A virtual library on the Web
Sophie Boukhari, UNESCO Courier journalist
Classics of world literature are now available for free on the Internet.
«‘In five years’ time, Mickey Mouse was to
enter the public domain and Disney would have lost the ability to control duplication
of Mickey Mouse films. The same with the film industry. Ted Turner is another big
winner. He’s just purchased the Metro Goldwyn Mayer archive, which now has a 20-year
additional life for him.’
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Untold riches await
anyone who can tap into the public libraries now availableon the Internet. But stiffening
copyright law could rein in the trend
Publisher Eric Eldred belongs
to a breed of diehards who see the World Wide Web as a way to fulfill ideals rather
than make money. “Very much like Unesco, we feel a responsibility to our public–all
human beings on the earth–to preserve our culture of books and art and make it available
to as many as we can,” he says. “We are now blessed with a great deal of free computer
power and we would like to turn this to good use.”
Since 1995, Eldred, the American founder of Eldritch Press, has published on the
Web great classics of literature whose copyright has expired and which have therefore
fallen into the public domain. He wants to build up a virtual library for university
literature students and high-school pupils like his triplet daughters.
From Victor Hugo
to the Kama Sutra
Eldred is not the only person
fighting to make culture more accessible and widespread in cyberspace than in the
“real” world. In the industrialized countries, such as the United States, plenty
of moves are afoot to freshen up the tired old image of the public library. In recent
years, millions of pages of the works of the greatest writers, historians, poets
and philosophers have been scanned1 onto the Internet or, in some cases, simply
re-typed and put online.
So far, such digitalized material consists mainly of Anglo-Saxon classics or products
of Western culture translated into English. For example, you can download from the
Web into your computer the writings of Aristotle, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo,
and a handful of Arab, Persian and Chinese authors, plus the Kama Sutra. You don’t
need to go hunting for a book that you can, in this way, keep, print out, annotate
and use as you wish or forward to your friends.
These freely-available virtual libraries have been set up by determined individuals,
NGOs, universities, governments and international organizations. The Gutenberg Project
and The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) are the pioneers (see page 45).
On a bigger scale, national libraries have begun the monumental task of digitalizing
all the hundreds of thousands of documents and pictures they possess.
The first to take the plunge are the French National Library (BNF) and the U.S. Library
of Congress, says Sonia Zillhardt of the BNF. “Others have begun working on the project
in the past three years but some are still at an experimental stage. Most don’t have
enough money to do it.” Scanning a page costs between one and four dollars, so millions
are needed to process whole collections. But the hardest part is overcoming the conservatism
of some cultural officials who have to be dragged into cyberspace.
“Every country should provide easy access to documents in the public domain,” says
Zillhardt. “The policies of different states must converge in the new environment
of the world information society.” This is the aim of the Bibliotheca Universalis
(BU) project which was launched in 1995 by the G7 group of the world’s seven richest
countries, joined last year by Russia, and now links 13 countries in all. “They have
to work out between them who is digitalizing what, as well as establish shared communication
norms,” says Zillhardt.
But there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. Each national programme goes at its own
speed, with its own priorities (such as U.S. history in Washington or material about
the great Portuguese explorers in Lisbon) and its own technical norms. On top of
that, current computer programmes do not allow people to switch from a document in
Japanese or Arabic to one in the Latin alphabet.
By the end of the year, everyone involved in the BU project should have pledged to
put together an initial shared collection of works on the theme of exchanges between
different peoples. But how many years will it be before Japanese researchers can
make a request in their own language and come up with documents from all the associated
libraries? And how much longer than that will it be before a student in Burkina Faso
can make use of such a tool?
At first sight, virtual libraries seem like a godsend for people in poor countries,
giving them access to the world’s collective memory, which is concentrated in the
rich countries. They just need a computer, an Internet connection and some money.
“Web access is still very much a dream in many developing countries and the cost
of international phone connections there is prohibitive,” says Philippe Quéau,
UNESCO’s
director of information and computing. “Fetching material off the Web takes time
and is expensive–several dollars an hour in Africa, for example.”
Does this mean online culture is beyond the reach of poor countries? No, but they
have to develop two kinds of services. First, the local creation of “mirror” sites2
of online libraries, which are accessible for the cost of a local phone call. And
then encouraging the distribution of works in the form of CD-Roms, which cost less
than a dollar to copy. UNESCO has launched a collection called Publica and
will soon put out a CD-Rom of the great Arabic classics. But it is having a hard
job bringing out a similar one on French-language literature.
“For two years I’ve been up against the inertia of French officialdom which doesn’t
want to get into a fight with the publishers, even though the works I want to put
on CD-Rom have come into the public domain,” says Quéau, who deplores the
rampant privatization of the public domain for profit, “either by extending the life
of a copyright or by making use of technology.”
Privatization
of the public domain
Both these types of privatization
are in the works. Microsoft’s new Windows 2000 programme will make it easier to read
texts on the screen, a sign that “e-books” could soon be on sale in the bookstores.
We could download and read hundreds of works on such small book-sized computers.
But would they, as Eldred fears, become “anti-books” which couldn’t be freely exchanged?
To keep its monopoly, the computer industry would just need to impose a technical
norm to enable e-books to be read. Works in the public domain would then have to
be electronically edited and so would once more fall under a copyright.
Intellectual property laws are also getting tougher. A European Union directive in
October 1993 extended the copyright on an author’s works from 50 to 70 years after
his or her death. “It seems reasonable to us to cover two generations of the author’s
descendants, as international law stipulates and in view of today’s greater life
expectancy,” says Anne Bergman, an adviser to the Federation of European Publishers.
The trend is the same in the United States, where the life of a copyright has grown
from 28 years at the beginning of the century to 75 years last year. The U.S. Congress
extended this by a further 20 years last October when it passed the Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act. Some people are even campaigning for unlimited copyright, or
one for eternity minus a day. The “minus one day” is to avoid charges of unconstitutionality,
since U.S. federal law forbids unlimited copyright.
The aim is also to encourage authors’ creativity, not to provide their heirs and
copyright holders with an endless source of income, says Eldred. He claims the new
law is unconstitutional and filed a suit in January 1999 to get it struck down. A
first decision will be made in July 1999 and the matter should go all the way to
the Supreme Court, says legal expert and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, who backs
Eldred. Congress has no right, he says, to limit the public domain as a whole and
extend the monopoly of a few private groups, like Disney and the film industry, which
lobbied very hard to get the Bono Law passed.
“In five years’ time, Mickey Mouse was to enter the public domain and Disney would
have lost the ability to control duplication of Mickey Mouse films,” says Lessig.
“The same with the film industry. Ted Turner is another big winner. He’s just purchased
the Metro Goldwyn Mayer archive, which now has a 20-year additional life for him.”
“The public domain is the wellspring of our culture,” says Eldred. “Think of how
much Disney has taken from works that are no longer under copyright. Think of how
silly it would be if you had to pay 7.5 cents to an author each time your child sang
‘Happy Birthday’ in public!”
1. “Photographing” a page by computer and transferring its contents to a computer’s memory.
2. A local copy of an original site based in another country.
• Eldritch Press: eldred.ne.mediaone.net/
• Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard: cyber.law.harvard.edu
• Bibliotheca Universalis: www.konbib.nl/gabriel
• UNESCO: www.unesco.org/webworld/public domain/public inf.html
• The Internet Classics Archive/MIT: Internet: www.literature.org/works/