A Brief History of the Internet by Maxwell Fuller (good non fiction books to read TXT) 📕

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 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 insure 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;