - but it depends critically on having free access to that cloud of information. In other words, it depends on the existence of a readily accessible knowledge commons that it can draw upon seamlessly. If such devices had to pay for every snippet they pull down, the knock-on cost and infrastructural complexity required to keep track of who is demanding their shilling will kill it. (Via Open Access News.)

Yoga, Ayurveda and Open Source

Knopper's comments, noted below, were made during a talk at the Open Source conference, LinuxAsia 2007, in New Delhi, where Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Open Source Affairs at RedHat, drew comparisons between open source and India's rich cultural heritage:

"Yoga and Ayurveda, which are perhaps the largest knowledge pools, have traditionally been 'open source'," he said, "and yet it is a US$30 billion industry in the US alone. Open source is not opposed to commercial gains, it is opposed to ownership and limiting of knowledge and resources."

DRMnation - Do Something!

It's easy to feel impotent in the face of the mega-corporations' assault on the commons of ideas. They are so big, rich and powerful and you are, well, just you. But there are things we can all do - 30 things to be precise, as this amazing checklist explains. Although its resources are aimed at the UK, its basic idea - that there are a lots of people we can contact to influence - is valid everywhere. Start your wordprocessors....

Update: And if you're looking for more to do, try this impressive list at DefectiveByDesign.

Getting to Know the Knowledge Commons

The Knowledge Commons is

a distributed network architecture that enables the culturing of knowledge through construction, distribution, and recombination.

This model provides:

* collaborative knowledge creation
* knowledge correlation through metadata
* identity and authentication brokering
* peer-based content distribution and retrieval
* automated commons management

Er, yes? Sounds interesting, but could we have some more details, please?